| Dec. 4th, 2007 @ 08:08 am Pia's Opinions are Pia's Opinions. |
|---|
pia was going to retype some suggestions she made on someone's outfit, but after some thought and an attack of lazy girl mood, she's decided not to do that, but to do another more general thing instead.
On Silk Caravanserai, pia only reviews things she really likes. she's not friends with any of the designers she reviews and at the moment, she gets only a few review copies. pia shops, see things that are great and blogs about them. That's it. To do negative reviews of stuff would be exhausting. pia could do 10 negative reviews for every positive review and still be only scratching the surface of the crap that's out there. Most of the crappy clothes suffer from the same problems over and over again. The reason that there are top designers and good designers and all the rest of them shoveling out, well, crap, is the top designers and the good designers learn from their mistakes, learn how to apply artistry to the unique demands of SL and make things that delight the eye. Some things can't be learned by experimentation, like good design. Other things, like how to make beautiful prims, requires a lot of hands-on experience.
But the things that pia sees over and over again, that she can't believe that new would be designers keep doing, are these. Don't they go out and study the market and learn from other people's mistakes before they start?
Bad Textures-- poorly scaled, not very detailed, or pre-made texture in a box textures slapped on with no adjustment or thought.
Bad Edges-- cartoony edges with sharp magic marker effect around every edge, or ragged alpha making the edges a nasty mess, or relying on the system clothing edges to make your edge.
Clunky Prims-- not taking into consideration scale, textures badly applied, using the wrong base shape for the prim and ending up with a poor final shape. Example: don't use perfectly round cylinder slices for belts. Not even avatar bodies are perfectly round!
Why does pia have a right to an opinion on this stuff, since she isn't a designer herself? Well, pia could say that she's been making real clothes and costumes for years and has awards for such and that would be true. pia's studied clothing and costume design and other design for years and years. But that's not why she has a right to an opinion. She has a right to an opinion because she's a consumer who buys stuff. Hoity toity design experts are all well and good, but it's *people* who buy stuff. And people, regular people who've never turned a french seam in their lives in world or IRL, notice the bad textures and awkward prims and slipshod work. They deserve to know that there is beautiful, well made stuff out there and they don't have to buy crap because there's nothing else.
This last is especially true in the fantasy/silks market. Everybody and their puppy dog is out there throwing together some bottlecaps on strings and a sheet or two of floppy fabric on a clunky prim belt and calls it "silks", or sticking a recycled fur texture on some system clothes and calling it "panther". Don't buy that crap. Eventually, if we all don't buy that crap, it will evaporate. The talented designers who take pride in their work and who constantly push the envelope of what can be done in Second Life deserve our business. |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
pia_qi's journal
amused
thoughtful
annoyed
melancholy
bouncy