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Uncommon - Custom design your own iPhone case

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Re: Uncommon - Custom design your own iPhone case

#2
Matt King (op), myself, and the rest of our team at Instrument have been building out the site and backend infrastructure for this manufacturing process for the past five months.

It's been one heck of a ride...we're web guys and don't exactly have a lot of experience in building factories or making, um, real physical objects.

The frontend is powered by Interface (http://www.getinterface.com), with the backend order fulfillment / manufacturing infrastructure built in Rails running on top of Ruby 1.9 and Unicorn, all sitting behind Nginx. All asset processing on the backend is done using GraphicsMagick using a modded mini_magick, which is way faster and more efficient than ImageMagick.

We'd love to hear your feedback, thoughts, and criticisms!

Re: Uncommon - Custom design your own iPhone case

#3
post #2

Matt King (op), myself, and the rest of our team at Instrument have been building out the site and backend infrastructure for this manufacturing process for the past five months. It's been one heck of a ride...we're web guys and don't exactly have a lot of experience in building factories or making, um, real physical objects. The frontend is powered by Interface ( http://www.getinterface.com ), with the backend order…

Love it. Awesome idea and prior to seeing this I hadn't even considered getting a case for my iPhone.

Very cool, great work.

Re: Uncommon - Custom design your own iPhone case

#5
post #2

Matt King (op), myself, and the rest of our team at Instrument have been building out the site and backend infrastructure for this manufacturing process for the past five months. It's been one heck of a ride...we're web guys and don't exactly have a lot of experience in building factories or making, um, real physical objects. The frontend is powered by Interface ( http://www.getinterface.com ), with the backend order…

I'd be interested in hearing more about how you went from idea to production, finding a manufacturer, etc. I think this is a big stumbling point for a lot of people in the same position as you were — interested in manufacturing a physical product, but only familiar with the web.

Re: Uncommon - Custom design your own iPhone case

#6
post #2

Matt King (op), myself, and the rest of our team at Instrument have been building out the site and backend infrastructure for this manufacturing process for the past five months. It's been one heck of a ride...we're web guys and don't exactly have a lot of experience in building factories or making, um, real physical objects. The frontend is powered by Interface ( http://www.getinterface.com ), with the backend order…

Is there a picture of a real case in someone's hand? I want to see what they actually look like, but all I see are shiny renderings.

They look really good though.

Re: Uncommon - Custom design your own iPhone case

#7
post #2

Matt King (op), myself, and the rest of our team at Instrument have been building out the site and backend infrastructure for this manufacturing process for the past five months. It's been one heck of a ride...we're web guys and don't exactly have a lot of experience in building factories or making, um, real physical objects. The frontend is powered by Interface ( http://www.getinterface.com ), with the backend order…

Nice site! Cool to see you can grab an independent artist's design, or upload your own!

Re: Uncommon - Custom design your own iPhone case

#8
post #2

Matt King (op), myself, and the rest of our team at Instrument have been building out the site and backend infrastructure for this manufacturing process for the past five months. It's been one heck of a ride...we're web guys and don't exactly have a lot of experience in building factories or making, um, real physical objects. The frontend is powered by Interface ( http://www.getinterface.com ), with the backend order…

Is there a picture of a real case in someone's hand? I want to see what they actually look like, but all I see are shiny renderings. They look really good though.

Of course! Sorry for all the renders; they look nice, but it's good to see the real thing.

Here are some of the cases coming off the line now: http://u.phoreo.com/pa.JPG

And here is a hand shot (the original art was a bit messy; the printing is correct): http://u.phoreo.com/en.JPG

Re: Uncommon - Custom design your own iPhone case

#9
post #2

Matt King (op), myself, and the rest of our team at Instrument have been building out the site and backend infrastructure for this manufacturing process for the past five months. It's been one heck of a ride...we're web guys and don't exactly have a lot of experience in building factories or making, um, real physical objects. The frontend is powered by Interface ( http://www.getinterface.com ), with the backend order…

One of the more interesting aspects of the site was image processing. Since the print process requires high-res images, we have to deal with fairly large images (anywhere from 5-20mb). Using image caching from Interface and a custom nginx module, we sped up image resizing and caching considerably for this site.
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