✨ScreenBean✨ is a tool to add colorful backgrounds to screenshots. This idea came to me when browsing Dribbble. I've realized a lot of promo pictures have the same pattern:
- Rounded corners of the product
- Drop shadow around the product
- Background using the primary, accent or other complementary colors
- Sometimes additional complementary shapes in the background
Here is an example of the current Dribbble startpage and you can see what I mean.
💡 Motivation
I often have to pitch new websites or pages to colleagues at work. Since I wanna leave a good impression, I wanna spice up my screenshots to make them stand out more. Though whenever I tried to promote my website it never looked as good as the ones on Dribbble. Probably because I am not a designer -- but I have recognized that adding things like rounded corners make a huge difference.
After a while I wanted to automate this process. So on a boring Friday evening I wrote ScreenBean just for the fun of it.
📝 Technical Decisions
First and foremost I wanted to keep the app alive and "don't worry about it ever again". I don't have any interest in generating revenue with ScreenBean -- but I also don't wanna loose money. So I tried to implement everything client-side. For sure it would be the better technical decision to use a Serverless function to, for instance, generate the images. Though in my context I just didn't want to spend a dime.
👨💻 Tech Stack
At the heart of ScreenBeans implementation are two libraries from NPM:
- html-to-image: Generate images from DOM elements client-side
- node-vibrant: Extract prominent colors from an image
So with these two libraries all I had to do was essentially creating the images using normal HTML/CSS dynamically. Then I can just generate the *.png graphic using html-to-image. Thanks to node-vibrant I can take prominent colors of the image so it usually looks complementary.
I have used React to help me with building the different preview images, the upload mechanism and saving the images.
Since the application is client-side only I could just use free-tier of Netlify for my deployment.
I am a huge fan of TypeScript, though for this project I have decided not to use it. Since I don't need to handle a lot of data throughout the application there did not seem to be a huge benefit of using it.
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