Tom McKenzie

Tom McKenzie

Founder @ HappyGraphic®
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About

Hi there! I'm Tom. By day, I run a subscription-based design agency called HappyGraphic. By night, I build micro-SaaS tools that (hopefully) make people's lives easier. I'm interested in the foundational tools we work with every day — specifically the utility gaps within them that create tiny, repeating moments of friction that eventually make you want to throw your computer out of a window. Recently, that interest has led me to documentation. I'm building Differ, a tool that links knowledge base documents to the parts of a code repository they describe and flags them for review when the underlying code changes enough to matter.

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Forums

RunEvrp/runevr•

18d ago

🎨 Do solo makers need a UI/UX designer?

For solo makers, wearing every hat is almost unavoidable - developer, marketer, support, product and often designer too.

AI makes this even easier now. You can generate UI pretty quickly, but a lot of products end up relying on consistent, polished AI-generated solutions rather than something truly unique or thoughtfully designed for their specific product.

So I m curious:

Do you design the UI/UX yourself when building solo?

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1mo ago

Will documentation be the death of me? Was it for you?

I run a small design agency. When I hand off a brand or website package, I include lightweight documentation, and honestly, if the client never opens it again, it's really not that big of a deal. Sure, their brand might look inconsistent, or they might break a module on their website, but then they come back to me to fix it, so yippee!

Now I'm building a SaaS product on the side and it's dawning on me that this is a completely different problem. You ship new features, the codebase starts to balloon, and hopefully, someday, there will be a team who needs a single source of truth to reference. Suddenly it's a very big deal if what's written in your docs stops matching reality.

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2mo ago

How did you come up with your logo, naming and branding? (Vision behind it.)

A day ago, I was talking to a friend about logo design.

TL;DR: how the Apple logo came to be and how it wasn t always the bitten apple we know today.

The first concept was actually Newton sitting under a tree.

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