The best modern products demand modern technological solutions and the embroidery sector is no exception. It is a long time since embroidery was completed entirely by hand, and now companies embellishing their products with the finest sewn designs are using computers to ensure the fastest, most professional results.
Information technology has transformed the world of embroidery and it is now possible to have unique, customized design with the touch of a mouse, instead of the hours of intricate and time consuming work once needed. Editing and reworking can be completed in seconds rather than having to start again with a team of dedicated but much slower sewers.
However there is still a high level of skill involved, and though there are plenty of digitized embroidery companies offering their services, their standard of work still depends on the creativity and experience of their graphic designers.
Not only that, but the design team must be adept at understanding the changing needs of their varied customer base – even long established customers will alter their requirements to stay in line with their own developing markets and expect designers to be completely au fait with current and ever more complex trends.
The best companies ensure their artists receive continuous professional development and have state of the computer hardware and software to work with, and this requires substantial investment. This investment also involves ensuring design work is not stolen through computer hacking or illegal downloads, or ruined through viruses which can bypass ordinary security measures. Paying for file back-up services run by external companies also creates a substantial but necessary cost for the embroidery digitizing business.
Digitized information is created through formation of a series of dots with numeric values mapped onto grids. Digitizing embroidery is a bit like digitizing photographs, in that the images are stored with numerically valued dots, and then this pattern can be recreated as required because the computer remembers the order of the dots and their numeric values.
Digitizing designs in this way makes sense from a customer’s point of view, since the designs can be stored in an infinitely smaller space than in past times, where shelf after shelf was required to keep manual embroidery records. Now the digitized catalogue of designs takes up a relatively small amount of space on a computer and can be returned to and edited so much more easily on request by the customer. Encyclopaedias of designs can be stored in compressed files which again reduces the storage space required and means digitizing companies can keep costs down for the customer.
The quality of digitized designs is preserved using information technology in a way that could not happen when designs were paper based and therefore prone to deterioration. Editing and developing designs is limited only by the imagination of the designer and there is consequently infinitely more flexibility for the customer in having their embroidery designed digitally, having it stored for them for a s long as they like, and in using previous designs to build new ones.