As a creative writer, finding and keeping up with writing submission opportunities can be a real chore. With LitNotice, creative writers get weekly email notifications about upcoming writing opportunities and deadlines for work that are relevant to their particular interests. They can easily add reminders to a variety of digital calendars to help keep up with the best opportunities to which they can submit their writing.

The secret behind LitNotice’s exceptional service is the comprehensive writing opportunities database they maintain. Along with help from FullSteam Labs, LitNotice was able to hit the ground running by developing their database in Airtable. Ahead of the official launch, FullSteam Labs designed and built a promotional version of the website to build momentum while the underlying tech was being developed.

The tech stack FullSteam Labs used for LitNotice provides a lightweight, yet scalable solution that can grow along with the platform, providing a robust foundation for success. The FullSteam crew chose Elixir, Phoenix, and LiveView to build upon along with TailwindCSS and AlpineJS for a custom-tailored user interface (also known as the PETAL stack). LitNotice’s fresh new logo and style guide were applied consistently across the website and email templates that are powered by a combination of Bamboo and SendGrid.

One distinctive characteristic of this project was the deployment system. FullSteam Labs created an automated system, built with Elixir, for building and deploying Elixir releases of the LitNotice app using systemd and NixOS. This crucial aspect of the project provided reliable, reproducible, and highly-ergonomic benefits to the development process. To learn more about the Elixir and NixOS-powered continuous integration system, check out this blog post that explores it in depth.

As a lean startup, LitNotice needed a logo and web style guide. After a short exploratory phase our UX designer produced a friendly, energetic logo that expresses a combination of traditional and contemporary elements. The logo set the tone for the brand, and we went on to create a Web Style Guide for color and typography palettes, illustrations, and graphical components. The brand came to life with a personable, approachable, and trustworthy vibe.

Customer flow through the informational, subscription, and customization processes required close attention to the user’s experience. The designer and developers worked closely together to leverage the existing functionality of the tech, impactful calls to action, attractive and intuitive interfaces, and UX writing to create a compelling and intuitive customer journey. When wireframes for this journey were complete, the Web Style Guide was used to mock up high-fidelity screens for the developers to build out the front end. And finally, an email template was created to have design consistency with the website and dynamically pull in the subscriber’s chosen opportunity categories.