Notion for Pattern Designers: Plan, Organise, & Manage Your Pattern Collections!

1. Hello: Are you a pattern designer but struggling to manage all your design files on your computer? Or maybe you struggle to come up with ideas for creating a pattern collection. Maybe you have a whole bunch of ideas floating around in your head, but have no idea how to organize them to start creating a pattern collection. Hello. My name is Mel Armstrong and if you don't know me already, I'm an illustrator and surface pattern designer from Wellington, New Zealand. One of my largest sources of income is licensing patterns to different surfaces, such as fabric, stationary, and home decor. But sometimes coming up with ideas for creating a pattern collection and then managing and storing those ideas, as well as the design files, can be overwhelming. So I created a Notion template that helps me to plan, organize, and manage all of my patterns, and pattern collections together in one consolidated area. Today, I'm going to show you how to set up your own pattern collection database in Notion so that you too can plan, organize, and manage your pattern collections. Creating beautiful, vibrant pattern collections is no small feat. As a surface pattern designer, I get inspiration in many ways, from crafting stories, to researching keywords and creating color themes. It is important to have all my ideas neatly organized, so they're easy to find when it's time for the creative process. That way, all those sparkly bits of magic can shine through. Notion is an excellent tool for managing pattern collections. I'm going to show you have to use it to its fullest potential. By the end of the class, you'll have a comprehensive system for managing your pattern collections, with everything from planning and design to managing and streamlining all in one consolidated space. You'll learn how to plan and strategize your designs, from conceptualizing ideas to organizing files. We'll brainstorm ideas and outline a plan of action to create stunning pattern collections. You'll also get hands-on experience creating an easy way for yourself to keep track of all your patterns in one place, so they never get buried on your computer again. This class is for surface pattern designers who already have a portfolio of work, but just need a better way of organizing it. So if you're ready to streamline your pattern collection workflow and take your surface pattern designs to the next level, I encourage you to come join me in this Skillshare class. All you need is your computer to get started. Let's get to it. 2. Introduction to Notion: In this lesson I'll walk you through an introduction to Notion. First I'll show you how to create a free account and then we will have a look at some of the basics, so that when we start getting into creating our collection database you'll have a better understanding of the process. Now if you already understand Notion quite well and already have an account, feel free to skip this lesson altogether and move on to Lesson 2, where we will be starting to set up our pattern collection tracker page. With Notion you can capture the works, manage projects, and manage your finances. In fact you could manage your entire creative business. Notion combines several features of other tools like Evernote, Trello, Google Drive and more all into one creating a cohesive system to basically organize your life. To get Notion all you have to do is click the link in the about section below, and that'll bring you to the Notion homepage. Let's go and have a look at the pricing first, there are a few pricing options but all you really need is this free option here. The free plan offers all the core functionality that you need, the only difference is that you can't upload files larger than five megabytes which is super easy to manage. The other thing is that it doesn't hold as many page history, so if you wanted to go back and find a previous state that you want to recover, you can only go back seven days as opposed to 30 days for the next level up. If you wanted to work in a team environment so that you have multiple people in your workspace on Notion, then you'd probably want to go to the paid version. But if you're just managing your own life here then you just choose the free option. All we need to do is click "Get started" and then you have the option of signing up with your email address, your Google account, or with Apple. Now I've already signed up so I will let you go through that process, one thing when you get to the question asking if you want to sign up as a team or yourself, make sure you choose the option to sign up for yourself so that you do get that free version. When you come into Notion for the first time this is what you will see, and this is basically your workspace. On the left hand side here you have the sidebar, which is what you use to navigate around your views and pages and databases. You can hide that by clicking on the little two arrows here, if you wanted more space on the right and then to get it back hover over and click it to get it back. Notion comes with a few views and databases already set up for you so you could have say, here's a reading list that you can add two for books that you want to read, it's already got a task list here. These are all very basic database is setup for you, we're going to create our own in this class for managing our pattern collections. Then another thing