New Skins, Design Gallery, Chinese New Year Holidays, and Free Shipping

[MK]

Singapore, January 29, 2006 — iStyles today announced the launch of a new range of trendy skins for all the iPod models. This new range includes work from psilocyber (the designer of hits such as the Absolute Hirst), and many other attractive designs. All new skin designs are available at http://www.istyles.com/products_new.php .

Chinese New Year Holidays and Free Shipping

Due to the Chinese New Year holidays and celebrations here in Singapore, our store will be closed for the rest of the week, and business will resume on 6 February 2006. All orders received during this period will only be processed after 6 February, but will enjoy free worldwide shipping if the cost is above $20.

Design Gallery

The design gallery has brought out the talents of many designers, who have come together to create artwork for the iPod. We talked to some of them and found that they are doing this as a hobby, and it's just the icing on the cake when they get paid for their work. Some of the designers get pretty good commissions as their designs are hot sellers, and the whole aim of the design competition is for the best designs to surface, to help us in our choice of what to manufacture.

The prizes we give each month are simply 'motivations' to bring out the best in the designers. These prizes are small in value compared to the commissions that some of the designers earn when their work gets sold on iStyles, but unfortunately, there are some individuals who do not realize this and have taken it upon themselves to vote their own designs to the top, rigging the competition, and simply spoiling the mood for everyone.

This is indeed unfortunate as these guys actually have talent, but we will have to either cleanup all the votes, or simply ban all these people. The cleanup operation will be carried out in the next week. This gallery is meant to be a fun place for designers to get together, to collect and showcase the talents of designers worldwide. It was never meant to be a self inflated power trip to the top.

[puneet]

Dear Mk,
i am really sorry if u fell that i am rateing for myself,actually i am studing in a design colledge and most of my friends knew that i have been designing for ipod as i really have to take out time from the hard colledge sechedule ,so i just asked them that whichever image they like they can rate it ,i understand that since they are my friends they will rate it high for me but didnt know that they will go in extremes,i have asked everyone not to rate for me ever so dont worry for the future rateing,honestly speaking i love to design ipod skins and till now i have design atleast 40 skins and i will keep doin it after my exams ,i will be really obliged if u can send me some feed back of my work unconditional of rateings so that will know that weather i am workin in the right direction or not . my mail adress is -puneetzzzz@yahoo.com sorry for the inconvinience thanking you ,
puneet

[MK]

Hi puneet, I think that some of your work shows promise, but it's just needs to be that little bit more special before we can select them for production. We are very strict with what we get printed because all these productions cost us money. We thus only select designs that will potentially sell well.

As a form of feedback for your designs - Try to create web images that use the cutlines for the templates. I believe that you're simply outputing the designs based on the print area within the templates, but it is necessary to follow the cutlines when creating the web image so that the output will more closely represent the iPod. For example, the screen area of your nano skins are too small and that's because they're following the print area. In addition, try to create designs that blend into the wheel area as well as it gives the product a more complete look.