Update 2: Karina’s name has been fixed. Also, she gave approximately L$7,000 to Zyrra. Zyrra says she will be putting it to good use — probably on money trees for newbies.
Update: Zyrra tells me that the hairs have been removed from the store and the creator admitted she stole the textures. Also, I hope Antonia doesn’t take this too hard on herself. Mistakes happen.
Earlier this afternoon, there was a post on PXP highlighting a new hair creator with several interesting and inexpensive hairstyles. It later turned out that the textures the creator Karina Popinjay used in these hairs were stolen from the super talented Panache duo Zyrra Falcone and HoseQueen McLean.
If you purchased any hair from Karina Popinjay or the Gin ‘n’ Juice store, it’s worth a try to get your money back by contacting the creator.
It’s a sad situation all around — sad for Panache because having your things stolen is such a blow — and they’ve already had this happen before, sad for the people who purchased any of the hairs, because now they have no guaranteed way to get their money back, and sad for the designer too — she had several really interesting looking hair designs — she didn’t rip off those prim for prim like some other cases that have recently surfaced.
A larger question to me is “Why?” Why steal Panache’s hair textures when full perm hair textures are available for sale? Clearly, this designer had some talent — at least looking at the ads I saw I was pretty interested in shopping there — so why go and screw that up? It just doesn’t make any sense that you’d sling prims around — create your own original work, and then steal someone else’s textures to sell it.
At this point, I have decided not to feature any new hair creators until I can personally see and verify that the textures that are used have not been stolen from some other source. I’m sorry to resort to such a drastic step, but I feel like I owe it to my readers, and especially the talented content creators who work so hard to keep us in style, not to reward theives.
When I saw these new halters from Iki show up on Nephilaine Protagonist’s blog I was so excited. Stylistically, visually, these halters carry all of the hallmarks of the other Iki casuals: unpretentious, simple, but extravagantly lavished with technical attention, detail and construction expertise.
The fabric textures that were chosen, the color saturation, the highlighting, shadowing and wrinkling are just superbly executed. My favorite from the four new styles are the “shiny embroidered” set. I totally love the way that the embroidery pattern runs all way across the entire garment, from front to back, along the neckline, then the bust. It’s wonderfully understated but definitely feminine and pretty.
Shop for these at the Iki store in Plush Gamma.
Seen in world: Yes
Review copy: No
Friends list: No
(P.S. Get well soon, Torrid!)
Miriel Enfield’s Fairy Tale release is a medieval inspired gown and circlet. While I really like the gown — all hand drawn, which makes the tapestry embroidery all the more impressive — the item which has kept me in a state of hyper detailed shock is the incredible circlets that accessorize this outfit so successfully. The gown comes with a color matching circlet included, but you can buy discounted fatpacks of all the circlets which come in both gold and silver. (Gold shown.)
Just look at all of the tasty prim details Miriel’s included — it’s certainly enough to make any avatar feel like a princess, if only for a day. You might not ever need to be rescued from a dragon, but if the situation arises… you’ll at least know what to wear for the occasion. Find it at Miriel’s store in Nusambaruku.
Seen in world: Yes
Review copy: Yes
Friends list: No
Nick Shaftoe, the Second Man, created a site dubbed Classifieds.
If you’re a designer who’d like a low maintenance, low hassle way to announce new products and you don’t want to get a blog at Blogger, maybe this is for you.
Alaska Metropolitan has written several more design guidelines for merchandise ads, including some great examples of what not to do — like the ad shown left. (Auugh! My eyes. My eyes!)
Where Kala Bijoux’s post was a little more off-the-cuff, Alaska’s put a lot of thought and careful consideration into her post. There’s a lot of good tips and tricks here — too many to summarize easily — but they all focus around the thesis that bad ads are bad business.
Her post and suggestions are definitely worth 10 minutes of your time.
Ginny Talamasca knocked my virtual socks off last night when she dropped the shimmery, satiny, and very sexy Starlet gown on me last night.