you can do if you see down here we've got templates, if you go in here there are lots and lots of different templates that you can choose from already created for you that you can put into your workspace. To get out of this window I'm going to click outside and it will take me back. Let's go back to this first page here, this is called a page and it is basically where you can put in information. You can format it much like a Word document, so you've got a heading here, then you've got text and you've got a checklist here as well. Now to bring those up, Notion users what is called blocks. If I was to hover down here you can see that it brings up these little icons here, there's a plus and then there's a little six dotted icon. To get to the blocks all you have to do is click on that plus and it will give you a list of options to choose from. We've got text blocks, we've got a to-do list block, we've got headings, bulleted lists. You can put in an image, a video and then you get down to the database blocks. These get a bit more complicated and we'll go into that later, but you could put in a database view. Then it's recently introduced AI as well but that is a extra pain option. Let's add a text block and we can then type in something here, and then press "Enter". Another way to bring up the blocks is to use the forward slash on your keyboard and then you can scroll again. You could also type in the name of what you want to put in here. Let's say we want to put in an image, I'm going to type image and then we can select it. With images you can upload a file, or you could embed a link to the image or you can use Unsplash which is a stock photo website where you can get royalty free stock images. Let's put this imaging of books and you can see how easy it is to then create these pages. Another thing you can do is add icons and cover, so let's add an icon and let's see if it's got a book icon here. To match our image and then we can select a color. Now the good thing about icons is it puts it in the navigation sidebar here, so that if you'd like to work visually it makes it easier to find that option on the sidebar. Another thing you can do is add a cover, and then when you do it initially it will just add a default cover. But you can change it by clicking on the change cover. You can put in a color background or select from one of these NASA archives, you can also upload a cover link to an image, and then of course you've got your Unsplash ones as well. Let's pick some more books here, and once you've put that in you can reposition it to a better position if you want to. Now another thing you can do if you look up here in the right hand corner and you can see these three dots, if you click on there you can update the overall style of your page. You could change the fonts, you can make the text a bit smaller, you could change it to full width, and you could also look at the page history and analytics as well as delete it. You can also import and export. Now that we have created an account and have had a quick look around a Notion workspace, it's time to start building our pattern collection tracker. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to set up a basic page that will be your central point for your pattern collections. 3. Setup Hub Page: In the previous lesson, you created an account if you didn't already have one and go yourself familiar with the notion workspace. In this lesson, I'll walk you through setting up a homepage for your pattern collections. Let's have a look at my pattern collection databases so that you get an idea of what we're going to create. I'm just going to jump over to my workspace, and over here I have my art hub where I manage all of my artwork, my pattern collections, my license management, my royalties management, and so on. This is basically what I create and manage anything to do with the patterns and artwork that I create for my business. We then have the pattern collection habit, and this is what we're creating in this class. In here I have this as a hub page. So this is the first thing we're going to set up, and then I've got a database that holds my pattern collections, and then I've got a database that holds the individual patterns that go in the collection. If I go into my collections database here, you can see I have a number of collections here that have been completed. I have some that I am planning and I've got one here that's in progress. Let's go and have a look at that one. We'll just open it up into a big page. This is a pirate's kids fabric collection that I'm working on, and you can see here I've got a number of sections here. Each of my collections has a number of fields. I have the date that I completed it, the target market. I have links to the completed files. Obviously with this one I haven't actually created the designs yet, so I don't have the links. It's calculating how many patterns I am thinking about doing, and these are the links to the actual individual patterns in the database. So if we go down here to the main section of the page. I have sections here for each part of my planning process. So I have a story. I have some suggested motives that I might create. I have my mood board. I've got colors. I've written down some design ideas, some resources, and then I've got down here is the individual patterns. So this is linked to the patterns database which you can see over here on the left, and so within