Presentation Boards and Concept Boards

What a Presentation Board Does

A presentation board, also called a concept board, is where a clothing line becomes visible in one place. Garment sketches, fabric direction, color, prints, logos and tag artwork are arranged on a single board so a buyer, a licensor or an internal team can judge a whole season’s idea at a glance, without handling samples or reading a long written brief. It is the format a line is sold in before it exists as finished garments, which is why the studio treats board work as a specialty of its own rather than an afterthought to garment design.

The Apparel Search Design Studio can create presentation boards for your next sales meeting, trade show or special event. Its designers specialize in clothing, fashion and accessories, so the boards are built by people who know how a garment sketch will be read by a manufacturer, how a fabric swatch photographs under showroom light and how much information a board can carry before it stops being clear. A good board answers the questions in the room before they are asked: what the garments are, who they are for, what they are made from and how the pieces belong together.

The Five Example Boards

Five finished boards are shown in this section, each one a complete presentation built for a different kind of line. Presentation Board 1 presents a rugged menswear program. Presentation Board 2 presents a licensed-character program. Presentation Board 3 presents an urban streetwear program. Presentation Board 4 and Presentation Board 5 complete the set, so a visitor can compare how the same studio handles five different markets, five different color stories and five different kinds of garment art on the same board format.

Read together, the examples show the range the work covers: tailored and rugged menswear, character licensing, streetwear and sportswear all present differently, and a board that works for one would fail for another. The sketches, swatches and graphics on each board are chosen for the audience that board had to convince. Companies planning their own presentation can use the five examples as a starting brief — which board feels closest to your line is a useful first answer when you talk to any design studio about board work, this one included.

Boards for Meetings, Shows and Events

The same board serves three different rooms. At a sales meeting it walks a retail buyer through a line in the order the garments should be considered. At a trade show it has to work at a distance, across a booth, in the few seconds a passer-by gives it. At a special event or licensing presentation it carries the whole proposal on its own, often to people who will never see a sample. The studio builds for the room the board is headed to: viewing distance, lighting and the order in which the story should unfold all change the layout, the size of the sketches and the amount of text a board can usefully hold.

Boards also work alongside the studio’s other services. The presentation tags and label design service develops the hangtags and labels that appear on a board’s garments, its print designs supply the graphics, and its silhouette drawings give the garments their shapes. It is all in the presentation: a line that arrives as one coherent board, with its tags, prints and silhouettes already agreeing with each other, is far easier for a buyer to say yes to than the same line shown as loose pieces.

Photos

A runway photograph filed with the presentation board pages: the selling end of the work, where a presented line reaches its audience.