Building Fontasso with Claude Code

I’m a designer and leader, not an iOS engineer. Recently, I shipped my app, Fontasso, to the App Store.

Fontasso is a font book for iOS, built for creatives. Browse, preview and share specimens, then install fonts on your device (Google Fonts, Apple’s additional iOS fonts or your own) for use in apps like Affinity, Pixelmator and Adobe. Browsing is free, with a low-cost subscription for unlimited installs.

Download Fontasso from the App Store
Read more on the fontasso.com

I started because no existing app met my needs as a designer. And after a couple of days of proof of concept, exploration and research confirmed the idea. I decided I wanted to see where I could get to. Over the next three months, I refined it using Claude Code, Affinity Designer, Pixelmator and hand sketches. These are the lessons that mattered most.

Vision matters
A clear-eyed focus on your desired outcomes will help you navigate LLM randomness, your own decisions and avoid building what everyone else has.

Think about go-live, not just the build
Validating licensing and legality, and getting the business ready, were among my most important activities. Navigating the App Store process for the first time takes focus and preparation. It is about thinking about the whole ecosystem: product value, experience, marketing and support.

Learn to brief the LLM well
Precision is key. I had to be clear on the look, functionality and business model I wanted, and get advice from someone who knows iOS development. This produced technical guidelines, functional boundaries and experience principles, so Claude interpreted my intent appropriately.

Plan before you build
Simple changes are easy to prompt. Complex ones need good inputs, so I always had Claude write a plan first. That let me test my thinking, interrogate the solution and spot where the LLM was filling gaps in ways I didn’t intend. Sample screens helped when an idea was hard to put into words.

Don’t offload the thinking
Claude and Gemini were self-assured, but often lacked the full context to appreciate the nuance of my problem. When I found myself asking “why can other apps do this, but the LLM can’t see it as possible?”, there was usually a flaw in its reasoning that I had to correct myself. This is where getting some direction from tech friends put me and Claude on the right path (plus I learnt what MVVM stands for).

You are the guardian of quality
I spent most of my time testing. It showed whether my instructions had been interpreted as intended, or whether I had designed the flow badly. Claude has improved at reasoning and remembers my decisions, but some things only show up when a person uses the product.

Most importantly remember an LLM can’t replace taste and expertise, but it does expand what we can do.

Focus on being a tastemaker.

Posted on LinkedIn