I put it on, did a RL version of the :O expression, and then basically everyone who was standing around in world with me asked, “Who made that???!” Dazzle Haute Couture, of course. But it wasn’t like Ginny’s been lollygagging around, taking a break after painting eleventy billion new makeups for her line of skins. No there’s three more outfits too — including a set of 6 empire waisted baby dolls for just L$20. A special customer “thank you.” Well, speaking as a big fan of Dazzle, Ginny, you are so welcome. Check out all of the newness here on the Dazzle blog, or in world at Dazzle.
Seen in world: Yes
Review copy: Yes
Friends list: Yes
Lisa Galarneau writing at Terra Nova, a blog that follows MMOs from a research/academic perspective has been thinking about female gamer’s attitudes toward their avatars. The title of her blog post is the same one I used here — just because it tickled me. She adds the aside, “I swear, I need this bumper sticker.” Lots of us do (especially Sol Columbia!!)
Lisa continues,
It seems like just about every time I get together with female gamer friends, the topic of conversation inevitably (and much to my chagrin) turns to the cuteness of avatars and our frustration with the limited options we are usually given to control their attractiveness. I had a long, involved ranting session the other night, for instance, with another WoW gamer about how frustrating it is to play the Horde, mainly because the avatar customization options are limited to a few (arguably) unattractive races. We talked about how we both have female undead mages, whom we spent quite a bit of time trying to make as cute as possible, yet are still frustratingly unattractive. And how it disturbs us a bit that we care all that much, closet-inhabiting fashionistas though we might be.
But I’m gonna confess. I do care. An unattractive avatar is so disruptive to my gameplay that I will stop playing if I can’t do something about it…
And she proceeds to discuss in detail some of the other theories about why women, in particular, seem to care a lot about playing attractive-to-her avatars. She concludes her post like this:
I left several Guild Wars guilds immediately after joining because they had badly designed guild tabards that didn’t match my outfits. That officially makes me shallow, doesn’t it?
Not in my opinion. One thing that constantly fascinates me about Second Life is just how much customization is possible — how people choose to represent themselves to others within that huge universe of possibilities is very interesting to me. Especially because I love the diversity of possibilities, not just in the realm of fashion, but also time and place. Pure Victoriana? Steampunk? Cyberpunk? 20s gangster moll? Second Life can cater to that. That’s a really remarkable thing, in my opinion.
Ms. Galarneau is looking for comments from female gamers — and I suspect I have more than a few among my readership. So that’s one reason for the link here, but also I think it’s just an interesting topic — definitely in the realm of fashion and style — because what is fashion if not some kind of fundamental form of self-expression?
I found a broader Second Life tie in at The Second Skin documentary blog, which is a documentary about how different people adapt, play, and use online worlds. Second Life features fairly prominently (I gather) since one of the “protagonists” of the film is in world DJ Nexeus Fatale. Film maker Victor Pineiro adds his own thoughts on this topic — and he’s also looking for some more subjects for his movie. Maybe you’re one of them? Have a look and find out.
Kala Bijoux of Material Squirrel posted a set of graphic design guidelines for people creating merchandise ads in Second Life while waiting for the 1.12 update to finish. Here’s a sampler of the mistakes she covers:
- Images from SL that aren’t scaled correctly
- Too much going on in the ad
- Text (in the ad itself and the announcement post)
- Brand Image (i.e., bad ads give a bad impression on your business)
- Following the KISS principle
- Having a focal point for your ad
A full read of her post is highly recommended.
I wanted to add (ha ha) that as someone who looks at merchandise ads in the forums (and all over teh Intarweb) quite frequently, unattractive or amateurish ads make it far less likely to spark interest on my part (and likely on many other potential customers’ parts) for further review or consideration of that product.
I’m a little surprised that there isn’t more of a robust ad agency market in Second Life. I know that a lot of clothing content creators are also RL graphic artists (which minimizes the need to outsource that work) but clearly that kind of expertise would be valuable in some cases, especially for non clothing items.
Another week, another release. I must admit that I’m actually looking forward to this one, despite the inevitable hiccups, because of the significantly improved in world group functionality. (Seriously, that last link is “Everything you ever wanted to know about groups post 1.12 release.”)
