Hard Shadows and Pastels

In a sea of black and white boilerplate Shadcn apps, TryPost.it jumped out to me. Finally! Design! It's silly to think that, but I'm so tired of the simple grayscale rounded corner pills and buttons of Shadcn peppered everywhere these days.

Every morning, I hop on OpenAlternative.co and filter by latest to get an idea of what's coming out. What's trending in the UX/UI space? Is it gigantic letters of the app name in the footer? A floating 3D graphic of something adjacent to the app? Extremely technical code demos in the center of the page that clearly weren't reviewed by non-developers before they pushed them?

This morning, TryPost.it caught my eye. I'm a sucker for hard shadows, and this app has hard shadows all over the place. Cards, buttons, segmented selectors, check icons. They have successfully merged big border radiuses (radii?) with hard black shadows. It's playful, simple, and fresh to look at.

And the pastel colors! The faded purples, pinks, yellows, and reds of the app look like sun weathered stickynotes on the wall behind my monitors. It's soft. It's different.

Personally, I'd cut the eyebrows above headlines. And, yeah, the Instrument Serif display font is Claude Design adjacent and should be swapped for its more on-brand Figtree font, but they're doing a lot right here.

The Onboarding Experience

I was going to fire off this article as is, but you know what, what if I gave the app a try? Does the UI in the app match the sales site?

First off, I'm thinking the team needs to add arrows and swiper functionality wherever they have carousels. Currently, on the login page, the only way to see the next step is to click the tiny 2px dot.

While we're at it, when I'm on the registration page and enter my email, and then realize this is the login and not actually the create account page, my email should carry over to the create account flow when I click that. But instead I have to type it in again. Just a small UX thing.

Right after creating account, I'm greeted by the pricing page. There's no onboarding demo. No view of the app. I cannot actually see the app until I've given over my card info on a specific plan.

The subscription process is via Stripe Checkout. That's fine by me, though Paddle and Lemonsqueezy are alternatives. What is not fine by me is that TryPost.it has disabled American Express as a form of payment. My business runs on American Express and I don't have any business Visa or Mastercard cards. So I guess that leaves me here, stuck at the pricing page, unable to continue. The marketing emails will be fun though!