Tag Archives: personalization

Name Tag World Takes Website to Next Level with Personalization

Identity Systems Inc sought to expand on their already top position on Google search with a site that catered more directly to consumers with low volume orders as well as larger corporate orders.   By creating NameTagWorld.com and enabling it with MyStyle, they did exactly that.

Online Customization for Custom Name Tags and Badges On-Demand

To accomplish this, they’ve implemented the MyStyle Customizer as the design tools to allow their visitors to upload their own logos to company badges and name tag designs, and then order individually or in bulk.

This allows any user to put a company logo, or event themed graphic onto the name tag permanently, while leaving space on the tag to be written on.

Custom Reusable Name Tags

Why throw  away Name Tags after an event?  With reusable name tags, you don’t have to.  Name Tag World offers a variety of reusable name tags, and not just for markers, either.  Check out their erasable chalk name tags for a new spin on an old concept.

Chalk name tags can actually be a perfect reusable name tag option for coffee shops, startups, or any business that wants to have a little bit of a different look from the standard marker-style name tags.

Custom Metal and Plastic Name Tags

In addition to chalk, Name Tag World has a whole bunch of plastic and metal name plates that can have a metallic finish that really looks nice.  These will last a really long time, too, as they won’t rip or fade in the way that paper name tags can, and they look more official.  These are great for staff members, security, uniforms, or anything where a more official look is needed.  The best part is, these too can be customized right on their website.

Batching A Set of Name Tags

“Do I have to make one for every person?” 

This is a common and logical next question.  Of course not!  Just design 1 name tag, add a logo or customize as you wish, add an example name in the design where you want the name to go, select the font as you want it, and just make the 1 name tag design.  Then, at checkout, you can add a spreadsheet to your order and they will batch-print your order, inserting each name first.

Design Your Own Name Tag with Your Logo

Need a branded name tag or badge for your business?  Try out Name Tag World and you can use MyStyle to make yours in minutes.

Create a Custom Name Tag

 

 

WordPress 4.8 and WooCommerce 3.1 Compatibility Verified with Successful Unit Testing – MyStyle Custom Product Designer Minor Update 2.1.1

We’ve just released a minor update for the plugin that verifies unit tests have passed on the most current WordPress and WooCommerce versions as listed below.  There is also a fix for an admin debug tool for repairing the design pages for an old legacy bug that rarely occurs.

Update Overview

This update is not critical or required if your system is already stable, but is safe to use with all versions of WordPress and WooCommerce.

  • Fixed an issue with the Design Profile Page Fix tool.
  • Unit tested current wordpress version and ran primary UX cases with no errors (WordPress 4.8)
  • Unit tested current WooCommerce version and ran primary UX cases with no errors (WooCommerce 3.1)
  • Updated readme.txt to reflect that the plugin has been tested with up to WP 4.8.0
  • Updated readme.txt to reflect that the plugin has been tested with up to WooCommerce 3.1.1

Featured Website: Custom Disc Golf Discs at FlyDiscs.com

Personalized Custom Disc Golf Discs

Since being launched as one of the top quality fly discs’ customizer, FlyDiscs.com has changed the game of designing one’s personal disc golf discs. With its innovative features, creating custom disc golf discs has never been easier. When you design your own disc golf disc the customer is unveiled by the MyStyle Customizer which allows full disc designs so you can add your own images, text, colors, patterns, effects, and more.

custom disc golf discs

Pick from Professionally Crafted Discs

With the art and design of creating your own custom disc golf discs it is imperative the discs meet professional standards. Using the MyStyle Customizer features, FlyDiscs.com offers four brands of dics all critical elements when playing the game. You have the option to choose between creating a driver, midrange, putter or standard ultimate frisbee. With each customizer option comes versions of each brand to pick from. Like for the midrange you have the option to choose from six different subcategories of midranges spanning from the Latitude 64 Gold Core disc to the top seller Fuzion Truth disc. It doesn’t stop there with the added enhanced description of why each disc varies and gives further information on specific strengths it offers to your game.

Design Your Own Disc Golf Disc

With the complete four step process you can construct your ideal fly disc in minutes. It starts with background features which includes colors, shades, logos, patterns, and adjustable features. Then moves into add in personal photos and texts which can look great together or separate. Scan the browse page for unique ideas that customers are saying look best on a disc golf disc. Once your creation is complete and you’ve saved your desired disc, buying and checking out never got simpler. With its elite status as a customizer flydiscs.com is changing its reputation as an online disc ecommerce website that each player has to check out!

Form, Features & Functionality at Your Fingertips

Many people like MyStyle for the quality look and feel that it brings to the personalization experience. It looks professional, clean, and it’s able to be customized with your branding, and the UIs move and behave smoother and more intuitively than other apps.  That’s great, and it never hurts to look good.

Still, MyStyle has a lot to offer in the UX beyond the smooth UI and graphics that other apps just can’t seem to get right, that are a big part of it’s high completion and conversion rates for design – something that can be a point of failure for users that have little or no experience with design or graphics.