each of these is some information about each pattern. I actually go to quite a lot of effort to think about and mind-map ideas, each individual pattern. For each of them they're either Hero pattern or a coordinate or a Blender. I have all the notions that I think I'm going to create, and then it's linked here back to my main collection. That just what we're going to create in this class. Let's jump back to the empty notion workspace here, and let's set up that initial hub page. To do that we just need to create a new page, and you can do that by clicking on the "add a page" link here. Let's first give it a name and I'm going to call it Pattern Collection Hub. [NOISE] We also want to give it an icon. I'm going to click on the "icon " here, and let's give it a cherry and make that a color, and you can see it updating over here in the navigation panel as well. I will add a cover as well. For the moment we're just creating a basic page. So I just want to click in here and I'm just going to write a description for the page. Then I want to add two databases. One is my Pattern Collections Database and the other is my individual patterns database. To do that, I'm going to use a forward slash and I'm going to select "a Database", and I want to select the "Full Database page", and that is basically opened up into another page, and we're going to name this Pattern Collections. [NOISE] At the moment, we're not going to worry about these fields. We're going to do that in the next lesson. I'm going to go back to my Pattern Collection Hub now, there's always multiple ways of navigating around notion or multiple ways of doing things. To get back to my Pattern Collection Hub, I can use one of these breadcrumb links or I can go over to my navigation panel here, and you can see that's our new database here, Pattern Collections, and it's placed it under the hub page. So I'm going to click on that to go back. Then you can see it's put that link to the Pattern Collections Database. Then we want to create another one. I'm going to click below it and do the same thing, database, [NOISE] full-page, and this one's going to be Patterns. Let's give them both some icons so they look a bit prettier. Put a bike for this one, an orange bike. Maybe that will inspire me to do some bike patterns. Let's go to our collections one and add an icon to do a bug. Then let's go back to our Pattern Collection Hub. Now we have our Pattern Collection Hub page, we've got a link to our Pattern Collections Database, and a link to our Patterns Database. Now I've shown you how to set up a basic page which will be your Pattern Collection Hub. I've shown you how to add an icon and a cover and to add some simple blocks. I've also shown you how to create a simple full-page database. In the next lesson, we'll set up a Pattern Collection Database. 4. Setup Collections Database: Welcome back. In the last lesson, we set up a pattern collections hub page that is personalized and has links to both your collection database and your pattern database. In this lesson, I'll walk you through setting up your collections database so that you can plan, organize, and create your pattern collections. Let's jump into our pattern collections database, and at the moment we just have a blank view with just two columns. One is called Name and one is called Tags. To manage our pattern collections, we're going to need a few more columns or fields in our database. Let's start with the first one, we'll rename that to Title, this will be the title of our pattern collection. Then we're going to change the second column to status, and then we need to click on Edit Property. Each of these columns is a property. We can change the type of property it is to a text or a status, or a image or a link, anything you like, even formulas, but for this one, let's go into Edit property and change this to status. It gives us some default statuses here, so we've got not started, in progress, and done. Now, I'm going to change the in-progress one here, I want to have two here. I like to have one that says I am planning and one that says that I am designing, because I spend a lot of time planning my pattern collections before I actually start doing any drawing or pattern composing. I just want to click on the little plus here and add one called planning. If I just hit "Enter", it should add that, there we go. I want to change this one to designing. [NOISE] Then I might change the colors of these as well. If I just click on it, you can see you've got an option here to change the colors, so I'm going to change that to purple and the rest can stay the same. To get out of there, we can just hit the cross icon or just the arrow to go back. Let's add another property. This property is going to be a multi-select property and it's going to be a list of options for the target market. I'm going to name this target market, and then we're going to add some options. Now, I'm just going to enter some options that I use, you may have different options, for me, I design a lot for fabric, so I'm going to put fabric, I'm going to put products. All I'm doing is typing out the option name and then hitting "Enter" to edit. I'm going to go with kids fabric as well because I like to have them separate and kids products. You could also have home decor and so on. Let's just leave that there for the moment. Because it's a multi-select, you see it's giving me three blank pattern collections at