My mom's a textile designer, contracting with large companies, but somehow not getting to use any fancy tools they. She says design software existd, but it's pretty expensive.
At the core, she's making plaids - a black-and-white pattern (2d grid) corresponding to vertical and horizontal threads being above one another, and color schemes (2 arrays) for the vertical / horizontal strings (in most cases, does not match the size of the grid).
So she made her own monstrocity of a pipeline, with Photoshop, Plaid Maker (a rather old web app, https://www.plaidmaker.com/), screenshots, Excel (for designing stuff - yes!), and an old Soviet-era MS-DOS designer program (in Russian, of course).
Throughout uni, I was jokingly saying I'd build a better Plaid Maker for her, even if the web is not my area of work. After The Great Resignation I figured, why not?
Note: not for mobile, but should work on a tablet.
Privacy: no analytics are used, but it does rely on Google Firebase for authentication and auto-saving of your designs. Log in to keep them permanently; otherwise, they're saved on an anonymous account, cleared up once a week or so
I love this. I don't know much about plaids but I really really really enjoy hearing stories of people replacing DIY, hacky, inefficient or simply long and painful pipelines and workflows with custom well designed software.
It's always nice to hear how much it helped people and removed the problems the previous version had - bonus points if it's for a small business or a single person rather than some giant enterprise org. I hope one day to actually be able to produce software that can benefit people that way. All I seem to do recently is write software that gets killed off because politics all while dealing with poor quality code from other teams and it's really demoralising.
I would love to know if anyone has a site or something where these stories are documented!
My mom's a textile designer, contracting with large companies, but somehow not getting to use any fancy tools they. She says design software existd, but it's pretty expensive.
At the core, she's making plaids - a black-and-white pattern (2d grid) corresponding to vertical and horizontal threads being above one another, and color schemes (2 arrays) for the vertical / horizontal strings (in most cases, does not match the size of the grid).
So she made her own monstrocity of a pipeline, with Photoshop, Plaid Maker (a rather old web app, https://www.plaidmaker.com/), screenshots, Excel (for designing stuff - yes!), and an old Soviet-era MS-DOS designer program (in Russian, of course).
Throughout uni, I was jokingly saying I'd build a better Plaid Maker for her, even if the web is not my area of work. After The Great Resignation I figured, why not?
Lots and lots of back-and-forth later, here's the outcome: https://plaid-designer.vercel.app/
Note: not for mobile, but should work on a tablet. Privacy: no analytics are used, but it does rely on Google Firebase for authentication and auto-saving of your designs. Log in to keep them permanently; otherwise, they're saved on an anonymous account, cleared up once a week or so