This is Sangie, and she’s wearing my “Overthinking and also hungry”.
She posted another photo of this shirt on her Instagram and wrote about losing hair. It’s scary how many young people have cancer.
This design is part of my philosophical cat collection.
As a side note, I’ve never met a stranger wearing any of my designs. I wonder when it will happen.
When Threadless adds new products everyone who has an artist shop should go through their designs and enable them on new products and colors. It’s what I do regularly.
Threadless recently added Women’s Scoop-Neck Regular t-shirts which they wrote about. It also looks like there’s a new kind of hoodie: Classic Fleece. I don’t see them mention it anywhere so maybe it’s not yet available in all artist shops. I remember that when Threadless introduced face masks there were not available in my store at first so maybe they haven’t added Classic Fleece to every shop yet? I don’t know, but it’s probably a matter of days.
The easiest way to enable new products on all your designs is to go to your Shop Dashboard, and then in the Artist Shop section hover over Products and choose which products you want to edit. You will see a list of all your designs and just have to choose colors for each:
I mentioned before that I manage a few websites including the one you are currently on, which is my personal blog, and manichyena.com, which is about games that my brother and I create together.
I don’t know much about web development and I don’t plan to do it professionally. But I want to know enough to be able to create good-looking simple websites when I need to. As everyone nowadays, I learn either by googling problems or stumbling on useful content. I don’t even remember how I found out about Landing Page Hot Tips by Rob Hope. It’s a series of 100 concise tips on how to improve a website. They arrive in your inbox every day for 100 days straight. I am at day 94. I think most of them were useful and what I really liked were examples of beautiful websites that were often included with the tips.
I can’t in good conscience recommend subscribing, though. I learned useful things — that’s good. But I’ve found out I don’t like the format. Yes, the tips were easily digestible, written in a few shorts paragraphs. However, receiving an email every day tired me out, and I am looking forward to the last one so that I can finally stop receiving them. I don’t think I will ever again subscribe to a similar course or series of tips. I am trying to limit the number of newsletters, and emails in general, that I receive.
If you don’t mind receiving emails every day, then subscribe here if you want.
Even after all these years as a designer it still brightens my day when I see one of my designs featured on the Threadless home page:
It’s my Black Sands design that I made recently:
I also always check other artists in Discover More section to get inspired and see what others are working on.
I hired a web developer on Fiverr to migrate my website. It was a disaster.
If you read my blog then you know that my brother and I make games. I maintain a website about them and about our little studio: manichyena.com. It’s hosted on Squarespace and I’ve wanted to migrate it to WordPress but I was so busy that I’ve been putting it off. Three weeks ago I finally hired someone on Fiverr to do the migration. From the start, it was a disaster — instead of saving time, I wasted more time.
Here’s the story of how it all went down. I found someone who had a good rating and I read all his reviews, seemed legit. I contacted him, he accepted the job. We agreed on payment — $70, and he said he needed 7 days to do the migration.
After 6 days, meaning a day before the deadline, he marked the migration as done and ready for review. So I checked the migrated website. It’s difficult to even describe what a mess it was. I didn’t know how to start explaining to him everything that was wrong or missing. It took me 2 hours to take 38 screenshots and describe all the issues. Some of those issues were: a strange white bar at the top of the pages, a lot of formatting issues, texts that were copied from the original website were not copied in their entirety, stretched images that looked weird, links and buttons not working or in wrong places, 3 pages were not migrated at all (out of 11).
For example, this is how a newsletter sign up section should have looked:
And this is how it looked when he migrated it:
Not only was the image cut from the top and bottom but most importantly the input box and the button needed to be centered. He kept insisting that it looked right on his computer screen. I told him it needed to look good on all computer screens. I don’t think he understood me because he offered to prove to me that it looked right by letting me connect to his computer and see his screen.
There were many issues like the one above. I wasted so much time writing to him about all those problems. I could have just made the migration myself in that time. After another week of him working on it, the website still looked bad but he kept saying that everything was fixed. I canceled the order.
He told me that I wasted his time and he was going to report me to the Fiverr support team. And that was that.