the moment, we'll get rid of them later. If I go into here, I can actually select, say two of those, that way I know that I am going to be targeting both the home decor market and maybe the product's market, so that gives me some good options there. The next property then I'm going to add is a property to allow me to upload a file, so this will be a file and media property and I'm going to name this one sales sheet. For me, a sale sheet is basically a page that has my pattern collection on it and I will then send that out to potential clients to see if they are interested in licensing my pattern collection. I also like that as a cover for my pattern collection record so that I can easily identify it. Then the next one I want to add is a date field. I'm going to select "Date" and I'm going to change that title to completed, so this is my completed date. I'm just going to make that field a little bit smaller and maybe this one as well, so you just click and drag the column to re-size. Lastly, I'm just going to enter one more, and this one's going to be a link. I'm going to select this one here called URL and I use this to paste in a link to my Dropbox folder where all my high resolution images are, so that's an easy way to find them, so I'm just going to put a link here. Let's just open this up, and let's just put this as an example for the moment so we can see it. In the completed field, you can then select a date, you can also, in the link field, you just paste in the link and then for the cell sheet you upload or you can embed a link. In the bottom here we're actually going to set up a template. I have a number of prompts that I use to guide me through the process of creating a collection, so we will do that in a lesson coming up, but for now we're going to leave that blank. We might just get rid of these two records here that we don't need. An easy way to delete is to basically just select them and then hit "Delete" on your keyboard. We can keep the example one in there for the moment. Now we have the main collections database setup. I've shown you how to create different types of properties that you will need to manage your pattern collections. Now we have the main collections database setup. I've shown you how to add different types of properties that you will need to manage your pattern collections. We now need to set up another database that holds the individual patterns that you will create for each pattern collection. 5. Setup Patterns Database: In the previous lesson, I walked you through setting up a pattern collections database that will help you to plan, organize, and design your collections. That each pattern collection will have a number of individual patterns. So, you need a place to store them before we can link them together. In this lesson, I will walk you through setting up your pattern database. Let's open up the patterns database. Once again, we've got a blank database here with just the default two fields. Let's rename the first one to Title. Then let's rename this one to Status and select the status property type. I'm going to leave those as default. The next one is going to be a selection option as well. I'm going to select this property here, select, and change this to type. I'm going to add three options here. These are the types of patterns. In my pattern collections I will often have one or two hero patterns. These are the main patterns as often quite a bit happening in them. Then I'll have a couple of coordinate patterns. Then I'll have a bunch of a blender patterns. The blender patterns are very basic and they basically just blend the whole collection together. I'm going to write here hero. Then we want a coordinate. Then we want to blender. It's allocated some colors, which is fine. Let's add another one that is just going to be a text one. This is going to be called motifs. This is just where I'm going to enter in some motif ideas for my pattern. Then the last one is going to be the actual image of the pattern. I want to add a files and media property and I'm going to say the design. Let me just get rid of those two there, and I might just call this example for the moment. Now that we have our two databases, we want to link them together. To do that, we use a property type called relation. If I go into my pattern collections database and let's add another property here. There's an option here for relation, and it says here, link to a database. All we need to do is click on patterns, and it's going to link this database, the pattern collections, to my pattern's database. I also want to show it on my patterns database. Then I click on Add Relation. If I click in here now, it will actually show me a list of patterns. If I go back to my patterns, we've got that extra property here. If I click it, I can select the name of the pattern collection and they are now both linked. You'll see why we do that shortly. In this lesson, we have set up our pattern database and linked it to our collections database by adding a relation property. In the next lesson, we will set up a collection template to help guide you through the process of creating a fabulous pattern collection. 