The Construction Of Theme Board In Apparel Product Development

For a long time, theme board, as a tool which can help designer to develop design concepts, strengthen the innovation in their product and promote the information exchange, is broadly used in the process of product development, particularly in those countries whose fashion industry are highly developed. However, for somehow, this very practical tool has turned to be a formalism in Chinese clothing companies. According to this situation, based on a large number of research and practical experience, this paper redefines the concept of theme board and proposed a new system which differs from the traditional western theme board making method. This new making system will better suit the Chinese garment companies and help they find a way to the root of the trends and to strengthen the original creativity of our product.At the present, most domestic clothing companies put little emphasis on the product development and often neglect the construction of theme board which is usually considered to be the beginning of design. Meanwhile, there has been not much research which is under this topic yet. In this paper, theme board is defined as an information display board which mainly uses images and text as means of expression to describe and convey design concepts at the early stage of product development. It can be classified into three types:trend theme board, personal creativity theme board and product development theme board. As the object of this research, product development theme board consists of mood board, color board and fabric board.The process of building a theme board can be divided into three phases:information research and analysis, determine the theme, the making process. As the beginning of building a theme board, information research and analysis is to grasp the social trends, consumer needs. It is also the foundation of getting the concept and inspiring the design. The information that we should concern at this stage includes social background information, fashion trends and market information and it is vital for researchers to assure the information is from a large range of source and possesses high value.Theme is the very essential part of the theme board construction work. To choose a theme and to name it both requires creativity and we also have to conform to the consumers' demand. In this part, we classify the theme board into five different motifs using psychological theories such as Maslow's hierarchy of needs.As we aim to demonstrate a practical method, this paper takes considerable space to show each phase of the theme board process by presenting an established case. We look at the information gathering phase that caters to the target market, the specific making process phase, and lastly the evaluating phase which sets the principles of evaluating a theme board.