Welcome to day three of the Crossroad build log! This series follows my journey of indie hacking a product from building to selling. If you missed day two, you could check it out here. I also uploaded today's Twitch stream to YouTube if you want to watch the replay.

Designing more blocks! ✏

Today we started where we left off last week, designing more blocks! I am slowly but surely getting faster in Figma, which I am thrilled with. With every hour I spend more in Figma, I am getting better at translating the design I have in my mind to an artboard.

Looking back at the design work today, I am pretty happy with how every block works together. They are lego blocks that you can stack on top of each other, so they have to look good together to make this product work.

Me and buttons... 😩

I don’t know what it is, but I am incapable of designing decent-looking buttons for some reason. I think by now, I have spent more time tweaking the button styles than on the actual blocks.

The buttons don’t look terrible, but they just aren’t looking professional just yet. The stupid thing is, I can’t lay my finger on the problem. When I feel the text is too big and shrink it down, the button feels too big. When I play around with colors and borders, it becomes more of an art deco project than a decent-looking button.

To try and overcome my dread of designing buttons, I will look at a couple of UI libraries and try to replicate those buttons in Figma. It’s probably just copying/creating more buttons before it becomes second nature.

Creating personas. 🧔

Well, sort of. I have created a page inside Figma where I have created two artboards (for now) labeled “video creator” and “blogger.” Via these artboards, I test if the blocks I have designed are sufficient for these types of users to create their link pages.

I am also thinking about converting these artboards into HTML templates to provide buyers of the templates with a couple of defaults, to get them up and running faster.

Not wanting to ship with any JavaScript. ❌

Now that I am a couple of days into designing this product, I am thinking more and more about the implementation. I am pretty confident in my “bring your own API” idea, and while thinking about how the user might implement their API, they probably will use some framework.

With this in mind, I am now doing my best to ship this template without any JavaScript, if possible. I don’t want users to have to port over any JavaScript while implementing the template into a Framework.

I was thinking about adding a slider to show multiple blog posts in a single row, but now I might have the build that with vanilla HTML and CSS via flexbox.

I don’t know why, but making these decisions fires me up. 🔥

No more streams/blogs this week! 👑

Yesterday I had a day off because it was Koninsdag (Kingsday, national holiday) in the Netherlands! I was out enjoying some music, dancing, cold beers, and some BBQ, all while being in the company of some of my favorite people on this planet.

I was planning on doing another stream today, but I have a pile of work waiting for me to get to, and I want to get most of it done to start May on the right foot.

Next week we’ll continue with and hopefully wrap up the first designs of all the components, after which we’ll get started with the next iteration to polish up primarily the spacings and make some changes here and there.

Thanks again for reading this build log. Have a great remainder of your week, and I’ll see you next week! 🚀

If you want to stay updated in the meantime, give me a follow on Twitter.

With love,

Twankrui