Obvious Why?
So I was looking at design themes for llmgames.online, tried multiple themes of design compact shadcn like professional sites, very maximal many colour concoction but every thing felt weird not gamey, most importantly nothing was unique.
Then I was looking at some design inspiration from design sites, and I found the doodle goat https://x.com/pablostanley and his https://hilos.sh/. instantly felt unique felt cool, that made me explore the doodle direction.
I know I could build some random borders and buttons and make them hand-drawn or doodly, But I wanted a good native doodle kind of font. I browsed all the open, free doodle fonts but they were all professional looking font disguised as a doodle font and nothing felt like native truly hand drawn or hand-written.
And I found https://doodlefonts.app/
Wow. This is what I was exactly looking for.
- A drawing canvas to hand draw a font.
- Very good interactive UI, making it very straight forward.
- Multiple Brushes!!!
- Multiple font weights?? (auto weights if you made it for a variant)!!!
- Fully Client side.
This is what we call a suit-case scenario.
Immediate next step. Start drawing. I was enjoying the process so much, and got involved in it and it took me 2 hours for just the lower-case and higher-case fonts. I had a realisation, I was trying to make it so perfect and professional that I lost the plot of it being goofy. This is what a good user-experience should feel like. I was so immersed I totally forgot why I was here in the first place.
I was sleepy so I decided to speedrun it
uhm . I was not happy with the polished version, and I was sleepy. So I decided to set a timer for 5 minutes, so that I don't goof around polishing the font and perfect it pixel by pixel.
I started the drawing process and it just made sense, it was so goofy, so imperfect I loved it. It would have been so good to look at if I recorded it. I remember feeling the dopamine, may be because it is exactly what I wanted? or was I just happy that I could get to sleep. Me knowing me, it was probably the sleep. sob
I was so elated and was on Cloud 9. I did not realise the site was pay-gated(3$) to export a drawn font. I was back on the ground again.
Was I going to pay 3$ for a font, that took me 5 minutes to make and it was as imperfect I wanted it to be. Any other day, I would have done it, and get it done with.
Allegedly, since the whole app was client-sided, It was pretty obvious to me that I could download it without getting paywalled. I allegedly. asked codex to use computer-use and run some javascript in the browser, and get this done. And allegedly it did it, asked it to prototype llmgames.online using it.
After all the pursuit the design direction was perfect. I explicitly having a very good sleep that day.
[Allegedly] I slop-forked doodlefonts.app for you
Waking up the next day, I [allegedly] slop-forked doodlefonts.app to handwritten.aakashreddy.com. It as easy since 100% of the product was client sided, it was easy to test and pretty straight forward.
If you want to make something like this, and you could afford, please pay the 3$, the idea on doodlefonts.app was so original and one of the best UX, in recent times.