I find the WGSN website very easy to navigate and very focussed on what is current and now, with quick access to specific searches e.g. menswear/womenswear/VM/city by city. With regular updates and reports on a large variety of areas it provides a lot more as a source of research and idea development. Within some of their pieces they also offer a general article then specific tabs on areas mentioned previously, this means that it’s a lot easier to navigate.
That said, on some of them there can be an overload of information and/or ideas. For example the Women’s colour that I mentioned previously there was too much colour for me, the amount for different swatches for each set was too much and detracted from it. With so many colours they’ve labelled them with their Pantone codes not their actual colour names, which i feel gives a degree of separation.
In comparison, the Promostyl book that I went through focussed more into the future, looking at 2016/17/18 and less focus on current affairs. The presentation was very clean and crisp, with a basic set of images as examples and a moderate amount of text relevant specifically to what was on that page. The book that i looked at was sport style 2017 and had 4 main themes that they’d picked out. Throughout the content it went in sections such as general theme, pattern, clothing, icons, each with the same obvious linking themes.
It did contain fabric samples and physical ‘touchy feely’ sections where you could get a more physical understanding of fabrics instead of just reading descriptions, you can also see the exact colour that it will be through dying, not the digital version which can sometimes not be totally accurate.
One downfall was that you couldn’t navigate it so quickly, without a full index if you wanted to find out if it has a certain demographic focus you’d have to go through it all and interpret it yourself.