XStudio
Boomerang’s design-it-yourself studio, the one I made too big to finish
XStudio was meant to be Boomerang's customer-facing studio: a place where artists would open their own stores, and anyone could design a shirt or a mug in the browser and see a realistic preview of the finished product before ordering.
The design editor
Image coming soon
Boomerang printed for other businesses. XStudio was going to open that factory to everyone else: artists selling their own designs, and customers bringing their own ideas. The idea is older than the code: this studio is what started our partnership with Boomerang in the first place.
An artist uploads a design and opens a store. A customer picks a shirt or a mug, drags the design into place, and the preview shows the real product: the print following the folds of the fabric, wrapping around the curve of the mug. The order then goes to the factory to be printed.
I made it too big to finish. We wanted wrinkles on the shirts and curves on the mugs, and every extra bit of realism meant more image processing and more features, until it overwhelmed me. COVID and other things put it on hold for good. The preview engine and the catalog went straight into Boomerang. So did what it taught me: version one has to be small enough to finish.
A generated shirt mockup
Image coming soon
A mug mockup, curve and all
Image coming soon
It never launched. Its pieces run inside Boomerang.
The product catalog
Image coming soon
Under the hood
A Laravel API and a Nuxt editor with draggable layers; every preview rendered on the server through a headless Chrome page and stored per product variant; chunked uploads for large design files; 74 API routes.
Integrations
- Puppeteer
- S3 / DigitalOcean Spaces
- Docker / GHCR
- GitLab CI