With tons of experience over the last decade, we’ve learned where to expose features to the user, and where to hide them away and make them automatic functionality.

Layers as a Concept

Layers is something that unless you’ve used a graphics editor, you probably are not that familiar with.  Once you know how they work in Photoshop, or Illustrator, or whatever graphics software you might use that support it, it’s logical and easy.  But, that initial learning curve is tough at first without a tutorial or a person teaching how to use them. Many developers will aim to try to copy Photoshop in UX because they themselves are familiar with it’s vocabulary and UX metaphors, but that’s actually a big mistake.

Layers in Photoshop

Hide the Concept for Usability, Automate the Functionality for Design Success

Since MyStyle caters to the common online shopper who is often non-technical when it comes to design and graphics, “Layers” as a concept must be implemented and functional the whole time the user is designing, but it has to be hidden away from the user’s experience to make it smooth and easy without that learning curve.  This doesn’t mean it’s not there, though. It just means it’s running behind the scenes instead of competing visually in the UI controls for attention, like Photoshop, the way many apps make the mistake of doing.

There are an unlimited number of layers with sophisticated groupings automatically set up and generating and removing within the both the product template and the user’s design object layers.  You can find “bring to front” and “send to back” buttons in the adjustments panel for any object to work with layering, but it’s not required and in most cases isn’t needed.  Groupings of the layers ensure that text can’t get stuck behind images, that backgrounds are always in the background, that patterns fit in the middle, uploads go on top of background and patterns, monograms in front of that, and so on.

This automatic layer control makes the design process easy for the user, ensures logical and common composition ordering occurs naturally, and allows users to compose dozens of layers without ever having to hear the word “layer” once.

Dynamic Process of Composition

Composition is the process of combining and layering graphics together within a defined space.  This seems obvious enough, and with computers the rules have definitely changed, but the roots go back to drawing and painting and still hold true today with computer graphics.  MyStyle has made a 1-2-3-4 step composition process that accomplishes the natural back-to-front approach starting with the lowest possible UX barriers to entry.  This linear UX makes the question “what should I do next” a sort of non-issue, because everyone gets that “steps” go in order. At the same time, you can click any step at any point, so you don’t have to go in order. While simpler users will just follow the order of the steps as is and do great, more advanced users will try to click steps out of order more often, and quickly discover that they can still work in any order they want, should they want to go back and change something up, or skip ahead to a feature they want immediately.

Nissan

A Good Composition Starts with a Background You Like

Any good painting starts with with a color palette and laying down background.  In the beginning of the MyStyle apps intro, it shows an animated arrow to the main composition steps, pointing at Step 1 – Backgrounds, in most cases.    This gives the user instant gratification to play around with some color choices, either solid or a gradient from one color to another, and requires zero content on their part.  As they move through background images, patterns, etc, they already get to see how easy it is for them to control their design and steer it into the realm of their personal tastes.

From here the Upload Images and Add Text features come into play for most users, as steps 2 and 3, layering perfectly and auto positioning as they go, to try to automate as much of the tedious obvious chores of a composition intuitively without too much intervention needed.

As a Result, the composition a user comes up can surprise them, as they often get further along artistically with more elements than they’ve ever done before.  For many people who are not photoshop users, this is the first time they’ve done a cool gradient, a photo or image, a pattern, some text or a monogram all together in one composition.

Dynamic Steps

The steps in MyStyle can be configured to go in any order at all, so the app is not stuck in it’s default configuration, although the default configuration does use the back-to-front composition that works really well.  So, if your product does not have a background ever, or your users 100% just want to start with an uploaded image for whatever reason, then steps can be removed or re-ordered however it needs to be to fit the demographic and primary use cases best.

Unique Trending Features

It’s not uncommon for the MyStyle dev team to create both hot new features for the out-of-the-box customizer, as well as custom features for specific MyStyle apps and clients.  This can add a special element to your app that you think will fit your users or your products needs more specifically than the general design tools already do.

Note: You can find lots of great add-ons in the MyStyle Marketplace to add special elements to your MyStyle apps.

 Some unique custom features we’ve developed in the past have included:

  • Custom Color Palettes
  • Custom Pattern Libraries
  • Custom Product Navigation
  • 3D Rendering / Preview
  • Acrylic Frame Customizations
  • Changing Template Size Options & Shapes
  • Patterns; special size scaling and/or repeating patterns
  • Gloss and Matte finish lighting effects
  • Price calculations (based on sq ft of actual design area used)
  • Laser and Engraving output
  • Filters
  • Custom Monogram Shapes
  • Custom Fonts
  • Custom Background Libraries
  • Custom Foreground Libraries
  • Product Option Overlays (like a photographic options that can be toggled on or off to layer on top of the design as predefined add ons)
  • Special Vehicle Trims
  • Special Templates with Predefined Text
  • Effects Layers and Textures
  • Custom Watermarks and Overlays
  • …many more

The Tip of the Custom Iceberg

These concepts are some of the core of why the MyStyle Customizer is so good at what it does. But, the list goes on and on. This is the base that you want in place for users to have design success, and fall in love with your brand for the ability to take products to a personalized and special level with great up-front features and tons of hidden automated power and functionality at their fingertips. Beyond this, the sky is the limit on how we can customize our customizer further to take your brand to the top of conversion optimization and user satisfaction with the best UX possible for customized configurations and personalized prints.

