Scotweb's new online Tartan Designer is now live!

[Nick Fiddes]

Firstly, huge thanks to those of you who have been playing around in, and providing feedback on, our first (mostly) working version of our online Tartan Design facility. In the intervening months, we've made lots of improvements, many in response to your ideas and responses. In particular I'd like to individually thank Rex, for several very helpful suggestions which have led to lots of work(!) but we think a better result.

The invitation-only password restrictions have now been removed, so anyone can use it. You still need to be logged-in to save a design, or see your own saved designs, of course. But it's totally free to use, until of course you choose to have your design woven.

There are lots of new tricks that should make designing tartans more intuitive and easier. For example, you can drag colours into any position in the threadcount sequence... and change all instances of any colour by dragging onto its swatch... and hover over the preview to identify which thread to adjust... oh, and just find out for yourself. :-)

We're also delighted to be providing a quite extraordinarily wonderful expert review panel, for anyone wishing to commission a Critique. In addition to Brian Wilton (Director of the Scottish Tartans Authority) for historical expertise, we now have on board the head designer for House of Edgar (the world's largest producers of traditional kilting selvedge tartans) for weaving expertise... and also, I'm delighted to say, X-Marks' own Barb Tewksbury for her kiltmaking expertise. So for anyone wanting to create their own new tartan design for serious use, we now offer the facility to have full creative control over its development, in the confidence of having it professionally appraised and perhaps tweaked towards perfection... for a fraction of the professional design fees that you'd previously have paid without enjoying such direct personal involvement. We think this has to be a good thing.

We hope the new layout and interface is considerably clearer too. There's a few details still to finish (such as the Help tools, that aren't yet fully implemented). But it should mostly be working otherwise.

You're the first people to see it, and we won't be announcing it fully quite yet... until we're 100% sure it's all working robustly. Hope you enjoy it. And as usual, anything that is broken or confusing... please let me know!!

Check it out at: http://www.scotweb.co.uk/tartandesign/

Nick