6. Create a Template: Welcome back. In the previous lesson, we set up our patterns database and linked it to our collections database using a relation property. Now to make our pattern collections interesting and unique, I use a template that helps guide me through the process, which I'm going to share with you in this lesson. I'm going to walk you through setting this process up as a collection template so that you can ensure the best outcomes for your collections. We will create the template inside the collection database so that every time you create a new collection, the prompts are there ready. I'll also show you how to embed your individual pattern view inside the template to save you time. Let's return to our collections database, and let's use this first record here as our starter for our template. To do that, just click on the Open button, which will appear when you hover over that title field. It will open in the side panel as a page where we can see all the properties. I'm just going to open this out into a full page, and you can do that by clicking on this icon here, just to make it a bit bigger. To create a template so that every time you open up a new pattern collection, you get all the same field and we're going to enter some information down here that is going to be some prompts to help guide you to create your pattern collection. We want to have that every time you open up this or create a new collection, so to do that, we create a template. You can do that by clicking on the, create a template link here and we'll just open that up into a full-page as well. Here I'm going to enter pattern collection template. We don't need to change anything here. Down here is where we're going to put our prompts for our pattern collection. I'm going to use the heading block for those, so I'm going to use a forward slash and I'm going to put Heading 2. For the first one, I'm going to put story. When I create a pattern collection, the first thing I like to do is create a short story that helps create a interesting and unique pattern collection based around a story. Then I want to create another title and we'll go to Heading 2 again, and this time I'm going to put motives. This is where I'll list some suggested motives. Then I want one for mood board, so let's do another heading, mood board. I want one for colors, sorry, we need the heading first, heading, colors and I want one for resources. Sometimes I'll put links to some images that I might use for inspiration. I also will put some title suggestions. When I start, I might create that title, but as I go through the process of creating my collection, I often come up with different names for my collection, so I'll write a few different suggestions there. Those are my prompts that I like to complete when I am planning my collection. Then I also want to put a embedded view to the pattern database that will show just the patterns for this collection. To do that, let's add a database view. I'm typing database, but instead of putting in a new one, I want to link it to an existing one, so there's one here called link to view of database. I'm going to select that, it's now going to prompt me for the view that I want and I want this patterns one. At the moment it's looking a bit cramped I'm going to make this page full-page so up here in the page styles, I'm going to change this to full page, and then we have a bit more room to fit everything in. We want to make sure that the patterns that are shown in this database view are only the patterns that are connected to this pattern collection, and to do that, we need to put a filter. Up here you will see a little icon called filter. Click on that, and then we want to select that pattern collections. Then all we need to do is click on that first one, pattern collection template so it's going to basically link it back to this page. It might sound a bit confusing, but it'll basically link the two together. That's all we need to do for our template. I'm going to click the back button here and then just click out of there. Let's go back to our collections database. Now if I were to click on the new collection and then open that up, at the moment nothing is showing, we don't have those prompts, so we need to tell our pattern collection database to create a new record using the templates. Let's remove that one. I'm just going to click the three dots and then say, delete. Then up here where it says new, if you click on the little arrow here, you can see that it's defaulted to an empty template, so we want to change it to that one, so let's click on the three dots here and set as default. I'm going to say for all views in pattern collection. If we were to create some different views, which way will it will always use this template to each of those views. Now when I click on the new now that there are multiple ways to click on new or to create a new pattern collection. You can click on the New button here, or you can use the New button here. Let's just click "New" here and then open it. Now you can see it's defaulting to our template. Let's just expand that out to a full-page as well. Now if I were to create a pattern in our pattern view down here, it automatically linked it to this new pattern collection. Let's actually remove that and let's give this a name. Let's say pirate's, adventure. Let's say this is in planning status. Now if I were to add a pattern in here, you can see it's updated it and automatically linked it to this page. I'm just going to write pattern 1 here, actually pattern 1. Now we have our template set up so that every time we create another pattern collection, it will automatically give you those prompts. Now one more thing, if you wanted to edit