← Trevor Waldorf

Tool development and data aggregation for textile design

Motivation

Building artist tools

In my own life, software seems to be most valuable when used for accounting and drawing. This is broadly true for everyone, as some of the most valuable software companies are financial services firms (Tether, Citadel, Nasdaq) and companies that sell composition tools (Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk).

I have always focused on making software tools which enable efficient, productive, and novel artistic / industrial / craft output. Early in my career this looked like marketplaces (DesignMeetsBeats.com) and product-enabled agencies (Mocktail) and later platforms and protocol ecosystems (Decentraland). Since Decentraland I have trended to more technical production tools. DesignPatternSystems was the first step in that direction.

Seamless repetition is a pain

Printed repeating fabric patterns are a common design element across the soft goods industry globally. A problem with designing repeating textile patterns for printing on fabric is that it is painful.

Why repeat tiling is painful: Illustrator and other software have perfect tiling support but it is not realtime and it relies on shape generation being done in the main design workflow then converted into tiling (a one way procedure). The fact that the workflow is commonly used is evidence that a specific tool would be valuable–one that goes beyond the ‘satisfice’.

Solutions

Design Pattern . Systems

DPS is a simple realtime shape tiling tool for generating seamlessly repeating patterns for printing on fabrics.

The interface is inspired by the command room of the USS Midway in San Diego, CA.

DPS is built with Javascript, Node and Postgres on Heroku, and a custom UI state management system. It was my first programming project in 2019 after not touching code for several years due to work.

Once DPS is used to generate the pattern, it can be printed onto fabric by common fabric printing services, screen printing, or by roll-to-roll printing setups and finally, sewn into a garment.

Sewn products

Learning a trade

Although I do not claim to be a skilled tailor, I have become a sewist for this project and have gained basic facility with pattern drafting, the operation and maintenance of common industrial and domestic sewing machines for garment and gear construction, and fundamental hand sewing and alteration skills.

However, perhaps you are a sewist and you don’t want to make your own patterns. There are almost a hundred thousand patterns made for you to sew from and more recently independent designers have been making high quality sewing patterns targeted to more contemporary audiences which you should look at first.

Ideally you would be able to browse all such patterns, hence, SuperPatternList.

Data aggregation and display

SuperPatternList

SPL has been firmly superseded by more social competitors.

SPL was made with React, Flask, and MongoDB. Data is gathered using a scraping and validation pipeline with Node, Puppeteer, OpenAI’s API, and various data cleaning steps.

The code is on Github: