If any of these sound familiar, your workflow is costing you more than you think.
Most freelance fashion designers don’t realize their workflow is inefficient. They just know they’re tired at the end of the day and feel like they never quite catch up on that endless to do list.
The problem isn’t your willpower or how hard you’re working. It’s the underlying process that’s quietly draining your time and energy.
Here are five signs your tech pack process is working against you, not for you.
1. One design change turns into hours of fixes
When a client requests even a small design update, it shouldn’t cascade into hours of fixes.
If adding a pocket to the sketch means manually updating every other view, copying and pasting screenshots into the tech pack pages, and then, most likely, reformatting said pages, that’s a sign your workflow is fragmented.
Changes should ripple through automatically, not multiply your workload.
You shouldn’t feel resistant to design changes just because you know that means more tedious work for you!
2. You spend more time formatting than designing
If you track an honest hour of your tech pack time, how much of it is actual design and product development thinking versus admin? How much time do you lose to resizing columns, repositioning screenshots, adjusting page layouts and fixing formulas?
If the answer makes you uncomfortable, that’s your sign.
Recently, I worked through every page of a tech pack in Excel to create an example of the layout for our developer to follow for the Tech Pack Wizard Excel export function.
It made me crazy!
On the Graded Specs page, if I needed to add a column to include another size in the measurement chart, the whole layout would shift. Extra blank rows would be added to the bottom, which meant I needed to adjust the row height. But that would cause the column widths to change and sometimes a blank extra column would appear. It was back-and-forth tweaking here and there for so long, I wanted to cry. It reminded me why I never wanted to do tech packs in Excel again.
Your clients are paying you for your design and development knowledge, not your admin skills.
3. You're switching between apps constantly
If your tech pack workflow involves Adobe Illustrator for sketches and another tool for specs and layout, you’re context switching every time you move between them.
I wrote a whole blog about the downfall of context switching, but the idea is that each switch costs you focus time and mental energy on top of the actual time spent switching.
Imagine this, you’re mid-sketch in Illustrator and realize you need to update a spec. So, you “quickly” switch to Excel, fight with the formulas and head back to Illustrator and it takes you a few minutes to remember what else you needed to finish on the sketch and even longer before you’re back in the flow.
A fragmented workflow is a slow workflow.
4. You rely on your “final checklist brain” to make sure the tech pack is ready to send
Alarm bells should be ringing if you finish your tech pack and immediately switch into “QC panic mode”, double or triple checking every single page, sketch and formula.
If your workflow doesn’t support how you actually work, you alone become the QC. And that’s how things get missed. And you still end up anxious to hit send on your tech packs because you’re not 100% sure you caught everything, even after all those checks.
That post-send anxiety is the clearest sign that your workflow is making you do the work that your tools should be doing for you. A connected workflow means when you update something, it updates everywhere. The knot goes away because there’s nothing to second guess.
5. You finish a tech pack feeling drained rather than done
This one is less about time and more about energy, but if you have to mentally recover after a day of tech packing, that’s still losing time to your workflow!
If completing a tech pack consistently leaves you feeling exhausted and like you’ve barely done any real creative work, that’s your workflow telling you something’s off.
Tech packs should feel like a productive part of your design process, not an administrative ordeal you have to survive.
None of these signs mean you’re bad at your job. Quite the opposite! You’ve managed to flourish under these less-than-ideal circumstances.
They do mean your tools and process aren’t keeping up with the work you’re capable of though.
Tech Pack Wizard is built to address every one of these pain points, keeping your entire tech pack process inside Adobe Illustrator, with tools that automate the repetitive parts so you can focus on the work that actually requires your expertise.
Click here to join the waitlist and be the first to know when Tech Pack Wizard is live