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Comment by jaredcwhite | Hacker News Reader

Far be it for me to criticize solo startup products—any achievement in this space is immense!

But in general…something that routinely irks me is the lack of truly outstanding design/typography in a lot of "start a website/blog/whatever in 5 minutes" stuff I see pop up. At least this isn't using some crappy monospaced font (that trend is so cringe), but…just a basic Tailwind theme isn't all that appealing IMHO. I think any indie project to help folks get a website online should offer something truly exciting/quirky/artistic on the design side so it's not just a clone of bland corporate media.

All that aside, congrats on the launch and I hope it's the start of good things to come!

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Thanks for the feedback! I plan to offer some alternative themes. I chose to spend my time making custom color support robust. For instance, there's dynamic code that determines which label colors have highest contrast on buttons depending on the theme color. So, there's some abstracted complexity there.

While the Postcard marketing page looks a little tailwind-y, I hope that the individual homepages look more polished and distinct. I've been working with a designer to tune everything, and I'll continue to make improvements.

Awesome to hear that, and again I don't wish to sound like I'm criticizing Postcard specifically, more just generically shouting into the interwebs. I look forward to seeing more themes down the road!

It doesn’t look just a little Tailwind-y. It IS in fact a made of unmodified (in terms of design) components from TailwindUI stacked on a Hotwire+Rails website.

  An example (the hero section)

  - https://tailwindui.com/components/marketing/sections/heroes
  - https://tailwindui.com/components/application-ui/lists/grid-lists

Since I’m guessing what the OP posted is an MVP, it’s perfectly acceptable and the product seems alright, just hope they do make homepages more distinct and polished like you said starting with their own.

On a more serious note, the OP might want to radically modify the design of these asap (I’m not sure if even that would make this project fall under TailwindUI’s license).

The License that TailwindUI provides (https://tailwindui.com/license) states:

  Examples of usage not allowed by the license:

  - Creating a "website builder" project where end users can build their own websites using components or templates included with or derived from Tailwind UI.

I personally like the sites/blogs with a crappy monospace font, as long as they have something interesting to share with the world, preferably by RSS feed.

But I do agree that websites with an artistic touch in the interface are more than welcome. For my own website project it was a constant battle choosing between some artistic freedom and expression on one hand, and making it useful and easy on the other.

In the past, I made what I call the Quick Design module (https://try.hellowebsite.online/quickdesign/) where users could easily click together a goodlooking website design. They layout is always the same, but a preselected or random combination of colors and other settings gives some very nice results. I definitely would love to explore this even more in the future.

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