Welcome to day eleven of the Crossroad build journey! This series follows my journey of indie hacking a product from building to selling. If you missed day ten, you could check it out here. I also uploaded day ten’s Twitch stream to YouTube if you want to watch the replay.
It’s time to move on. 🚶♂️
Another week and more time to work on Crossroad! The last few weeks have been somewhat of a struggle; I was stressed about what I wanted to do once my sabbatical is over by the end of this month.
Last weekend, after conversations with many friends and family, I finally bit the bullet. I decided that while I want to keep my business for my projects, I want to join a team again as a front-end developer.
I miss working in a team, and I want to surround myself with more senior/talented developers to learn and grow at a faster pace.
After making this decision, I was finally able to breathe again. The anxiety has made room for excitement!
So I guess if you are looking for a front-end developer to join your team, I would love to grab a (virtual) coffee!
Enough about me; let’s talk about the progress I made on Crossroad!
Design & animation changes! ✍️
The more I work on the landing page, the more design changes I implement. When I continued working on the front end of the landing page, I thought to myself that the page was still a bit flat and dull.
This made me realize that I should be spending more time on the design in the future. While it’s easy for me to make these changes during the development phase, it still costs me more time than applying them in Figma.
Besides, if I ever want to delegate this kind of work, it needs to be perfect in Figma to hand it off to a developer.
Included a new header font. 💬
If you’ve followed my blogs for a while, you might have noticed that I am a sucker for nice font pairs. There is something magical about the glow-up a design can receive by mixing and matching different fonts together.
In the case of the Crossroad landing page, I was only using the inter font, which made the design feel a little stiff. I decided to pair it with Raleway, which added a bit of personality to the page. The Raleway font is a bit more playful, which Inter is not since it’s focused on readability, which makes for a solid font pair.
Introduced a body background texture. 🎨
In the case of the Crossroad landing page, I was only using the inter font, which made the design feel a little stiff. I decided to pair it with Raleway, which added a bit of personality to the page. The Raleway font is a bit more playful, which Inter is not since it focuses on readability, making for a solid font pair.
I don’t know if it’s because it makes the page more “unique,” but I also find it easier on the eyes while reading the content when you mix a texture into the color.
Animations. 🎞
Last but not least, I added a bunch of (micro) animations to the landing page. I always wanted to play around with micro animations, and for this landing page, I finally had the chance to apply them.
Personally, I’m not too fond of animations that hijack the page or scroll. However, since we are not working on paper but with screens, things can transform, float and move around to support the story you want to tell.
I added a subtle float animation to the icons in the header and introduced a draw animation for the lines between the sections. Especially the animating lines feel like they guide you through the features toward the pricing section.
All the animations still require some tweaking, but I am happily surprised by the impact they make, even though it’s subtle.
See you tomorrow! 👋
Hopefully, we’ll get to 100% towards the end of the week. I am not sure if we’ll launch this week since I want to work on some marketing material before hitting the LAUNCH button.
For the people interested, today I will be doing another Twitch stream where I’ll walk you through all the changes I made today, as well as my plans going forward. If you have any project-related questions or not, come hang out!
Thanks again for reading this build log. Have a great day, and I’ll see you tomorrow!
If you want to stay updated in the meantime, give me a follow on Twitter.
With love,
Twankrui
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