Okay now my thought on public recipes/designs is that anyone should be able to see them. It makes it a great deal easier for shopkeepers and anyone else looking for great quantities of a single item. So if public recipes are truly public it would allow the consumer to pick which item they wanted given that merchant can produce that item. This of course wouldn't grant the commodity lists or what have you that is normally available to the merchant. It would allow people to become accustomed to what was offered and be able to buy more items.

Agreed.

I thought about this a couple days ago when I was looking for clothing to purchase. It would be so much easier if anyone could just look over the designs, and ask a jeweler/tailor/cook/smith/thingy to do the one they liked. Maybe even make it so you can only view designs if you're in the jewelry/forge/tailoring/cook place in a city.

You can just ask a Tailor/Jeweler/Cook what they have available though. I've set up a system to allow people to browse all the public jewelry designs, so I'm sure others have as well.

The Workshop of the Moonlace Tailoring Cartel.
There's that tailoring bench here, with all that cobbling and sewing stuff. There is an elaborate catalog of patterns here.
You see exits leading north, south, and Dennis.

read catalog
You open an elaborate catalog of patterns to page 1 and begin reading.
MOONLACE TAILORING CARTEL CATALOG OF SLAY GIANT +3

Thank you for choosing the Moonlace Tailoring Cartel for your tailoring needs. Below is the table of contents, which will tell you what pages you can find descriptions and sketches of our various public and private designs.
(insert table of contents here)