Neuro-Designs is featured in the September 2010 edition of Concept, the Indonesian graphic design magazine. Thank you for the kind feature article, guys.
Neuro-Designs is featured in the September 2010 edition of Concept, the Indonesian graphic design magazine. Thank you for the kind feature article, guys.
Some time ago, a few people asked us on why we make our T-shirts in a short-run production. Why not make them into a commodity or market them through store chains and local distro shops? To be honest, that thought crossed our minds a couple of years ago, but we do have some good reasons for not doing so.
Reason #1: We Like to Keep Them Exclusive
While many would probably disagree with us, we think that exclusivity is important to define who we are and what we designed. In terms of quality, even when we jumped in to the same meme bandwagon and created a T-shirt out of it—The Trololo T-shirt, for example—we always wanted to take the design from another edge, differentiating from others who made T-shirts with the same exact theme.
In terms of quantity, it goes even better. Limited number of copies of our T-shirt design means there are less people wearing it. This gives our design a step further from ubiquity.
Reason #2: Apparels for a Niche Market
If some people thought that we didn’t try to market our T-shirts at a local and popular trade forum, we did. In fact we did that recently and we didn’t like the results. It turned out that not everyone out there have the same thought or taste like ours. Some people just don’t get our designs, some people just didn’t like it, and to make matters worse, some people even defined our designs as something that is too sterile and that it lacks “design” elements. It’s rather hilarious since we never aimed our designs to be something like Ed Hardy, which we’re sure that they are attractive for some people.
Our T-shirt designs are based on things that we cannot express when we are designing for our clients. Some of them are extensions of memes, fiascos or popular culture that we think consider important to be immortalized into something that we can wear every day.
So instead of giving what everybody wants and reduce our passion in apparel design, we’d rather cater those who share the same thoughts and can appreciate our designs as they are. It’s just a simple fact that you can’t make everybody happy.
It seems that we’re quite happy with how things are going now with our T-shirt designs, and besides, since this is not our primary industry, we’re just trying to have some fun while we’re at it :)
Officially, today marked the first anniversary of our pet project infolalulintas.com. Surprisingly and unexpectedly we’ve achieved so much with it within this first year:
Thanks to you for all of that. We sincerely hope that we can stay in service for many years to come.
As many web designers and developers may have known, statistically, IE6 users are dropping day by day, and with Windows Vista along with IE7 installed in most new PCs, as well as those who updates their PCs regularly. But does this mean that IE6 is going to be perished any time soon? No, not if we don’t push the campaign further. And I can’t stress enough on how important this is.
To web-standards developers reading this, I don’t think we need to discuss the matter here. We all know what’s happening. To clients reading this, I perfectly know that sometimes it is hard when users that are actually browsing to your site are stuck in the past, or they are working in an office with an ignorant IT department that does not even issue free modern browsers to their employees’ workstations. And you, as a client, of course wants everyone to be able to access your site without the effort of upgrading their browsers. I’m afraid this is just inevitable, while right now we can still have limited support to even support IE6, the browser is two versions behind (We’re on IE8 right now, if you are sticking with IE) and many major web companies are dropping their support for IE6, such as Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc. If these huge companies are taking huge steps to throw IE6 overboard, why don’t we join their cause? Why don’t we all try to reeducate web users that IE6 is a prehistoric browser, it does not play well with the latest web technologies, and it is hard to develop the same experience you’ll get on newer browsers. Is this what you want your users think of your web? As something that is stuck in the past? I certainly don’t think so.
Does this mean that we’re dropping support for IE6? Not at the moment, we charge additionally if you really need IE6 support and if there’s absolutely nothing you can do but to cater them. But although we still have this service, we never recommend it to our clients as it is not worth it for the both of us. It’s not worth it to invest your money on a dying technology, and it’s not worth it for us to spend time developing for IE6, while we can push the boundaries further for you, if we focus on modern browsers.
So if you’re thinking to move your website to the future, the time starts now. Are you with us?
Some links for further reads:
As our form of participation to the start of the movement of various design and IT professionals to go against IE6 and stopping our support for it, we’ll be installing our own browser upgrade notice to websites that we make for clients who chose not to support IE6. The websites incorporating this will auto-detect the browser, and renders this page to visitors using IE6, providing them links to download Firefox, Safari, Opera, or IE7 if you must. In the long run, we hope that this effort would “force” people to upgrade their outdated browsers.
As a news update, as written in a recent article in Wired, even Microsoft supports the anti-IE6 movement. So there seems to be no more reason for users not to upgrade their browsers to the latest standards, and I think we’re closet to that point where we can simply ignore people who protested that websites don’t work in IE6.