I think I will migrate manichyena.com by myself instead of trying to find someone else. But I am not completely discouraged. Next time I will hire someone on Fiverr Pro instead of the normal Fiverr. I should have done that from the start but all the developers in the Fiverr Pro section had queues of orders already and the developer that I hired had really good reviews. Now I know I should have hired a professional even if it meant waiting a few weeks.
There’s a game, Undertale, where you play as a human who falls underground into the world of monsters. My favorite thing about the game is that it gently — every few minutes — encourages you to be determined.
This past week my brother and I worked on a bug with gamepads in one of our games. That took a lot of time, we spent most days reading on possible issues and trying different solutions. It was difficult to feel motivated when we weren’t seeing any progress. And it wasn’t even our bug but a bug in the game engine that we were building our game in. So we weren’t looking so much for a solution as for a walkaround. We kept at it and now it’s fixed.
I suspect that this kind of attitude is what made it possible for me to have a successful store on Threadless. I know how it is in the beginning: you submit your designs and not sell anything. It is discouraging. I know many people give up. I wish they knew that if only they kept drawing they too could have a profitable store.
I’ve been thinking, maybe every now and then we all could use a reminder to stay determined.
Threadless sent me the following photo:
It’s Daniel Nguyen, you can view his Instagram profile. He is wearing my Space Painted design, I think it suits him 🙂
This is one more reason why it’s great for designers like me to work with Threadless. Every now and then they run various campaigns to support artists. Sometimes they double artists’ earnings, they also find opportunities to sell our designs in retail stores or other online stores. This time they teamed up with creators and influencers to show off our designs as part of the Threadless Spring Style Refresh campaign.
Space Painted is of course available on Threadless like all my designs:
We spent another day fixing the gamepad issue in Summer Paws. Making games is awesome, but sometimes hunting down bugs takes a lot of time. And the bug that we are currently trying to fix is not even a bug in our code — it’s most likely an issue in the Unity engine.
I haven’t had time to draw anything new, but here’s a sketch that my brother and I made in a scratch book. It’s a sort of sketchbook that has pages coated in black paint, and you draw by scratching away the paint with a pen and revealing a holographic paint under it.
We got this from my mom for Christmas. Every drawing so far is created by both my brother and me. We took turns drawing the image above: he drew the guy sitting on the log, I drew the dog, he drew the bike, I drew the helmet and the backpack, and so on. This is great fun. And the silver paint that is underneath the black paint really shines as you see in the photo.
I found a similar sketchbook on Amazon.
My brother and I spent another day trying to solve the issue with gamepads in Unity. To recap: if you start the game and plug in your gamepad while the Unity splash screen is displayed, the game will not recognize that a gamepad is connected.
We reported it as a bug to Unity but so far they haven’t approved the report. Even if they approve it, they might not fix it as there are plenty of more serious bugs reported. And even if they planned to fix it, it might take weeks before there’s a patch. The last release of Unity Input System was over two months ago, and it was just a preview version, meaning it’s most likely not ready to be used in final products.
We can’t wait for the fix, we need to solve it in Summer Paws somehow. It looks like we will use Rewired to handle gamepad input but in order to do that we need to do a few things:
Edit (June 6th, 2021) Rewired was easier to use than expected. Unity hasn’t fixed the bug yet, but at least they are tracking it now: [Input System] Gamepad is not recognized when it is connected during splash screen
Three days ago I wrote that our Summer Paws game got rated by ESRB and it’s suitable for all players. We need an ESRB rating in order to receive a certification to have our game published on one of the platforms.
But just a day later we got a report that there’s a bug in Summer Paws.
The bug is reproducible in the following steps:
Somehow connecting a gamepad when a game is starting causes Unity to not recognize that a device gets connected. The player needs to disconnect their gamepad and connect it again for it to start working. But we can’t force a user to have to do that, we need to fix this.
My brother and I have been trying to solve this issue for the past two days. No success so far.
It might be a bug in Unity, we will report it. But we would still like to find a way to solve it on our end somehow. We have been testing Rewired which is a third-party tool for managing input in Unity but it’s too early to say if it solves the issue.