I had a very happy customer from a band (Bad Habits) in Europe post some nice photos in the product's comment section. So I thought I would share them here. This product was one of the key chain tags I designed for the key chain contest that recently happened here at Shapeways. And although many were rather elemental designs I've actually sold a lot of them, and in particular the ones that allow longer text strings to be printed. Being able to only print initials or the year in a text line doesn't seem to excite customers to the possibilities of customization as much as being able to print a small phrase. Of course they can use the image area to add additional text but I get the feeling that being able to print multiple lines of text or multiple images containing text would greatly enhance CustomMaker, IMHO. Anyway, here are some photos: I am somewhat surprised that those thin lines in the logo managed to print well in steel. I dare say that had I uploaded that exact same design it would probably have been rejected for thin line problems. I'm glad it worked out for the customer!
Very nice, a simple design but the customization options add so much. I'm also surprised with the steel detail in the logo. It seems that maybe steel resolution has increased somewhat over the last year? I've noticed that some of my recently uploaded designs that I never would have thought printable in steel now register as printable.
I created a copy of the model having a larger custom image area with a different aspect ratio so the customer can increase the size of the logo if they have any additional orders. I sense a disturbance in the Force that could lead to a future rejection for something that was already manufactured. It's difficult to know what a customer might want to put on designs and without rule checking things seem like they could be rather hit and miss to get customized items printed. Or do customized parts get an exemption from checking? It would be great if CustomMaker could be made to allow customers to place or adjust the custom text and image boxes (and heights) themselves. I'm not really thrilled about the long term proposition of needing to create multiple customized CustomMaker design copies. That hole in the design doesn't help things either. If CustomMaker could ignore a void in a custom area then in this particular case a much larger custom image area could be defined. Of course a hanging loop could be placed on an exterior corner of the tag but that's something for a future design.
I just went and played around with your tag customization, and I managed to upload a b/w image of my logo and it looked pretty darned good on the tag, if I do say so myself. I can understand your concern, though, if a customer doesn't follow the instructions for an image and uploads something with too many grey tones, not enough contrast, too many ultrathin lines. I guess it's possible that the CustomMaker will still show it as working but it still may not be printable. I'm interested to see how this develops. It's all one big experiment at this point, isn't it?! One thing you might consider doing is writing a mini-tutorial for the customer and putting it in the product description. The little info button with the specs for the image may not be so obvious to potential customers, and a little repetition never hurts.
Another thing I was considering was creating images of the customization areas, if only for image definitions, and adding them to the image bar. Putting on the shoes of a customer and looking at a typical CustomMaker product you quickly realize that you have absolutely no idea how the customization is set up. You don't know the size of the image, where it is located, if it is square or rectangular, if it is angled, or what heights are set for embossing/engraving. If you're lucky the designer entered some information into the product description, or you can upload several images having different aspect ratios to figure it out through trial and error. Ideally such information would come up automatically as part of the preview process. But in the meantime (assuming a more meaningful preview is ever implemented) the best way might be to cut and past the set-up information into an image like this: That also gives the exact image size so they would have a better chance of producing artwork that would keep lines or features above a minimum width, at least for the materials in which they were interested. I suppose the ultimate solution is for any CustomMaker output to be run through the standard design rule checking algorithms, with a repair option. And if that were possible then the customer should also be able to set the embossing/engraving heights they wanted, or have the ability to do a simple z-scale with a readout of the maximum height excursion that ends up being used. Life would be much simpler if only one or two materials were an option!
It would be helpful to give the customer an idea of where their image will appear on the product, and whether it can be rectangular or square...I uploaded a rectangular image, it didn't work but it did have a lot of grey tones. Tried a square one, b/w, no problems. I guess the danger is if you make it look too complicated before the customer even has the chance to try it that they might be scared off. Maybe a simple display with two images, one showing a high contrast image with a thumbs up, one showing a low contrast image with a thumbs down or slash through it would do the trick? And maybe just for this purpose someone (Shapeways?!) could run a calibration of the CustomMaker...take one black/white high contrast image, make it stepwise grayer with lower contrast and then print out a small series. This way the customers (and designers) could have a better idea of which images will work and which won't.
I think several image pre-processing options have been suggested in the past (as in the same week CustomMaker was introduced). It would mean a few more click boxes for the customer to deal with but I think that in general people in the 21st century can handle that. As I recall some possibilities include image invert (swap black and white) and convert to full black and white (high contrast). But those things are a bit different than showing a preview of where the customization can occur. For that I could see a faint discoloration or hatching superimposed on the customization image preview so the customer knows if they are using the full area or if their image is somehow limiting their customization. Oh well, not really my problem I guess. I just prefer to see customers get the best possible results without ever having to deal with customer service or getting stuck waiting for a response from a designer. Maybe we'll see some updates to the tool soon.