The Strake ( ? )

New Site Launch - Dyenomite Tie Dyes

Another site that I’ve been working on for a while has launched recently. This one is for a company called Dyenomite Tie Dyes and, as the name implies, they manufacture all sorts of tie dye garments for customers large and small.

Dyenomite’s designer, Andy Johnson, created the overall design to match that of their print catalog. I took it from there and built the backend including the shopping cart and checkout system.

All of my projects I’ve worked on lately have had at least one new and exciting piece to work on (or if not, I’ve come up with one) and for Dyenomite, it’s the “virtual” garment previews. Previously, they had to shoot photos of all of their garments, come up with a clever name, and then upload them to the website. This covered the “stock” tie dyes, but there was no way to show the (literally) trillions of possible custom combinations of garment types, tie dye styles, and colors.

With their new system, they can create a vector line drawing of each of their garment types - something like this…

… where the green designates a transparent region. And tie dye styles like this…

This particular style has five colors that can be set to any of their 50+ choices. So, these vector files are little Flash SWFs that are stacked up - the style goes on the bottom and you specify the colors to use for each placeholder (sort of like color by numbers) and then the garment goes on top and acts as a mask with the style visible through the transparent areas. The end result would be something like this…

Anytime a tie dye image needs to be displayed (thumbnail for shopping cart, larger version for customizing, etc.), a little Flash movie is called upon with parameters describing which pieces and colors to use. Even after the user starts to make more specific filter selections (only certain garments, styles, and colors), we still can’t expect to show every possible combination. The idea is that they will find something reasonably close and they can then customize it. Existing product photographs may also be customized in the same way.

This certainly isn’t an exact representation of the final product, but it gives customers a new way of shopping and a nice tool for experimenting.