I can now — finally — belong to up to 25 groups, and each group can have up to 10 user defined roles with abilities for each role controlled with very fine granularity. I am also really looking forward to designer notification groups being able to send out a notecard with embedded texture “ads” for the new items as part of the notification.
Posted by admin | Posted in Linden Lab | Posted on 23-08-2006
Wanda Rich is on indefinite design hiatus, but she’s been building a new online fashion magazine site called Electric Venus. Electric Venus aims to offer longer, less “new release” type coverage and more in depth news, commentary and reviews. It also features a lot of cool fashion/content creation tips and how to articles, like how to navigate Second Life’s often confusing permissions system, and creating transparency layers that work well in Second Life.
Additionally, if you’re a designer and you’d like a forum to announce new products, Wanda will give you posting permissions on her blog. Just contact her to set something up.
Good luck with the new venture, Wanda!
A chance encounter early Monday morning let me see these beautiful shoes in world before the ad was shot for them. I’m talking about Kimberly Casanova’s Ladybug shoes.
I was taking a look around Garbage Prototype’s brand new store (see the all the new denim at Garbage’s store — it looks like Kimberly’s wearing a pair of Garbage’s excellent beach combers in the ad; she’s definitely wearing Garbage’s new favorite hair design) and Camie Cooper and Kimberly also stopped by to take a look around.
I was very near “keyboard face” then, or I would’ve stuck around a bit more. Kimberly’s Ladybugs are totally versatile because they’re scripted with tons of different color and texture options. Pick a color for the straps, pick a color for the base and pick a color for the heel — fantastic. They are perfect shoes for so many casual situations — and they lend themselves to complimenting so many different casual looks from denim to dresses. You can find them at KCD in Naedam.
I should have a post up about Garbage’s new store just as soon as I can get some photos of the cool new stuff.
Seen in world: Yes (still on my avie’s feet!)
Review copy: Yes
Friends list: No
Roslin Petion (a Second Style staff writer) writes on her blog:
Skins are a lot of work. A lot. We’ve been working really hard on creating a skin that improves upon our weak points while still retaining the character that our customers love and say sets us apart. I’m really looking forward to sharing more in the coming weeks as the launch time for Tete Deux draws near.
That time is almost here. Last night Roslin slipped me a promo pack containing 4 skin tones and a selection of the initial 16 makeup sets that she’s created. From the beginning, Roslin has been primarily working on the makeup details and CJ Carnot (full disclosure: CJ has done some scripting projects for Second Style) has been working on the skin tone, the shading and all of the fine details (like hand drawing 50 individual eyebrow hairs. Amusing side note: Roslin said to me in IM last night, “You know CJ hand painted each of those eyebrow hairs. Surprising?” I replied, “No. We are talking about CJ here. Crazy boy!” Like most skinners, CJ is a total perfectionist.)
Like the original TAP skins, these are still 100% hand drawn. My very favorite makeup series is called “Enigma.” Enigma is a blend of somewhat muted lip colors with subtle, but strikingly well blended eye makeups. Probably my very favorite is Enigma 3, followed by Enigma 4. (If you’re going to demo, try those first!) Second, a lot of the body shading has been totally re done from scratch. One of the things that I whined about to Roslin in the past was that TAP skins made my boobehs a little too washed out. So periodically during the months long redesign Roslin would fwing over snapshots of her on a modelling stand in a bikini. “Good enough yet?” she’d ask with a grin. Yes! I am so happy to see the cleavage enhancement. I also really like the shading work along the shoulder blades on the back of the skin. Wearing those cut-down-to-there backless gowns always looks a lot better if you’ve got some great shoulder blades to help frame all that sultry skin on display. Finally, I think the lip shape is much improved from the originals. The TAP2 skins feature really lush, plump lips and Roslin’s beautifully accented that with her makeup palette.
Seen in world: Yes
Review copy: Yes
Friends list: Yes (Roslin is also a staff writer for Second Style)
