Feature Roundups on Typogram — September Edition
Week 55 of Founding Typogram
Hi, I am Wenting. I quit my job at Adobe to build a startup, Typogram, a logo design and editing tool for startup founders. This is my weekly newsletter documenting my journey from the start on Aug 2nd, 2021 till the present.
The weather in New York took a really harsh turn over the past few days, loudly marking the start of October. As always, we share the progress and updates on our product Typogram from the previous month. Missed the previous updates? See June, July, and August.
September is filled with a good, “conquering” vibe. The two roadblocks I mentioned in “Road Blocks and Flowers” are both removed from the path forward! I dug myself out of the backend work — projects can be saved to the cloud now! I also found a solution to the “bug” that we found in a third-party library and unblocked Hua’s editable icon project!
Save Multiple Projects on the Cloud
An exciting update to Typogram is that projects can be saved to the cloud under user accounts. Up until now, our features were developed with a saving mechanism using the browser’s localStorage. However, saving projects to the cloud is also essential, and we can finally do that now! A notable feature we supported is to merge artboards created and stored locally before logging in with artboards fetched from the cloud after logging in; this way, no progress will be lost.
We reached out to every pre-order customer to talk to them about their branding needs, and these conversations are so helpful to us in making a better product. One of the first things we discovered is the need for multiple branding projects, contrary to what we originally presumed. It is a use case that we must support as some pre-order customers have already bought multiple licenses, \intended to use them for multiple brands. I can also imagine this feature to be helpful for other scenarios, like deciding between multiple brand names.
Take a look at the screencast showing loading different projects from the cloud. We store which step you are at with each project, and upon loading, the app automatically scroll to your current step so you can quickly get back to where you were at and continue designing your brand:
Overcoming Technical Challenges
We also overcame a big technical challenge. In the last few weeks, we ran into rendering issues with the editable icons. We thought it was a problem with the third-party library we used to render the variable font files — a font technology we used for the editable icons. Without fixing the issue, our editable icon project was at a halt — there was no point in spending more time developing icons that could not be properly rendered. We have to find a solution quickly to resume the editable icon project.
We decided to dive into the codebase of the third-party library in search of a solution. It was a major challenge at first — unfamiliar with the code, we had no idea what was going on between the lines. However, after some patience and help from the author of the library, the code started to make sense line by line. We dug deep and revealed some information that we configured in the variable font file was not properly interpreted by the library. We can change the library to interpret it better, or there was actually an easier way — write the information into the font file in the way the library was designed to interpret it.
It was a surprising turn that led us to the font creation software we used, and a simple change in the font script fixed the problem. The debugging process not only unblocked our icon project but also helped us get a better grasp on the third-party library we relied on and heightened our understanding of variable font technology in general.
Hear from You
I think choosing to rely on a third-party library takes a certain level of trust. The library I mentioned is very experimental, but I have known the maker through the “font world” for many years and had a positive experience contributing documentation to the library. I trust the maker and the quality of their work, and if I have any issues, I can reach out to them directly and get a response reliably. What is your strategy for working with third-party libraries?
❧
See you next week! If you have friends who are interested in founding startups, please consider sharing my newsletter with them!