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By Jill M. Simmons, Lectra USA Inc., New York, N.Y.
t is becoming increasingly normal for retailers and branded apparel companies to use digital communication as a means for both the design and development process and the merchandising process. This leads to a critical need to be able to accurately define color at the beginning of the design process and then consistently and accurately communicate color throughout every stage of design, development, and merchandising, both internally and externally. As such, we must acknowledge the need to control color throughout the entire apparel process requires taking into account many factors: observers, illuminants, color standards, display devices (monitors, paper and/or fabric printers), production needs, consumer marketing (catalogs, Internet), etc.

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DIGITAL DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT FOR COLLABORATIVE COLOR COMMUNICATION

COLOR DEVELOPMENT
The color development process for apparel retailers and branded apparel companies will vary greatly depending on the organization and emphasis at each company. Selection of colors to be produced for a season may be a trend or a design function. Once the colors are selected, a standard for each color is produced in sufficient quantity for distribution to suppliers who must match the color to the satisfaction of the retailer/brand. This is referred to here as the color approval process, which entails at a minimum the following steps: Send standards with appropriate instructions to selected suppliers for color matching. Receive lab dip submissions from suppliers. Evaluate lab dips for color match. Approve or reject with comments to supplier.
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Communicate with designers when acceptability of color submissions is in question. Track progress of color approvals and administer the lab dip process.

Consistent Information Needed Once production orders are placed, the same organization may receive and approve production lot submissions. Depending on the retailer/brand organization, responsibility for the color approval process may be assigned to individuals within the design department or to individuals in other departments. These departments are given various names, including color office, product integrity, quality control, quality assurance, or color management. In some cases, the color approval process may be outsourced to testing labs. Concurrent to the color approval process, design and development must begin for the graphic design, textile design, and silhouette design. It would then seem logical that the same color standards that are initially communi-

cated externally to the suppliers for color matching should also be communicated internally for the design processes. Traditionally this has been done via small swatches that are then either entered via spectrophotometer into the design CAD systems and/or matched visually via RGB on the CAD. In every case the same process was being initiated at least two times in two different channels within the same company. With the advent and acceptance of digital color measurement devices in the first step of the process, it is now possible to communicate this initial digital color information to other steps of the process. Ideally, the color should be communicated at every step throughout the following stages of the product life cycle: Design Development (including information concerning the status of lab dip approval) Sampling Sourcing Merchandising Production E-Commerce Catalogs
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 Retail This necessitates coherence between several different color spaces, color profiles, and output processes. Devices in RGB, devices in CMYK, devices with unique color spaces (i.e., textile dyeing), etc.it is a mind-boggling proposition. However, there are great strides being made in this direction. For the purposes of this article, I will focus the discussion on the display and manipulation of color on garments through texture mapping technology and 3D rendering. Spectral data from color standards are communicated to the design departments using the information collected from a spectrophotometer to create a palette. This spectral data is not transformed for communication, but must be converted into RGB for monitor display. Most important is that this display RGB does not affect printing or output as we will introduce monitor and printer profiles in order to calculate the overlapping color spaces between various devices. For communication to other parts of the process digitally, we will communicate in sRGB, CIE-Lab, and/or spectral data depending on the process.

Display and Communication of RGB Software packages may not communicate RGB the same way, resulting in two different values and two different displays for a single color standard. sRGB is a standard interpretation of the RGB color space and enables colors to be communicated correctly between software packages. It is a device independent color space and will not affect the display of the colors on various devices (monitors, printers) when you use monitor profiles. Display of Texture Mapped Images The appearance of color is only partially controllable by the new technologies in place. There are many more subjective items in the textile and garment design process.

For example, there is often little emphasis placed on the type of lighting used within the CAD design environment. Also, a designer will now receive the color palette from the color standards creator, but they should not be able to tweak this color. Here lies perhaps the most important issue it is not in a designers makeup NOT to change things. Ultimately the color will be applied to the texture of the fabric for visual simulation (i.e., a 3D yarn must be colored before being used in a woven fabric or a knit will be piece dyed with a color). The influence of this texture on the color can greatly change the appearance of the color in which case, the color that the designer originally asked for is not really the color that they intended. Add to this the application of the colored textile fabric to a photograph that has its own unique lighting scenario, shadows, etc. for merchandising purposes. The intent is that this merchandising photo will then be communicated either in the paper form of a catalog or electronically via the Internet. It becomes imperative that the color displayed in the photo is consistent with the product that the end consumer will finally receive so as to minimalize any returns to the re-

tailer due to color. Although there are some challenges with how the image is to be displayed in the merchandising process, it can be clearly shown that there is a value to allowing a design and merchandising team to communicate in the medium where they are most comfortable: visually. If this is done early in the process perhaps even before lab dips and/or productionmany colors may never be developed due to a lack of knowledge of how the color will look on a particular texture.

CONCLUSION
As technology progresses it will be necessary for color management systems to converge with design, development, and merchandising systems in order to properly take into account the observer, illuminant, and textures when displaying texture mapped images and 3D rendered garments. This can then be used to predict the store display.

Authors Address Jill M. Simmons, Lectra, 119 W. 40th St. Fl 3, New York, N.Y. 10018-2531; telephone 212-704-4004, ext. 261; fax 212-704-0751; e-mail j.simmons@lectra.com.

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