13
9 Comments

Typeface Finder App Demo

Day 19 of 30 Days of Starting Up

On Day 16th’s newsletter, Choose Typefaces Based on Brand Personalities, I shared my process of tagging typefaces based on brand personalities. I built an internal tool using Retool to help me tag typefaces and then write tagging information into a database.

Retool is a low-code platform that requires coding to use, making the initial learning curve a little steep. Once I get the hang of it, I am yearning to make more apps with my newly acquired skills. Retool is created for internal tools, but there is no stop sign to making public apps with it. An idea came to me: making a web app to help users find typefaces based on brand personalities.

The first step is to list all brand personalities in our database. Hua and I spent days narrowing down personality adjectives to this final list:

brand_personality_list.gif

How the app work is simple: user select brand personalities that fit their company, the app shows a list of typefaces tagged with these brand personalities.

To demo the app, I will use the brand personalities of inverr, a no-code website builder created by Hieu Nguyen. Hieu is very kind to support us along our journey; he purchased our brand personality workshop kit and did the workshop for his company’s brand. These are the five adjectives that came out of his workshop: Affordable, Friendly, Modern, Secure, and Simple; I select them from the list in the left column, the middle column starts to get populated with typefaces shown in live specimen:

show_personality_typefaces.gif

The brand personality typefaces sometimes belong to bigger font families with many other weights and styles. It would be helpful for users to access these sibling fonts, so I build an additional feature: when users select a typeface in the middle column, the right column will show all family members of that selected typeface.

show_fonts.gif

All of our tagged typefaces have free-for-commercial-use licenses. Hua made sure of it by checking every typeface’s license; thanks, Hua, for the hard work! That means I can provide more app features like the download fonts button and web font embed code. These features are still under development, as well as refining the app. The last mile of the project is the most crucial; I am well-prepared to see it through! I will share more about this project in the newsletter.

Let me know what pain points you have when choosing typefaces or what other features I should add to this app. I can’t wait to hear your ideas.

  1. 2

    Hey Wenting, nice article (again). – I also read your latest one and they are always full of value.

    Building a web app from the type categorization you've introduced seems just like the logical next step. It's great that you've already done the "manual categorization work". – Always when I see categorized data like this I think of building an AI-classifier from it 🤓 And I think your use-case would be a perfect fit for an AI TBH. If done some research a while ago regarding low-code AI-tools (if you are interested, this is the link: https://twitter.com/dennis_zoma/status/1427525609912115204)

    I wish you good luck on the journey with your new product 👋

    1. 2

      Great list @dennis_zoma! AI is definitely something I am interested to incorporate, and your list makes it less scary! Thank you!

    2. 1

      Interesting content you have on Twitter. Followed you there.

      I am curious, I noticed you are building a Twitter app to share content. I wanted to know, have you gotten your app approved by Twitter. How has the approval process been?

      I am also building something in that space and I am just curious about other peoples experience now that Twitter seems to be locking down app development.

      1. 2

        Hey Prashant, glad you asked. The application went super smooth and quick :) Just describe what you plan to do, wait a few days, and they’ll reach out to you via email. And in certain cases you have to answer a few more questions. But nothing too complicated.

        1. 2

          Thanks for that. Good to know it is smooth. We will be applying in a day or two, lets see how it goes.

  2. 1

    Wentin!

    I remember reading your previous post and getting interested in your progress.

    To me, the licensing part seems to be a very important feature and it looks like it's going to prevent many "to-be-had" headaches.

    Best of luck in your endeavor!

    1. 3

      Thanks, @mkrunic! Great to hear that the license part is important to you, my cofounder @huashu spent lots of time on it, it is comforting to hear it was time well spent!

  3. 1

    nice one, wenting!

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 16 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments