“Pattern drafting with Illustrator (AI) with iPM is popular among students.“

Masataka Noguchi
Professor at the Department of Fashion Design at Kobe Design University

After graduating from Guerre-Lavigne ESMOD in France, Prof. Masataka Noguchi worked at the design office in Tokyo. In 2002, he joined the Department of Fashion Design at Kobe Design University, where he teaches mainly pattern drafting of clothes.

The university had already introduced CAD, but it seemed not being used very effectively. On the other hand, students were familiar with popular softwares in the design industry, such as Adobe Illustrator (AI) and Photoshop. “I thought that I could make good use of them, so I tried iPM. I found it very easy to use. Therefore, I decided to introduce to my class,” says Prof. Noguchi.

He talks about the advantages of AI and iPM : “AI is easy to learn, even for beginners. Besdies, once you get used to it, you can use shortcuts to speed up the process. Furthermore, while it feels as free as hand drawing, it is faster and even more accurate. For example, you can move multiple lines at the same time, which is something you can’t do manually. Another attraction of AI is that it is not designed specially for drafting. Therefore, you can use it freely. It is very popular among students, too. They can learn it very quickly, whereas CAD is rather difficult to learn. I use AI and iPM for all my outsourced work too.”

Currently, iPM is installed on about 20 computers, and they mainly use SegmentTools and Seam Allowance Tools. They also output patterns using AIPLOT-Pro. “My challenge for the future is to make pattern drafting with AI and iPM more popular in fashion companies. So that our students can utilize what they have learned here.” says Prof. Noguchi.