Mikons - Product Review

• Interested in creating your own designs for logos or for a personalized T-Shirt?
• Are you a person who has some good ideas for graphic designs and would like to sell them online?
• Are you looking for an easy and intuitive way to create logos, icons for your blog, website etc?

Then you should check out mikons. Here is their side of what is mikons for.

I was able to quickly and intuitively create this simple design (within 3 minutes).

Observations:

• Very intuitive user interface
• Flexible feature set
• User experience (playing with the features) very close to the feel of working with an offline application like paint or photoshop.
• It has got many design categories in the form of people, cartoons, buildings etc (more than 25 of them) and each category has a lot of black and white sample options.

Now, this is where it excels over other products which are into creating pictures, logos etc. Each such symbol or a drawing can be manipulated by moving the dots around,to achieve greater precision. For example, you can take a rabbit and just enlarge its ears and create something whacky! Well, you can just about do anything with the image manipulation tools!You can then save it under your profile.

They also have a products section where you can sell your designs (by default your designs will be up for sale within mikons). You can also buy designs created by other users and have them printed on T-Shirts, wooden boards or stickers (just these three options for now).

It is an online product and the speed is bound to be slow depending on the bandwidth connection you have. I am using shared 512 Kbps connection and the experience was really good barring a few problems as listed below.

Problems I faced:

• Around 3 to 4 times, I used certain features and the screen just froze. I did not know what to do. Even repeated undos’ (there is an undo button) or random combination of keys didn’t seem to do (i mean undo) the job.
• Then tried to click ‘new’ to start a new project. Although it asked if I want to save and proceed, clicking ‘yes’ again went into a freeze mode.
• Finally, I had to resort to a F5 to do the job for me.

Suggestions:

• Need to fix the freeze problem and make the design throw tangible errors or instant prompts for user to make changes accordingly.
• Facility to import user designs from external sources could add to the library but this depends on the copyright rules and also how the mikons machine adds control points within each design imported or added.
• Add more products like caps, bandanas, body art stickers, ties etc that users can customize with their design and buy.
• Option to embed into blogs might be good and then the visitors can be directed back to buy (if they want to) at mikons site.
• Need more social bookmark features.

Summary

I just loved it. It is totally cool. Plus, checkout the stuff other users have done. It shows to you how creative people can get if given the flexibility and features to manipulate and finesse the existing basic designs.

This is a good way to create customized gifts. While there are many such product sites, being able to customize the design and really change them to closely match your preference adds the much needed personal touch to it.

Tags: create icons, Fun, mikons, personalize gifts