Sign Up Shop Marketplace

 

Latest MyStyle Site Has Launched – Fly Discs! Design Your Own Disc Golf Disc!

Custom Disc Golf Discs, Ultimate Frisbee Discs, and Frisbees!



Ever wanted a custom disc golf disc? Us too! So we went ahead and launched the latest super cool MyStyle Site: Fly Discs – Design Your Own Disc Golf Disc!

This is another one of our signature sites and we’re really proud of how well its turned out, (not to mention how cool our discs look!) We partnered with some of the top brands to make sure that every disc from our site is top quality and ready for course. This was one of first sites to go live with the mobile HTML5 customizer at the same time and we love the site design. A completely circular product makes for some interesting designs and we’ve already seen some great ones using everything from spirals to pepperoni pizzas. Definitely a great site to check if you’ve ever wanted a custom disc or ultimate disc and we’re confident this has to be one of the cooler brands in customization. FORE!



Missed the link? Click here to get custom disc golf discs from Fly Discs!

Mobile Customizer Is Launched! Design Your Own Products in HTML5!

We’re excited to announce the launch of our new product customizer for mobile web! We’re pushing the boundaries of HTML5 and web tech to bring mobile customization and mobile personalization to the MyStyle Platform. You’ll see our new mobile product design tool rolling out across many of our sites as we test the waters and launch new features. So far so good and the designs are looking great. If you want to see it in action head over to design your own skateboard on your phone at Whatever Skateboards or try it out by getting your phone pictures printed on canvas and MakeCanvasPrints.

Screenshots of Our Mobile Customizer

Want to take a peek at our mobile customizer? Here’s a few screenshots we snapped so you can take a look:

Whatever Skateboards Mobile Customizer
MakeCanvasPrints Mobile Customizer

So… What’s It Like? How Are The Designs?

We’ve tested this on multiple devices and the experience is great on both phones and tablets. We’re super happy with the performance on iPhone 5 and iPads in particular and the experience is the the current best in class. We’ll be adding more spice to our mobile customizer coming soon; new features are on their way! It is definitely exciting to see mobile tech and HTML5 break through previous performance and UX barriers to become a viable option for mobile customization apps and mobile personalization apps. The designs on the products coming out look great!

What Products Are Available?

Using our MyStyle API we’re able to provide nearly our entire product catalog from all manufacturers and printers to be designed on cell phones and other devices. That’s a staggering number of products that are live for people to design! We have to admit, its pretty fun to try the mobile customizer so give it a whirl and let us know what you think.

Brand New MyStyle Partner Site – Welcome MPS Prints!

Custom Metal, Glass, and Wood Prints!



Looking to get a custom metal, glass, or wood print? Look no further than the latest edition to our MyStyle partner sites: MPS Prints!

Built using the MyStyle Platform and using both MyStyle custom products and the MyStyle Site format MPS Prints is one of our newest and shiniest MyStyle sites. Currently our only site displaying two new personalized products available through the platform, glass prints and metal prints, MPS showcases some of the best features of the platform. We’re especially proud of the way the metal prints turn out; if you’re looking for a professional or long lasting personal gift we highly recommend taking a look at the metal prints on MPS Prints.


Missed the link above? Click here to get custom metal, glass, and wood prints from the new MPS Prints!

Greatest Skateboard Ever Was Made With MyStyle

Cats + Lasers FTW

One of the best parts of MyStyle is seeing the creative and incredible art and products that are made using using our platform. This skateboard is exactly one of those situations and we had to share it here on our MyStyle blog. Using the MyStyle platform running over at Whatever Skateboards to design their own skateboard one of our genius friends created this masterpiece which has to be seen to be believed…

Actual Printed Skateboard

Original Design on Website

YEP. Cat on a skateboard deck shooting laser beams from its eyes. Does it get any better than that? We submit that is does not and thusly why we dubbed this the great skateboard ever made. And it was made with MyStyle using the MyStyle Customizer and the MyStyle API. Here’s a link to the original design on Whatever Skateboards – design your own skateboard

Huge Upcoming Demo Launch Later This Week!

Taking Personalization and Customization to New Industries

I’m not sure if we could be more excited for upcoming demo launch this week! While we can’t spill the beans on it quite yet we can at least tell you to keep your eyes peeled for MyStyle powering a brand new customization solution. There’s always something exciting about launching customization and personalization in new verticals and industries. That relentless pursuit of the next best thing is what keeps us pushing the forefront of customization tech and this upcoming demo this week will prove no exception. We’ll keep you posted on it here on our blog when we’re ready for the big reveal!