the template, you can do that by going into that new button, clicking on the three dots and then clicking "Edit". We can go back in there and make some modifications, if we wanted to add another prompt say, we could do that. Now one thing to be aware of here, this won't update any existing pattern collections that you've already created, it will just update the template for any that you create from now on. In this lesson, I showed you how to create a template for your pattern collection with prompts that will help you to plan, organize, and design your collection. I also showed you how to embed a view of your pattern designs within the main pattern collection page to streamline the process. In the next lesson, I'll walk you through actually creating a pattern collection plan. 7. Real-life Walkthrough: In the previous lesson, I showed you how to create a template so that you can plan, organize, and design your collections. This included adding prompts to guide you through the process and embedding a view for your patterns. In this lesson, I'm going to walk you through a real life pattern collection plan so you can see it in action. Let's create a new pattern collection. I'm going to click the "New" button. I'm going to give it a title. This one is going to be based on an underwater world. I'm going to call it underwater world to begin with. This title might change at some point. Then I'm going to open that up. Let's open up to a full page, and more changes to planning because we are in the planning stage. The first thing I like to do when creating a pattern collection is to write a little story. The story helps me to come up with unique design ideas for my collection. This is particularly useful if designing for fabric and in particular, [inaudible] which often have a bit of a story behind them. I'm just going to put my story in here, this is basically a story of Ari, who was a mermaid and lives in a magical underwater world, which is vibrant and colorful and she also has a best friend dolphin called Finn, who she likes to swim and play with. Then after I've created my story, I will use that story to create a bunch of keywords or potential motifs for my collection. I'll go back through my story and I'll pick out a few things. Obviously, we need the mermaid, we need the dolphin. We probably could do with some underwater world creatures. Let's do a starfish, schools of fish, shells, turtles, sea horses, also maybe some plant life, seaweed would be good, coral, shells. We already have shells. Maybe some other creatures such as octopuses and so forth, squid and maybe even a sunken ship that they go and investigate. In my story, they also have found treasure. So I'm going to put in a treasure box and a chest, sorry, and some jewels and coins, even maybe a treasure map, a cave, and I think that sounds pretty good for the moment. The next thing I would do is a mood board. I would jump onto the web and maybe go to Google or Pinterest or quite often, I go to the library and I'd like to find old magazines and in charity shops to find references to my ideas. Then I will pull in those ideas into here, into a mood board, and that will help guide me through my collection. I often find as you build upon each idea, other ideas will open up and I find it's really important to write them down so that you have them here in your little collection planner. Even if you don't use those ideas, you can carry them over to another collection. I think that is the power of planning and brainstorming ideas rather than just jumping right in and designing your collection. This way you know you've created it from scratch and it's unique and different, and it has a story. Now I created a mood board in Canva. I basically dragged some photos from Unsplash and I created a colorful mood board here that I'm going to use for my inspiration. I have downloaded that. Let's add an image block here to insert my mood board. We'll just make that a little bit smaller and I'm just clicking and dragging it. I can also align that to the left. Then we want some colors. I had a few ideas. Basically, my mood board did prompt me and I'm thinking this is a kid's collection, fabric collection, so it needs to be bright and colorful. Here are some colors that I thought might represent magical underwater world. Aqua blue is nice as it represents the ocean and would probably make a good primary color for the collection. Coral pink is vibrant and can represent the coral reefs and would also complement that aqua blue quite nicely. Sandy beige, this can represent the sandy ocean floor and can be used as a neutral color in the collection. Seafoam green, it's a softer, lighter side of the ocean which will work well as an accent color. Sunshine yellow, that represents the bright and sunny days that one might experience in the ocean and maybe add some warmth to the collection. Then maybe a deep purple, which could be the mysterious depths of the ocean and could also be used to create a sense of intrigue or darkness in the designs. Maybe a bright orange to give it an energetic and playful side. Then maybe ocean blue, which is the darker shade of blue and represents the deeper darker parts of the oceans. It can also be used to create a bit of contrast in the designs. Now I think I'm going to go on and create a few pattern design ideas for that individual person. Let's start with the first hero pattern. I was thinking when I was looking