This is a short introduction to the main functions of the application. What it's able to and why - here the few steps are explained to effectively use the utiliy. The different parts of the user interface as well as the toolbar are explained here.
On the left side you can select the active product via the drop-down box, e.g. gents polo shirt. (out of eleven possibilities to the time of this writing). The preview screen just below shows the selected product as a 3d model that you can turn around and inspect from all sides. The Buttons allow you to reposition the object to the common views 'front', 'back', 'left' and 'right'. Additionally you can zoom in and out to inspect your conception in more detail.
Perhaps the two most interesting buttons can be found below the preview as well. Export as a picture renders a high quality preview that can be attached to an email for example. Generating a PDF document will aggregate the informations from complete project this includes pricing, material informations, preview and alignment on the cloth.
The right part of the userinterface contains a graphical editor that allows to place texts and images on the model. The toolbar on top of it provides the different buttons that create the objects on the drawing canvas, it allows adding text, images and comments.
The canvas shows the objects directly on the textile material, it has buttons to choose cloth color and switch between front, back and arms.
All objects on that canvas can freely be moved, scaled and turned around, at the same time you can watch how it will look like in the three dimensional preview. If that sounds complicated to you, just try it out, it's pretty straight-forward.
Each of the different objects has its own property pane that is displayed below the editor. You can specify color of font, special things like line spacing or in case of an image it even has a quick crop function to make the background of logos transparent with just one click.
The shirt designer allows to select from the installed system fonts and choose either predefined colors or from a regular color chart
With the current version it is possible to freely scale and turn around different texts. The application does not intend to be a full fledged vector graphics suite such as illustrator or the free inkscape, but rather is an add-on (it's able to import and export svg). There aren't hundreds of buttons that often make simple things complicated. It's for quickly drafting a shirt or a baseball-cap and it does it well.
Designer Pro Apparel edition has a high quality preview function
If you haven't downloaded it yet, simply give it a try.
