Maybe the Signs Were Always There

Looking back, I think the signs were there long before I ever called myself a print designer.

It was February 2014, during my postgraduate studies. My college took us on an educational trip to Italy and Paris — the kind of trip every design student dreams of. In Paris, we were taken to visit Première Vision, one of the biggest textile trade shows in the world. That's one afternoon I still think about often.

Première Vision was massive — fashion, art, textiles, fabrics, trims, all under one roof. We had one day to see it, and even then, we only managed to get through about half of it. While my classmates moved through fabrics, trims, and embroidery sections, I kept finding my way back to one part of the show, again and again — the prints.

I wasn't thinking about it as a career decision at the time. I just knew I didn't want to leave that section. Designers sat at their booths with their fabric swatches and printed collections laid out, some even printed onto paper to showcase the work — and I was completely captivated by how they presented it. The colour, the detail, the craft behind every repeat. I went from stall to stall, and somewhere in that excitement, I started collecting visiting cards from print brands and studios — names I didn't recognise, whose work I didn't yet fully understand the significance of. I just knew I wanted to hold onto them.

Looking back, it's funny how little space prints actually had in my design education up to that point. We'd had one semester that touched on it, but it leaned heavily toward embroidery rather than prints, guided by a mentor whose own strength was embroidery. I didn't even know "surface pattern design" existed as its own field — a whole discipline built around exactly what I'd been drawn to that day in Paris.

At the time, it felt like nothing more than genuine curiosity. I had no idea that it would take one more moment to actually set things in motion — on the first day of my first design job, when my boss asked if I knew how to create a scarf print on Photoshop. I said yes. And that's really where it began.

I still have those visiting cards today — Paper & Cloth Design Studio, Vooprint, Selvedge, Suzie-Q, Indigo Salon, Dishes, Minakani, and a few others whose names meant nothing to me back then. And tucked among them, one handwritten card that simply says, "I love prints!" I don't even remember which stall gave it to me. But looking at it now, more than a decade later, running a print studio of my own, it almost feels like it was written for me to find.

I still think about that version of myself sometimes — collecting cards she didn't know the value of yet, standing exactly where she needed to be, without realising it.

Maybe the signs really were always there.

— Mandeep