DEV Community: Alex

The 7 fonts that survive a SaaS browser tab (and how I test them)

Alex — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 09:15:17 +0000

I build LogoRay, a tool that composes a full brand kit around a name. After watching thousands of names run through it, I am convinced the most common mistake in a SaaS logo has nothing to do with the mark. It is the font, chosen at the wrong size.

A SaaS name does not live on a billboard. It spends its life at 13 to 20 pixels: a browser tab, a sidebar, an app switcher, a favicon with three letters next to it. Designers pick the font at 80 pixels in Figma, where everything looks good, then ship it to the one place it was never tested. So here is what I learned building the pairing engine, and the short list that survives where SaaS actually gets seen.

Three properties decide it, and none show up on a specimen page

The first is x-height. The taller the lowercase, the more of each letter survives when the name renders at 16 pixels next to your favicon. Low-x-height display faces look elegant large and turn to mush small.

The second is tracking behavior. Display faces that look sharp at 80 pixels often have spacing that closes up as they shrink, welding letters together exactly where users see the name most. A face has to hold its spacing down at product-UI sizes, not just at hero sizes.

The third is dark-mode behavior. Most SaaS products ship a dark surface somewhere, and thin strokes that look refined on white either vanish on near-black or bloom into a halo. Sturdy, even-weight faces with open counters pass all three tests. That is why my shortlist is all grotesks and geometrics, and why it is much shorter than any font library suggests.

The shortlist

For the name itself, a grotesk or geometric sans with a tall x-height and open counters, paired with a neutral body face. Space Grotesk, Sora, Schibsted Grotesk, Hanken Grotesk, Outfit, Familjen Grotesk, and Gabarito all qualify. Which one wins depends on whether the product should read engineered, calm, editorial, or friendly. There is no single best face, but there is a clear shortlist, and it fits on one hand twice.

Almost always sans-serif for the name. A SaaS name lives at tab size, where serif detail turns to noise. High-contrast serifs like Playfair Display or Gloock belong to editorial and luxury brands that are seen large. The exception is a deliberate contrarian play, and it only works when the serif stays sturdy small.

The body face should be boring on purpose

Almost every pairing I trust resolves to Inter on the body side. That is not a lack of imagination. A neutral body face is what gives the display face room to have a personality. When both the headline and the body try to be interesting, they fight, and the brand reads busy at every size. Pick one voice for the name and let the rest recede.

What I avoid, every time

Novelty display faces. Anything that announces a genre, brush scripts, pixel faces, rounded bubble fonts, ages at the speed of the trend that produced it and reads wrong the moment the product moves upmarket.

Fake-tech stencil and sci-fi fonts. Angular cuts, missing crossbars, and stencil gaps signal "technology" the way a stock photo of a hooded figure signals "hacker". Real technical brands run the other way: calm grotesks, even color, no costume.

Ultra-thin weights. A hairline wordmark disappears on a dark surface and breaks up at small sizes. Even-weight or medium holds together everywhere.

How to test a font in two minutes

Set the name at 16 and 20 pixels, on both a white and a near-black background. Then look at three things: do the letter counters stay open, does the spacing between letters close up, and do the strokes vanish or bloom on the dark version. A pairing that passes at 16 pixels passes everywhere. The reverse is not true, which is the whole trap.

One more question I get: are Google Fonts good enough for a commercial SaaS logo? Yes. Every face on my shortlist ships under an open license, most commonly the SIL Open Font License, which permits commercial use including logos. These are the same faces shipping in well-funded product brands today. Check the license file on each family's Google Fonts page before you commit, because terms can differ per family.

See them on your own name

Reading about type is close to useless. The test that matters is your own product name, at the size it will actually render. I put all 16 pairings and 12 palettes on one page in LogoRay so you can type your name once and judge every option on the word that matters: the font pairings page. If you want to see the SaaS registers as finished marks rather than raw type, the indie SaaS logo ideas page renders them as complete lockups.

The font is the part of a logo that gets chosen fastest and regretted longest. Give it the two minutes at 16 pixels, and most of the regret never happens.

The free way to check if a startup name is trademarked (USPTO, 2026)

Alex — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 18:05:08 +0000

I have named a lot of side projects, and for years I got the order wrong. Brainstorm a name, check the .com, fall in love, ship. The trademark check was the thing I did last, if at all. That is exactly backwards, because the domain being free tells you nothing about whether someone already owns the name.

So here is the process I use now, written the way I wish someone had handed it to me. It is free, it takes a few minutes, and it happens in a place that changed recently enough that most guides online are out of date.

TESS is gone

If you learned to search US trademarks before 2024, the tool you remember no longer exists. The USPTO retired TESS, the Trademark Electronic Search System, on November 30, 2023, and replaced it with a cloud system called Trademark Search at tmsearch.uspto.gov. Old TESS links redirect there now. Any tutorial still telling you to open TESS is describing a system that was switched off.

