What is Design Concept

What is Design Concept?

Concept basically means, – a broad abstract idea or a guiding general principle which results in the formulation of a plan.

A design concept is the main idea behind a design which provides direction. It’s the roadmap that designers use, to seek guidance for, to finally get the finished design. A design concept is abstract, yet without its binding forces a design might fall apart. A design concept is the glue that holds everything together in the design. Thus, every design decision made should always refer to the original design concept so that we do not lose direction and get disoriented while creating a design. A design concept comprises the underlying logic, thinking, and reasoning of a finished design.






Design concepts are expressed and understood through two ways, which includes:




Verbal – design concepts can be expressed verbally through keywords that describe your main idea.






Visual – a design concept might be conveyed visually through specific image or color scheme. Visual concepts usually come from the verbal part of the concept.



In short, a design concept is the core of a design where a plan is formulated based on the concept. The plan then leads to the final design that conveys the story and message that can be seen visually or described verbally.



Developing a design concept is the most "fun" part of the creative process in creating a design. This is where you can go wild and free with your imagination and come up with new and creative ideas.

To develop a design concept, first, designers gather inspirations and generate ideas. Inspirations and ideas can come from anywhere and in any form; there is no limit to it. Thus, a designer has to be observant of every single detail in life because everything that we see, hear, sense, feel could be a potential inspiration. Collecting and recording inspirations by jotting down, sketching, snapping photographs, that we’ve discovered are important as we might not know when we need them or apply them onto our designs.

After gathering inspirations, generating ideas from the inspirations is the next essential step to developing a concept. In fact, brainstorming is a great way to stimulate the development of ideas and concepts. The goal is to note down anything that you can think of without spending much time thinking about any of them to lead to and generate new ideas. Mind mapping is a way to brainstorm in a more visual way as it shows the connections between ideas. Besides, asking prominent questions is a good way of generating ideas as questions make us think more.

Fashion designers often have their own inspiration board or mood board or theme/concept board that tells the designer’s story. The mood board is mainly filled up with selected, prominent and appropriate photographs and images to get inspired.  After a designer has finally decided an inspirational topic, designers would start on doing researches about that particular inspiration to know more in depth about it and looking at it from more and different perspectives.

Building a design concept involves gathering inspirations, generating ideas and a lot of thinking and research. A design concept makes a design more meaningful with a story behind it and add values to a design instead of just focusing solely on its visual appearances. 

Jason Wu's inspirational board for Fall 2009 RTW collection.

From the last post, as mentioned in Jason Wu's Fall 2009 RTW collection, his inspiration was from vintage fairy tales of a book. So from that inspiration, he developed a design concept of romantic, playful and optimistic. His design concept has close relations with his inspiration as 'romantic' can be felt when we look at the pictures of fairies as they are often associated with flowers and floral backgrounds. 'Playful' and 'optimistic' can be related to the perception of fairy tales in children's heart as fairy tales often gives a perception of fantasy where you can play as much as you wish and fairy tales usually comes with a happy and positive ending.



Pinterest : RESEARCH INSPIRATION - WILT (added the link at the footer of the blog too [: )