If you’ve ever launched a side project, you probably know this moment:
You’ve finished coding, the landing page is live, and now you just need a logo… and somehow that’s where everything stops.
I’ve been there, many, many times.
🌀 The logo trap
Every new project of mine followed this exact spiral:
“Let’s just throw in a placeholder logo.”
Spends 4 hours testing fonts.
Realizes Helvetica feels too safe, but Poppins feels too startup-y.
Decides to “come back to it later.”
Never comes back.
And just like that, another half-finished app joined my ever-growing graveyard of ideas.
💡 The dev problem with design
As developers, we care a lot about polish, but design tools aren’t built for us.
They’re heavy, visual, and demand an artistic instinct that most of us don’t have.
I didn’t need a “perfect” logo. I just needed something good enough to not look like a meme.
The existing AI logo generators didn’t help either, they wanted long prompts and gave random results that looked like clip art from 2007.
So I decided to build something better, something for us.
🔧 Building LogoSmith
That’s how LogoSmith was born, a simple logo generator designed for indie devs and makers who just want to get it done.
It’s built using:
React + TailwindCSS for the UI
Node.js backend
Appwrite for auth, database, and storage
Stripe for payments
OpenAI image generation API for logo rendering
The setup is lightweight, and everything runs in Docker. It’s a straightforward stack that’s easy to scale if needed.
🧪 Experiment: Try before login
One of the first bits of feedback I got from early users was that signing up before seeing anything was annoying. Fair point.
So I switched it up.
Now, users can generate logos first, no login, no email, no barriers.
Only when they want to save or download does it ask them to sign in.
That small UX change made a huge difference, more people actually reached the generation step, and engagement nearly doubled.
🎯 Lessons learned
Here’s what I took away from this small but surprisingly fun project:
Don’t block curiosity, let people try before signing up.
Keep the flow simple, fancy animations don’t make better UX.
Your first version doesn’t need to be clever, it just needs to work.
It’s easy to overthink features, but most of the time, the best move is to remove friction.
🚀 What’s next
I’m now working on adding:
SVG exports
Multiple formats (social, favicon, etc.)
Brand kits for consistency
And probably a few more tweaks based on community feedback.
If you want to check it out (or roast my colour choices), it’s live here:
👉 logosmith.dev
🤓 Final thought
The funny part?
I built a logo generator… and still changed LogoSmith’s own logo three times.
Some habits die hard.
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