The new system is free and needs no account to search. It gives you two ways in:

A simple search box for quick lookups. This is where a first pass starts.
An expert query builder for precise work: field tags, wildcards to catch spelling variants, and Boolean operators.

The knockout search

A knockout search is the fast first look. You are checking the federal register for identical or near-identical marks in classes related to what you sell, so you can rule out the obvious conflicts before you invest anything.

To run one at tmsearch.uspto.gov:

Search the exact name. Enter it as you would write it. The system is not case sensitive.
Search close variants. Misspellings, spacing changes, dropped or doubled letters, plurals. Wildcards in the expert builder catch a family of spellings at once.
Search how it sounds. A mark that sounds the same can conflict even when it is spelled differently, so search phonetic equivalents, not just the letters.
Read the live results in your classes. Focus on marks with a live status in the classes that match your goods or services. A dead mark, or a live mark in an unrelated class, is usually not your problem.

The class matters more than the name

This is the part most first-time searchers miss. Trademark protection is not granted over a word in the abstract. It is granted for particular goods or services. A conflict exists when a similar mark covers the same or related goods or services as yours, which is why two identical names can coexist peacefully in unrelated industries.

The USPTO uses the international Nice Classification, which sorts everything into 45 classes: classes 1 to 34 are goods, 35 to 45 are services. Before you judge a result, know which classes your business falls into, because a hit outside them rarely blocks you. The USPTO also publishes a Trademark ID Manual, a searchable list of pre-approved descriptions of goods and services, which is the fastest way to pin down your class.

What a knockout search does not catch

Finding nothing is not the same as being clear. A federal register search, however careful, has blind spots you should know before you rely on it:

Sound-alike spellings you did not think to try.
Related, not identical, goods. A mark for a neighbouring product can still block you, and judging how related is related is the grey area a quick search skips.
Common-law rights. In the US, rights arise from use, so a business using a name in commerce can have enforceable rights without ever filing federally. Those marks are not in the register.
State registrations. Each state keeps its own register, outside the USPTO database.

Closing those gaps is what a full clearance search does, and the USPTO frames that as the search an attorney conducts. A knockout is the right first filter. It is not a clearance opinion, and it is not legal advice. Treat a clean result as "worth a closer look," never as "safe to build on."

If the name survives: filing

Once a name survives your search and you decide to file, that is a separate step in a separate place. Since January 18, 2025, the only way to file a US trademark application is through Trademark Center at tmcenter.uspto.gov. The old TEAS system was retired at the same time, so any fee quote built on TEAS tiers is out of date. The current base application fee is $350 per class. Fees change, so confirm the current schedule on uspto.gov before you file.

One thing the USPTO is blunt about: a search never guarantees registration, an examining attorney may reach a different conclusion than you did, and filing fees are not refunded if the application is refused. That is the whole reason searching well before you file is worth the few minutes.

The tool I built around this

Doing this by hand is the right way to learn it, but it is slow when you are weighing a dozen candidate names. That gap is why I built Startup Name Generator. It only surfaces names whose .com is available, checked live against domain records at generation time, then runs a free US (USPTO) register search on the one you pick, with exact, phonetic, and fuzzy matching. No login. The EU (EUIPO) register is the one paid step, for people naming for Europe.

To be clear about what it is, because I care about not overclaiming: the trademark check is an automated register search that surfaces conflicts for you to review. It is not legal advice and not a clearance opinion. For anything you are betting a company on, a lawyer still does the clearance. But for the first cut, it saves you from falling for a name you cannot own.

Name the thing once. Search before you commit.

I built a name generator that checks the trademark, not just the domain

Alex — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:54:19 +0000

Every time I named a side project, it went the same way. Brainstorm in one tab. Check the .com in another. Get attached to a name. Then weeks later find out it was already trademarked, usually right after I had made the logo.

Most name generators stop at the domain. They will hand you a name whose .com is free and whose trademark is a landmine. The expensive part of naming is not the idea, it is the conflict you do not see until you have already built on the name.

So I built Startup Name Generator to do the whole first pass in one place:

It only surfaces names whose .com is available, checked live against domain records at generation time. No dead domains in the list.
Pick one, and it screens the name against the US trademark register, the USPTO, for free. No login, no card.
The EU register is the one paid step, for people naming for Europe.

To be clear about what it is: the trademark check is a register search that surfaces conflicts for you to review, not legal advice. For anything you are betting a company on, a lawyer still does the clearance. But for the first cut, it saves you from falling for a name you cannot own.

Free at startupnamegenerator.com. There is also an MCP server and API if you want it inside your own tools.

Feedback welcome: is the .com-first, trademark-aware flow useful, or am I solving a problem only I have? Naming stories welcome.