at, back at my story that a bit of hide and seek play with Ari, the main character and a dolphin could be fun. I'm going to call this one hide and seek. It's automatically linked it to my underworld collection. This is going to be a hero pattern. In this I will have my mermaid, a dolphin, a turtle maybe, and maybe a school of fish and some reef and seaweed. Let's create another one and this can be the friends of the sea. This one can be a coordinate. This one's going to have some of the friends, some of the other creatures such as fish, whales, maybe a merman, turtles. I just realized I spelled dolphin wrong here. Let's create another one. This one can be another coordinate. I'm going to call it bubbles for the moment. This could maybe be a coordinate or a blender, I'm not sure at the moment. So I want bubbles, seaweed maybe. Let's create another one called waves and this one would definitely be a blender pattern. We're going to have waves. I would probably go on and create a few more of those, but you get the idea now this is a really good starting point. My dolphin has gone a wrong spelling again. Maybe I will just type it in because it's being silly with me. There you go. Yes. This is a great way to get a really good idea of how to start creating your pattern designs. The next stage for me would be to start drawing those motives and then creating the patterns. If we go back, I'll just show you now what it looks like. We haven't put a target market here, so I'll put kids fabric. We've got all our little patterns here linked. If I go to my patterns database, you will now see them listed there as well, and they are linked back to that underwater world collection. In this lesson, I walked you through a real life pattern collection plan. In the next lesson, I'm going to give you a few tips on how to make your pattern collection database look a little bit better. 8. Make it Pretty!: In the previous lesson, I walked you through a real-life pattern collection plan so that you can see it all in action. In this lesson, I'm going to show you a few ways to make your pattern collection database look a little bit better. Looking at my live workspace here, you can see I've only got a few items on here and they all fall under my favorites. Most of my databases that are currently out of view are in this section here where it say private. The first thing I want to show you is how to add a database to the favorites. Let's jump back here to our work in progress. I want to add the pattern collection hub to the favorites. All I need to do is click on those three dots beside it and then add to favorites, and then that puts it all up in there. The private space really just has the original Notion default databases, and it still has your pattern collection hub there too, but up here you have the ones that you want to get to quickly. If I go back to my workspace, you can see my pattern collection hub looks a little bit prettier than the one we've created. I'm going to show you how to create a button, so this button here will basically create a new collection automatically, see it has taken me into there. I will show you how to create this gallery view, so that's my collections database and my patterns database. Let's go back and go to the pattern collection hub. At the moment, we've just got a couple of views. The first thing I want to do is make this a wide page, so I'm going to go to my three dots and turn on the full-width toggle. Then I'm just going to click above these links here and I might just hit "Enter" a few times to put them down the bottom. I'm going to click in here, I'm going to go forward, space, button, click on that. We want to do a couple of things here, we want to first add page to a new database. I'm going to click that and then I'm going to select the database, which is our pattern collection database. Then we can click "Done". Actually, go back in there by clicking on the tool button and give it a name, New Collection, click "Done" and let's just see what happens when we do that. Basically, it's saying here that it has created one, but then we can't see it. But if we went into my pattern collections, you'd see there is a blank one there that it has created. I'm just going to delete that because we need to put another action on that button. If we go back to the button and we click on the Edit button tool icon, and then we need to add another step, and this one is to open a page. It will automatically give you this option, new page added. Basically, it's found that you've created the action to create the page and now we want to open it. I want to open this into full-page mode and give it an icon. I'm going to use a plus, maybe. Yes, there we go. Now when we click on our New Collection button, it opens it up into a new page and we can create our new collection here. If I do that and then go back to Pattern Collections, you can see that it has created a new one. I'm going to delete that because I don't need it. Another thing I want to do is create a gallery page, let's do this in our patterns database. At the moment it just looks like a Excel spreadsheet. If I'm going to take you back to my patterns database, and if I click on my gallery here, you can see that all my patterns are showing as images. When I create my patterns, when I finish them, I add the design in that file upload field or property, and that means I can then create another view. These are all views, this