As a fashion designer or even a student of fashion design, you will need a portable, stylish and powerful laptop with a good battery life that can run demanding programs like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere.
In short, the laptop needs to have a solid GPU, plenty of RAM and storage, excellent resolution, plenty of support with ports, wireless connectivity, and portability.
You might be surprised at how much multitasking you’ll have to do and how many demanding programs you’ll have to run on a laptop for fashion design.
A high-end laptop will definitely serve you the best. Fashion design, in many ways, involves the sophisticated software necessary for graphic design and long work hours.
Transferring an idea to a workable model on a laptop doesn’t happen in a few minutes, so battery power is high on the priority list as well.
Let’s dig a little deeper and explore the top 11 things you should look for in a laptop for fashion designers.
Table of Contents
A Powerful Processor to Run Resource Intensive Programs
You’d be surprised how much processing power is necessary just to run a single, 3D sculpting program, such as you might do for creating models for 3D printing.
It’s not like fashion design strays far from the resource-hogging software necessary for creative design.
- Minimum i5 CPU (four or more cores), preferably i7 or up (AMD Ryzen 5 or 7)
- Minimum clock rate of 2.0GHz
- Needs to run Photoshop and Adobe Premiere
The minimum, recommended processor for fashion designers is going to be an Intel Core i5 or Ryzen 5 and that’s if you’re new and scraping the bottom of the barrel for something that will be solid enough to get you started. For experienced fashion designers, an Intel Core i7 or equivalent Ryzen and up will be your goal.
You’re going to be running sophisticated software and you need a processor that’s up to the challenge.
- Apparel Magic
- Photoshop
- Adobe Premiere
- Adobe Illustrator
- C-Design Fashion
- Sketchbook
- Wild Ginger
These software programs are resource-hungry programs that will put a CPU through its paces for sure.
Body scanning is another important aspect of fashion design and you’re not going to scan and run 3D modeling in an Intel Celeron processor.
Lots of RAM for Multitasking
Eight gigs of RAM is sort of becoming the norm in computers nowadays, even laptops, as components become smaller and smaller due to technological improvements.
While you may get by on the bare minimum of RAM, 8GB isn’t going to cut it in the long run.
You will want 16GB of RAM at the least and feel free to go higher.
RAM is what allows you to run all of the programs that you want at the same time, with several things going on in the background while you focus on a particular program.
Some sites will recommend 8GB of RAM, however, some of the better software programs for fashion design are resource-hungry enough to easily justify the jump from 8 to 16GB.
You should never feel bad about erring on the side of caution and going with the larger amount of RAM.
For instance, one of the more popular system requirements for beginner fashion designers who are dipping their toes in the water for the first time is a 10th generation i5 with 8GB of RAM.
Only go for 8GBs If you’re getting a great deal on a laptop and plan to upgrade it to 16 gigs before long.
If you’ve been at this for a while, a beginner’s dream setup is yesterday’s nightmare.
A Powerful GPU for Smooth Editing
When it comes to the design side of the software, the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) is far more stressed than your CPU (Central Processing Unit).
The GPU is very important when running things like CorelDraw or Adobe software.
You don’t have to run the kind of GPU that hardcore gamers use in their highly demanding gaming rigs but you need efficiency nevertheless.
Ideally, you would want an Nvidia RTX 3070 or 380 but Intel UHD graphics 620, Intel Iris Plus 645, or an AMD Radeon Vega 8 are sufficient.
To practice your craft through fashion design software, you need a smooth editing experience without your fans working overtime within a few minutes and your laptop getting too hot to touch.
Related Article: Are Gaming Laptops Good For Graphic Design? (And How To Choose The Right One)
Fast SSD Storage for Increased Productivity
SSD stands for Solid State Drive and you will want a lot of it for fashion design work. In fact, a minimum of 512GB SSD is recommended but it wouldn’t hurt to make the jump to 1TB.
Or, you can go with a speedier option, such as a 512 PCIe SSD.
PCIe stands for Peripheral Component Interconnect Express and even though you may not understand the ins and outs of how this bus expansion works, there’s no doubting that it “sounds” fast and that’s because it is fast.
There are different forms of PCIe expressed in lanes with x1, s4, x8, and x16.
The fastest is x16 because more lanes mean there is more bandwidth and more bandwidth means more speed.
Going with an x16 means that the GPU is probably sitting in the x16, which means peak performance because there is less stress on the GPU.
The main point is that if you want to increase productivity then you want to increase your speed.
