Book excerpt: The Fashion Designer's Sketchbook is a must-have resource for both fashion students and practising designers who wish to learn new ways of generating design ideas in order to create successful fashion collections, and who wish to develop their own creative aesthetic. It demonstrates how the fashion design sketchbook serves as a crucial creative tool for professional development - and a valuable portfolio of design work to present to potential employers. This book identifies four distinct types of creative journal, each representing a different phase in the design process: the inspiration diary, the working journal, the presentation journal and the design log; and it explores how one develops out of the other, each stage in the idea generation process moving the process forward organically from discovery, to direction, to design development and delivery. The Fashion Designer's Sketchbook shows readers how to turn their sketchbooks into source books; how to generate design ideas from everyday experience; explores multiple ways of presenting and arranging elements within pages; details digital search and storage techniques as well as bulletin board journalling; and provides exercises to improve readers' illustration skills and enquiry, promoting in-store sketching and visual analysis to focus awareness of design aesthetics, taste levels and design vision. The book also explores the need to address market realities, consumer profiles and trend analysis, and shows how to build design collections based on target customer demographics and different markets. Beautifully illustrated and filled with a vast range of inspirational and full-colour design illustrations, The Fashion Designer's Sketchbook also features interviews with designers and industry experts. With a strong emphasis on exploratory design, this exciting resource provides readers with stimulating exercises designed to enable readers' sketchbook work and their creative vision to shine.