is a gallery view and this one here is a view which is filtered by patterns that I have licensed to someone. Let's jump back to our workspace that we are creating. I'm going to go to my patterns and I'm quickly just going to chuck in a few pattern files here because this is brand new, I don't have any in there. Now we have our images in here. I'm going to create a new view, which I can do by clicking on the plus button. I'm going to change this one to gallery, and then I need to change the preview of each of these cards to the field where I put my image. That is the design field and there you can see all my patterns. I also want to change the way it opens. I'm going to change that to full page, so that when I click on it, it opens in a full page, and then I'm going to click "Done". Now we have a gallery view, we can actually see the designs. You could add more fields or properties to this preview as well. If we were to click on the three dots and go to Properties and it says, one shown, we could also add maybe the status or the type, or you can add as much as you'd like. That makes it a little bit easier visually to see what you have in your database. Now I'm going to show you how to create this gallery view on your collection hub page that links through to your collections and patterns database. Let's jump back to our workspace and go to the collection hub. We need to create another database view here. I'm just going to click down below here and click on a database, and we can make that a full-page database as well, and then I'm going to name this Directory. Then if we open that up, let's call this one Pattern Collections, and then down in here, we do our forward slash, and this time, if we type in database and then scroll down to get to linked view of database and then select Pattern Collections, it has put it in there for you. We'll close that and then let's do the patterns one here. Name that Patterns, add a database with the linked view of database, and this is going to be Patterns. Close that, I want to then create another view and this one's going to be a gallery view. Let's just get rid of that one there, we don't need that. At the moment, our Pattern Collections and Patterns doesn't have any images, let's change that. Go to the three dots, then Layout, then Gallery, and in the card preview, you want to change that to page cover. Let's change it where it opens to full page. Now at the moment, our pattern collection database doesn't actually have a cover, so let's just make that full width and let's go and give it a cover and that'll do for the moment. Then let's go back to our patterns, make that full width, and give that a cover as well. Now we've got two covers there. If we now go back to our pattern collection hub and we click below our new button and we go /database, and this time we also are going to do a linked view of a database and we want to select our directory and we want to select the gallery view. There we now have a gallery view of our pattern collections and our patterns, and if we select the pattern collections one, it will go directly into our pattern collections database. That just makes it a little bit visually more appealing. We can also hide that database title because we don't need that. Then one other thing that you can do is, let's go to our patterns and our table. There are some options down here at the bottom of the table that allows you to calculate certain aspects of your table. If you were to, say, have numbers in here, you could calculate the sum. In this case, I'm just going to count the number of entries and then that will tell me that I have for patterns basically. There's little things like that you can add that will come in quite handy. In this lesson, you learned a few new ways to make your pattern collection a little bit better looking with buttons and gallery views. In the next lesson, we will wrap this up and I will let you know what's next. See you there. 9. What Next?: You did it. Yay. [LAUGHTER] Somehow, you made it to the end of my class. Thank you. So now I just will rehab everything we have done. Firstly, I talked you through setting up an account with Notion, and then I showed you the basics of the workspace. We then set up a hub page for your pattern collections and created two databases to hold your collections and your individual patterns. I then showed you how to set up a template with prompts to help you plan, organize, and design your collections. And finally, I walked you through a real-life example of a pattern collection. So now you have a comprehensive system for managing your pattern collection with everything from planning and design to managing and streamlining all in one consolidated space. Where to from here? Keep an eye out for my next class, where I'll take this another step further and show you how to expand what you have into a full management system that also helps you manage your licenses, royalties, and your client wish list. I'd love to know how you went with setting it all up, so do share your progress with screenshots in the project section. Please do reach out if you do have any questions. Also, come follow me on Instagram @melarmstrongdesign, and also on YouTube at Mel Armstrong to see what else I'm up to. I'm always documenting my creative story and putting out tutorials. Again. I'm Mel, and thank you so much for taking the time to do my class. And as always, happy pattern-making. See you.