What is Thread’s Not Dead?
It is a 118 page informational book regarding clothing design and is written by Jeff Finley of Go Media. This book is for designers looking to make a splash in the art world. This is a book that needs to be read rather than described. Note this: If you are involved in clothing design or freelance graphic design, you need to read this.
The book begins with a surprising start with looking at effective website layouts for designers looking to show off their portfolios and continues on into telling you about getting started designing clothing, design techniques and tutorials, printing and production, branding and marketing, sales and fulfilment and going big time. It also exposes the nasty truth about a lot of ‘design contests’ and inspires you to get out there and do what you love.
Something I also really enjoyed as a whole about reading Thread’s Not Dead were the hyperlinks throughout it; references can be clicked and viewed just like Wikipedia sources and it really hammers home the fact that we are living in the era of digital books.
I really like the overall design of the book itself as well; the distressed fabric along the bottom and the page identifiers are a really nice touch of consistency throughout the book.
However much I enjoyed Thread’s Not Dead, the plugging of Go Media does get a little tedious after the first 30 pages; beginning the book with a more thorough introduction of Jeff Finley’s background may have been a better choice than continually plugging Go Media to the point of distraction throughout the book, but we’re all guilty of a little self-promotion here and there, so I don’t hold it against him.
Thread’s Not Dead, and how it helped me
As someone who is about to go into retail stores with the next Clikyz collection, I found a lot of great information in Thread’s Not Dead. It sounds ridiculous, but I had completely overlooked the hangtag aspect of the product itself. The transition between label that primarily sells online and on merch stands at concerts versus a product that is sold on rails is quite a shock to the system even though it might not seem like it is going to be one until you actually realise that these t-shirts won’t be folded up and on a shelf, they’ll be getting handled by customers and will be hung on a rail.
I have a lot of projects, and sometimes I wonder if we’ve hit a roadblock, but this book has given me a lot of inspiration to carry on pushing harder and building the brands; making great things happen takes time.
A lesson contained within the book and put into play is the things that come with your product are as important as the product itself; Thread’s Not Dead comes with bonus goodies consisting of a rather wonderful audiobook and some items to use within Photoshop. Now I’ve never been much of a fan of audiobooks, and admittedly the large file size was somewhat irksome, but I am so pleased that I downloaded everything that was on offer to me as the audio book is a really great accompaniment to the ebook and physical copy.
If you’re in the clothing design industry as even just a freelance designer considering having something printed from the likes of Designhill printshop, or if you own a store, you need this book. This book should be viewed as the industry standard checklist to make sure that you’ve got all of your fundamentals ready and to draw inspiration from the success stories of others in the included interviews.
Click here to download the ebook version of Thread’s Not Dead.
Craig is right; This is a really informative piece of writing.