Understanding Design with Typogram Founder Hua Shu

In this AMA, we had the pleasure of getting to know Hua Shu. She is the founder of Typogram, as well as a writer of the newsletter "FontDiscovery". Hua Shu has always been interested in creating and designing, so she decided to start Typogram to help beginners edit and design logos by easily manipulating fonts and creating a typographic design.

This Slogging thread by Sara Pinto, Hua Shu, Mónica Freitas, Hieu and Jack Boreham occurred in slogging's official #amas channel, and has been edited for readability.

Hey @channel, please join me in welcoming our next AMA guest, Hua Shu. Hua Shu is the founder of Typogram (http://typogram.co/), an intuitive, beginner-friendly design tool that enables small business owners and start-up founders to easily and quickly design logos and brand kits. She also teaches design as an adjunct professor and runs a newsletter.

Please feel free to ask her anything about:

Hey Hua Shu! It's great to have you here with us. Can you start by telling us a bit about your background? What led you to create Typogram?

Hey Sara!

So happy to be here for the AMA! Thanks for having me!

This is a long story, I will try my best to make it short and sweet : )

I have always liked being creative and drawing when I was young. when college came around I choose to design design! And I really loved every aspect of it!

I especially loved the typographic parts about design, the way you can create something very beautiful and useful to others just by using text and language.

I loved it so much that after college, I moved to NYC because one of my college professors told me there was a great design scene there. I enrolled in a Type Design Program (it’s the only one in the US!) to study the design of fonts and the history of typefaces. I started experimenting with code and tool making.

Typogram(https://www.typogram.co/) is a logo design and editing tool for founders, makers, and people who are absolute beginners in design. I created/co-founded this tool.



It started out as a tool for professional designers to make the process of designing with fonts easier. the tool uses the variable font, an innovative font technology that allows everyone to easily manipulate fonts and create a typographic design.

However, after many user tests, we decided to pivot to non-designers and create a tool specifically for the logo and branding design.

We have met many newly minted business owners who needed quality branding design including logo, website, and social media to launch their business. But this was a frustrating process for them because they don’t have an easy to create them.

We showed them Typogram and they were interested in using it to create logos and branding, and learning about design!

Hua Shu, oh wow, that's interesting! I can understand the need for a platform like this. Logos can be a powerful element, but for people that aren't into design, it can be more complicated

How was it to actually conceive the idea? What were the challenges of starting a company? Hua Shu

Hi Hua Shu! I've always loved to design some logos and posts for myself but some simply wouldn't work. What makes a good design and logo in your opinion?

Sara Pinto, yes exactly!

As for how we conceived the idea:

We talked to a lot of users to figure out what business owners want and need especially in a design tool.

Another thing we also were interested in doing is teaching them a bit about design because some of them were interested in learning.

Design is also a fun, creative thing to learn about. So if we were to design design in our app and what would feel comfortable for them.

As for Challenges to starting a company:

Yes, there are many challenges. I’m still trying to get it off the ground.

For me, first, there are personal ones:

I’m an extremely introverted person and to be honest, for a long time it was hard for me to imagine even starting a business. So I had to learn how to get myself out there.

Also, I’m a really private person, it took me a lot to learn how to share with others what I’m doing. I know nowadays everyone is on social media, but I have never been a social media person, so it took me a long time to get used to that (it makes me sound ancient 💀)

https://twitter.com/HuaTweets

Other than these personal challenges, there are business challenges too.

For example, how to get more users to your tool, how to get the right kind of eyeballs to your website. And since I’m a bootstrapping company, how to do these without so much $$$$, these are all very interesting yet tricky challenges to figure out!
Luckily, I think my co-founder is an extremely creative person and we try to come up with fun and creative solutions like:

https://www.codingfont.com/

As side projects that get people to check out typogram

TLDR version is: It’s hard to run your own company, I’m still in the trenches - but I love being independent and what I’m working on!

Mónica Freitas, oh I agree. I think it comes down to three things for logos:

- simple
- functional
- unique

A logo is a piece of highly utilitarian artwork- it will exist in a lot of digital and physical places (phones, computers, printed things of different sizes). It must work with a range of sizes, in different environments while saying something about your company.

Being simple usually makes the utilitarian part easy. If you have a complex group of shapes, the small shapes and complicated details will break down when you are using a logo on smaller scales, for example, printing on a business card, etc. But your logo should also be unique. We can start from this by choosing a really good font and maybe even the brand personality (my co-founder wrote a post about it):

https://build.typogram.co/p/choose-typefaces-based-on-brand-personalities?s=r


So good logos are the ones that work in any environment, whether computer or phone or business cards. It’s memorable and completely accessible to users.

I can speak about this topic forever, feel free to dm me 😆

Hua Shu, that's a great customer relationship: figuring out their particular needs and answering them. So maybe we'll see some classes as one of your services in the future?