Lots of Ports for Connectivity
One thing a fashion designer needs is connectivity, with portable hard drives, touch displays, drawing boards, and modeling mouses just to name a few of the things you may have to connect.
With Mac, you want a couple of Thunderbolt 3 ports, along with as many USB 3.1 gen 2 ports as you can get your hands on.
The same goes for windows laptops, just without the Thunderbolt (even though Windows computers are adopting Thunderbolt rather quickly now), which was a Mac thing for a while.
Of course, an ethernet cable to maximize speed when you’re near a router should be standard.
A Large, Color Accurate Display
OLED displays give you a good color range and decent color accuracy. Organic Light-Emitting Diodes are able to completely power off and each pixel can operate independently of the rest, which provides high contrast and maximizes the full range of color potential.
With OLED screens you get the deepest blacks available. The only drawback is that an OLED screen can’t get as bright as an LCD, however, the color accuracy over an LCD makes the OLED worth it by far for fashion design work.
Other features to look for in a laptop’s display for fashion designers?
- 4K resolution (or as high as possible)
- IPS technology; if you don’t go for OLED (improves color fidelity and viewing angles)
- Anti-glare, flicker, and blue light filters to reduce eye strain
Stylish Looking Laptop
How happy would a fashion designer be with a gray, mundane-looking laptop? Oftentimes, a fashion designer lives and breathes on first impressions, especially when walking into an interview for the first time.
That means spicing up your laptop’s aesthetics.
The HP Spectre 13 screams “unique” as soon as you haul it out of the box and the specs are on par with what you need, despite a low but upgradeable 256GB SSD.
The Lenovo Yoga 920 also has a unique aesthetic while maintaining the kind of raw power that you need in the fashion design industry.
Great Battery Life For Designing on the Go
If there’s one thing that can be said about the fashion design industry, it’s that it is definitely life on the go and that makes battery power a priority. Check out these laptop models for a boost in battery life:
- Acer Aspire E15: 13.5-hour battery life.
- LG Gram: Comes with an earth-shattering 25.5 hours of battery life.
- Asus Zenbook Flip S Ultra Slim: 15-hours of battery life.
- Apple MacBook Pro (Newest Generation): 11-hours of battery life
- Dell XPS 9370: 10-hours of battery life
You really don’t want to jump on a laptop that can’t push more than 10 hours of battery life. Of course, you’re not going to get the max amount of battery power if you’re running graphics-intensive software, but higher-end batteries are going to give you a long time to work with.
Full, Ergonomic, Backlit Keyboard
You want the full gamut here because you’re going to need it. Fortunately, the listed laptops above come with full keyboards and aspects that are considered ergonomic.
As a fashion designer, ergonomics might not always be readily available, however, but we all do the best we can.
However, an ergonomic keyboard can help to minimize muscle strain and injuries due to your hands being in an awkward position.
Ideally, you’ll want a controllable keyboard backlight that you can turn off when you’re in well-lit areas because battery conservation is everything in this line of business.
However, you’ll need it for those late nights of which there will be many.
Consider a Two-in-One Touchscreen
With a two-in-one, you can detach the keyboard or fold over your laptop to turn it into a giant drawing canvas at any time.
It’s also pretty nice for scrolling apps and social media sites that work better in portrait mode.
As a fashion designer, you will have to draw. A lot. Touchscreens change the way graphics and fashion designers translate their creative ideas from mind to computer so it may be something worth considering.
Also, a Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ or an Apple iPad 12.9” Pro with an Apple Magic keyboard are both every bit as good as a high-end laptop. Couple that with the Apple Pencil 2 and you have yourself a design powerhouse of portability and convenience.
Should I go for a Mac or Windows Laptop?
If you can afford it, there’s no questioning the superiority of Macs for design and creativity, regardless of industry.
Windows dominates Mac in gaming and the reverse is true in terms of raw design power and simplicity.
There are several reasons to choose Mac over Windows:
- macOS Catalina is a simple and intuitive OS
- The Apple Ecosystem is incredible
- Build quality is premium through and through
- Mac Accessories (Apple Pencil 2) are the best in the industry
- You can’t beat the audio quality from Apple devices
Having said that, it usually comes down to what ecosystem you enjoy working within because there are still some awesome Windows laptops, like the ASUS ZenBook Flip and the HP Spectre x360, that will be fantastic for fashion design work.
Final Thoughts
There you have it. This article entails everything that you will need as a budding fashion designer to the master of your craft.
If you cover the bases with these 11 things to look for in a laptop for fashion designers, you’ll have a device that will promote productivity and serve you long into the future.
