"What Matt said..."

Since Matt doesn't believe he can post here, even though his name is listed under 'people who can post here', I'm going to paste in some of his earlier comment as it's full of ideas and ought to be a post of its own,

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yes a good name is cool but have always totally failed to find one. problem is - it is not just costume designers who will want to use the design tool. I think it will be fashion designers, games designers - really anyone who does digital visualisation of people and fabric - so you'd want a name vague enough to cover a whole bunch of design industries.
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[more on names]

People are going to want to come to and use the website as it will make their life easier. It helps formualte their design ideas and gives them tools to communicate their ideas in a clearer, more professional way. Also, the industry is still very much in transition - coming to terms with digital technology - and I think many people are still looking for solutions that work for them. The best part about the website is that is designed by working designers - so I it has a intuitive usefulness.

I don't think we need a gimmick as such to get people to keep coming back to the site - I think we just keep creating beautiful work which we update in a public way every few days and the users can download this work for their own refernce material - or to incorporate into their own illustrations. I've always thought it needs to have a very vital, constantly evolving feeling.


Problem is - we need a system that can handle users searching through and downloading many thousand image files. We still have barely just started and we could easily be around 10,000 images. (Although we'd want to cull that down to just really good quality ones but you get the idea.)

Other problem - each object on the database is extremely subjective in how you name it and I'm not sure I want to spend the rest of my life doing keyword entry ie: stripe, striped, stripes, stripey,

I always tried to come up with an OBJECTIVE system but i don't think I've found it yet. The last bit of thinking was a human figure template (a bit like a toilet door person) where the limbs and torso are actually buttons and the user would select which part of the body the garment would objectively cover. For example, if you were looking for kneepads - you would just select the knees - but if you were looking for hot pants you'd just select the bottom part of the torso and the top of the legs... I'm not sure how this would work for garment components (like ruffles and draped fabric) as they don't follow the same rules and I'm not sure how this would work for human models either...




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want to get Katerina Stratos (Moulin Rouge! asst designer) to work with me on my scheherazade book. Though we'd create about 40 test illustrations and then see if we could shop it around and get some interest. Also after mardi gras sitting in front of teh computer editing images sounds like a good time.
[...]
Remember the Irving Penn work of Issey miyake - that fabulous white space with those amazing images? That's really how I want it to feel. That's who I want to be - beautiful inspirational images floating in an empty creative space.

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