#logoshi

[logoshi]

Optimizing Logotype Generation

One of the bottlenecks Logoshi.com experienced after being featured on multiple blogs simultaneously was the generation of the text portion of the logos.  I wanted to generate type as large as possible within a fixed container size.  I had been approaching the problem with commands like this:

convert -size 1000x500 -background 'transparent' -font 'font.ttf' -kerning 0 -fill '#000000' -gravity center label:' Company ' text-image.png

It turns out that is incredibly inefficient as the output image dimensions increase.  Convert tries to fit the text within the given dimensions starting with a small point size increasing it over and over until it just barely fits within the desired dimension.  Performance is pretty good with small image sizes on my cheap-o server, but once you start getting to 1000x500 sizes, things noticeably slow down.  After reading the docs, I realized this was the wrong approach.  The solution is to specify a point size for the text and not specify the ultimate image dimension until a final resize command.  The command to generate the text portion of the logos is now something like this:

convert -background 'transparent' -pointsize 500 -density 72 -font 'font.ttf' -kerning 0 -fill '#000000' -gravity center label:' Company ' -resize 1000x500\> -size 1000x500 xc:transparent +swap -gravity center -composite text-image.png

This command doesn't specify the image dimensions and instead specifies the point size to draw the text.  The resulting image file is then resized down to the desired dimensions.  In informal testing, this is about 10x faster.

[logoshi]

Logoshi.com featured on Product Hunt

A while back I submitted Logoshi.com to Startup Tabs.  I did it on a whim as I got up to have lunch and didn't think much of it.  I got a quick note from @jleebiz on Friday night letting me know logoshi.com was going to be featured in the Startup Tabs Chrome extension.  Logoshi appeared on Startup Tabs and was immediately picked up by Product Hunt and sat in the #1 position for a full day.  Unfortunately, Logoshi is still just a little side project sharing a web server with 16 other side projects of mine and was overwhelmed by the traffic.  It was a rush to see that people like Michael Arrington and Scott Beale were trying out my site as I sat at my desk watching the server load skyrocket. 

Now, six days later, links to Logoshi have been passed around twitter, traffic has subsided and sales have increased.  Techie types love the idea, designer types hate it.  I've implemented a couple of optimizations to speed things up.  It's a little late, but that's how these things go.  You don't know where your bottlenecks are until they show up.  I had planned on improving Logoshi over time.  Now that the idea has been thoroughly validated there's an incentive to improve it sooner rather than later.