Illustrator Is the #1 Drawing Software for Fashion Designers

Fashion designers use Adobe Illustrator to design garments and apparel. They commonly start by drawing fashion flats, or hand sketching (and then converting to digital fashion flats). A fashion designer (or technical designer) will then convert flats into technical sketches.

Fashion flats are just what they sound like – a drawing of a garment laying flat. Here’s what they look like:

Below is what a fashion flat looks like as a technical sketch. The only difference is that a tech sketch should be 100% accurate for manufacturing and it has technical callouts. (Fashion flats are sometimes created quickly as a collection is designed, and they might not have all the accurate trims, details, and stitching right away.) Tech sketches are what a manufacturer uses (inside a tech pack) to create the garment, so detail and accuracy is crucial.

Fashion flats are most commonly drawn with Illustrator’s Pen Tool. They’re vector, meaning the lines and points are mathematically calculated. Vector art allows for infinite scaling without loss of resolution. This is as opposed to raster, which is pixel based. When you scale raster artwork, it gets blurry.

Below is an example of a flat with a lapel that has a cheetah textile design. Everything here was built in Illustrator, with the exception of the cheetah textile design (image grabbed from the internet).

If the cheetah print were original, then yes, it could have been created in Photoshop. But after that, it’s easier to bring that raster textile design into Illustrator and use it to fill your fashion flats and scale it to the size you want in a few clicks. Doing this in Photoshop is laborious and restrictive.

Now yes, Photoshop can create vector artwork, and Illustrator can create raster artwork. But the core of Illustrator is illustration, which is mostly vector. The core of Photoshop is photos, which is always raster. If you are creating something that is all vector (fashion flats), it should be done in Illustrator.

Photoshop does have its place in the fashion industry, but it’s used more by fashion graphic designers and textile designers than fashion designers. If your job crosses over into either of those roles, then you may need to know both. If you’re exclusively doing fashion design, you only need to know Illustrator.

Why Do Fashion Design Jobs List Illustrator and Photoshop as Required Software Skills?

If you’re looking for a fashion design job and it says Illustrator and Photoshop proficiency required, don’t worry about Photoshop. Here are two reasons why:

1. They’re probably written by HR or management who *think* you need Photoshop to sketch.
2. Designers use PS because they don’t know how to do it the right way in AI.

So just focus on Illustrator. I promise, it’s all you need. In the rare case you need to use Photoshop, it’s going to be for something small and quick. YouTube is a great resource (I also have some tutorials below), and once you know Illustrator, you’ll easily be able to follow along for the simple things you may need.

Here Are The Few Ways I Used Photoshop In My 15+ Year Fashion Design Career

Full Disclaimer: In my fashion career, I also did a lot of graphic design (it’s what I went to school for). I did photo retouching in Photoshop, catalog layouts in InDesign, and a lot more. But that was all under a “graphic design” type role. As a “fashion designer,” I used Illustrator 99.9% of the time.

Here are a few examples of when (and how) I used Photoshop in my fashion career. I’ve linked them to corresponding tutorials where I show you a few steps where you need Photoshop, and the rest of it done in Illustrator. You’ll notice they all have a theme: editing and mocking up raster / pixel based accents.

Editing & Mocking Up Embroidery

If you have a comp of embroidered artwork you want to mock up on your garments, you may need to cut out the background or change the colors. This tutorial will show you how (in both Illustrator and Photoshop).

Mocking Up Hang Tags

Fashion designers are expected to do a lot – and sometimes that includes designing and developing labels, hangtags and packaging. This tutorial will show you some cool Illustrator tricks (and a little photoshop) to help you create / mock up a hangtag for your designs.

Mocking Up Seamless Raster Fabric Textures (like denim)

It’s super easy to create texture swatches in Photoshop and then bring them into Illustrator to fill your fashion flat sketches. This step by step video tutorial will show you how.

Free Resources to Learn Illustrator for Fashion Design

Don’t get overwhelmed trying to learn everything – focus on Illustrator first. That will put you in a great position to work in the industry, either in-house or as a freelancer. The best place to get started is with my free YouTube videos. There are 37 step-by-step tutorials, organized for you to go through them from start to finish.

You got this!