Tools for Fashion Productivity: Evernote

In my goal of helping fashion designers move forward with technology so that our jobs are easier and we can spend more energy and time on creating, I would like to share with you some of my tools for being productive. So much of a designer’s job is processing information, and I think a lot of time is wasted and things forgotten because they are often unproductive in their methods for organizing and finding things.

In trying to minimize the physical space I am taking up, I aim to move as much as possible of my research onto my computer. That makes organizational and productivity tools essential for me. Today, I am focusing on how we organize information for research and design.

Way back when (last year), I used Google Notebook to store information and jot down notes, etc. Then the project folded, and I had to find an alternative. And that I did. The better alternative is Evernote, and so enthused about it I am (I managed to capture all of what was available to education subscribers on trend forecasting site WGSN right before they canceled the service), that I am now a premium user. With all the images we use as visual inspiration and text we use as research, fashion designers are among those I see this program working well for. It would probably work great for collaborative environments as well.

Let me explain with visuals:

And a close-up of my notebooks and notes:

Basically, you get a browser add-on, and can simply “clip” items (text, images, pdfs, screenshots) into your notebooks. It’s so easy to use, frees up space on my hard drive, and is accessible from any computer. I clip market research in the form of PDFs, which all can be read directly from Evernote so that you don’t have a bunch of windows open that take forever to load. I also clip screenshots of projects and designs I am working as throughout the process so that I have a reference point to look back on, and process shots if I needed them.

I have Evernote on both my IMac and my laptop, and can clip from a shared computer as well into the Evernote web interface. (If you’re really that mobile, I believe that it can be used on mobile phones as well). Syncs are automatic. No worries about where you dropped that research and finding your computer’s hard drive messy and completely chaotic – so chaotic that all that research goes to waste because you can’t bother going through it. It’s all here (most of it lands in Inbox until I come to organize it, and often I put a bunch of things in to use as reference later).

I just had to write this post, because as I am currently researching my niche market collection (which is coming along, and I am so excited about!), I am finding that everything is going by so smoothly and productively because of this one simple program. I imagine the design process to go by much smoother as well.

Click here for Evernote