Hua Shu, I get it! To put your business out there, you have to put yourself too. There's always more work than what meets the eye. Yet, it must be exciting figuring those problems out! And you must always be trying to make the company stand out and get those right eyeballs haha. What do you think differentiates Typogram from other design tools?

For classes:

Right now, our primary focus is proving helpful inspiration, design tips through the app and through the free resources and guides we write, like our fontdiscovery newsletter: https://fontdiscovery.typogram.co/


As for differentiation:

I think what differentiates us is that we try to teach/create a place for people to learn branding in our app, and we make it really easy for absolute beginners to get hands-on with manipulating paths of shapes, fonts, and more. When we talked to our users, one frustration they experienced is the difficulty of editing and creating logos using existing design tools.

Hi Hua, I'm curious about what should we keep in mind when using trying to keep consistency for our product? (a website and its app in my case)

My landing page uses a site builder, and the app uses a UI library (something similar to Tailwinds or Bootstrap)

They don't look much alike, I'm not sure if there are "best practices" in this case

Hua Shu, oh, cool! And how is managing a newsletter? Since you write for FontDiscovery, is it difficult to keep the reader interested?

That makes sense! You can have all the tools at your disposal, but if you don't understand them, they can't help you!

Hi Hua Shu, form a personal brand perspective. What would you tell someone who is just starting off writing

Hua Shu, I love this! I think we get so stressed about making a logo memorable, which is an impossible task you can't control that we ignore the crucial parts - functionality.
Thank you for the post! I'll definitely read it!

How did you get started with design? I've always had an interest but well drawing isn't a skill I possess unfortunately 😅
But designing especially in advertisements and things like music festivals posters seems such a fun thing to do.

Hieu
So happy to see you here, Hieu! :D That’s a really good question.

I would try to find some kind of consistency between the landing page and the product.
Consistently between the product and landing page (branding) is nice, it makes the brand memorable to your audience.

So besides the logo, if you can keep a visual consistency between the landing page and product, for example, fonts, icons, buttons, and colors, it will be good!

Sara Pinto

Managing a newsletter is fun but can be really tough sometimes! I have been doing it for over a year, but I still find it difficult to write sometimes. However, I think I have to build a good system to support my writing process.

It can be difficult to keep readers interested because everyone gets so many emails these days, so I always try to experiment with different formats, visuals, and topics to see what works the best. I think this helps a lot with keeping things fresh and keeping readers engaged!

Jack Boreham
I would say if there is a topic you are really passionate about, just write it — When I started writing my newsletter, I was worried that it could be too niche... but you can always expand from a smaller subject to a broader range of subject.

Another thing I would say is to write about something you really like. A newsletter takes time to grow...if you start a newsletter, you will probably be writing it for a while, so pick something you really enjoy writing and researching about.

Mónica Freitas
it’s very fun to design those things : )

I always enjoyed art/ creative things, when I was growing up, I thought I’d be a fine artist. However, later in high school, I realize it’s difficult to make a living as a fine artist, so I thought the design was a nice alternative-- a full-time job creating things. I thought that would be something I like, so I ended up studying design in college.

In the end, design was way different from art -- It’s a lot more systematic and “scientific” in a way. To me, art sometimes is about freedom and chaos. Design is about working with restrictions and finding rules in chaos XD

Of course, there are always movements of design and art that deviate from the norms in those two fields!

Hua Shu, I understand. I've experienced it a few times with copywriting, and it was a real challenge. Nowadays, we're so used to visuals that engaging with the readers through text is harder. Do you have any tips about marketing in a newsletter?

Thanks for the answer Hua Shu, I'd be a bit more work and I'll keep it in mind :thumbsup:

Sara Pinto I think depends on the newsletter, it will be different, but essentially: find where your audience lives and share with them : )

Hua Shu, with creative projects such as Font Discovery and Typogram, how do you find inspiration to keep improving them? Does it help to follow current trends?

Hua Shu that's very true. Is there any project designed by you that you're particularly proud of?

Sara Pinto - for sure! I like to research about trends, and write about them to help my users and customers understand/ how to use them so they can create better, more eye-catching visual materials to help their businesses and projects!

Mónica Freitas, I think https://fontdiscovery.typogram.co/
is the most challenging one I have done so far because I come up with new content weekly!

That's a wrap on the AMA! Thank you so much for answering our questions, Hua Shu. It was great to have you here! Do you have any final thoughts or anything you want to promote?

This was fun, thanks so much for having me!

If anyone wants to follow my startup journey where I share build in public updates:
https://twitter.com/HuaTweets

Also, Typogram, our logo design tool for absolute beginners is having a pre-order!
you can check it out: https://typogram.co/