COMMUNICATION DESIGN AS A CREATIVE TOOL. HOW GRAPHIC SOFTWARE COULD SUPPORT THE CREATIVE FASHION PROCESS

Fashion and Visual Communication are usually linked in a relationship that sees the elements of visual communication only as decoration, patterns, texts reproduced on dresses and T-shirts. In reality, the relationship between the two disciplines has become, in recent years, support to creativity. All the elements of visual communication (photography, colour, design, symbol, typeface and space), in the hands of a designer, are not only elements to use and manipulate to create the final aesthetics of the project. They also become real working tools, able to stimulate and support the creative process in all its phases: mood boards (used to define design, material and colour indications) or software for image editing (used as tools to support the creative process), for example. If the letters compose words, the set of images, colours and texts, arranged in the space of a sheet of paper or a monitor, contributes to the construction of design discourse. A discourse in which each graphic element can affect the creative choices, to stimulate and guide the designer in the correct definition of the project, in identifying the target audience and in the setting of the numerous and possible design solutions. From this point of view, graphics must be understood as a real design tool, an essential and fundamental part of the process. From a metadesign point of view, the process is the core of the project itself, and it is designed to give shape to it through precise communication artefacts, created and built peculiarly, depending on the phase of the path a designer is. A path that, like all design processes, does not necessarily follow a straight and continuous line, but is subject to constant verification and always subject to improvement. In the contemporary world, new creative figures have appeared on the world fashion scene, in the hands of which the infinite gallery of input offered by the web becomes material to be processed to create new projects, manipulating images through digital programs to create a unified composition. The paper aims to present the experimentation, implemented within the fashion design courses of the Design School of the Politecnico di Milano, of design development processes related to the use of image editing software as tools capable of stimulating the creative process, first and then the final project.