Croissant Club has been live for about 3 weeks now. It is a personal review blog for croissants. Huge traffic to it, obviously.

Over the past few years I have developed an appreciation for croissants, and I thought this would be a simple funny project to look back on in a few years if I keep up with it. Backfilling the data has been a bit irritating, but luckily I’ve only had this idea for a month or two.

Animation

The animation was by far the most amount of work. Initially I tried Lottie Files, but they wanted to charge me a $20 month subscription to export 1 animation, which I didn’t find worth it. I’ve been designing in Inkscape a free open-source SVG drawing tool.

Bug looking croissant poorly done with cartoon eyes and legs on a picture Not much better croissant with more realistic legs Much friendlier croissant using a flat cartoon base

After multiple tries (shown above), I ended up adapting an existing SVG of the croissant, so thank you to the author of this croissant from SVG Repo. Easiest way to gain respect for someone doing something is to try to do what they do yourself, and I am extremely impressed with the amount of work that must go into incredible animation work - especially after spending far too much time on this silly project - at a certain point I started to lose respect for myself.

I am curious about how SVG generation by LLMs will develop, especially since this seems to be a plausible pathway for balancing expressive generation with the ability to make small edits. The onboarding time of GUI tools like this is extremely high compared to text prompts, so anything that can be done to cut that down will draw users. Just getting something on the screen quickly is a huge motivator.

Of course, the inability to generate odd images has persisted over the past few years to the point to which it has become a test of capabilities, so it is not surprising that some free image generation LLMs gave extremely poor results:

LLM generated croissant with melting egg eyes that terrifies the soul

But did improve depending on the website; Perchance.org gave reasonable results.

Friendlier looking LLM generated croissants after prompting cartoon styling from Perchance.org

To animate it, the JS Web Animations API has been straightforward to pick up, since it neatly aligns with existing CSS and even with past D3.js experience designing charts. Key point to understand was animating the groups that hold transformed elements, rather than the elements themselves. This required a bit of organization on the Inkscape side.

Data

I meant to use Google Forms as a back-end; I’ve read other simple sites doing that, but unfortunately while you can upload photos through the form, the images themselves are uploaded to the owner’s Google Drive account, and you need to authenticate to then pull those images to display them on the site.

So instead moved to an Airtable form that is shared on the web and the images are hosted in a way that I can just read them with a read only API key. So no read authentication here, but the data is all public on the site anyway.

You do need to be logged in to Airtable and have permission to access the form to submit a review. I don’t feel confident in making in public; I think I need to add an approval process, since people could upload inappropriate imagery or text. So I think an “Approved” field on the form that dictates if the submission is shown on the website? But I am unsure of Airtable’s TOS and how anonymous submissions would be handled if objectionable content was uploaded there.

Of course this assumes that there are other people out there that would ever actually bother to upload an image and their thoughts about a croissant. If a croissant review website ever did get popular, I imagine that LetterBoxd would be able to pivot pretty quickly.

UI

UI post cards and CSS are LLM-coded; especially for more whimsical design choices, the LLM required a few tries. Croissant design for the background and rating are pulled from a free SVG icon online; Claude 4.6 was stumped by generating a good croissant SVG that was plain enough to use for the ratings.

Infrastructure

Hosted on GitHub Pages; built with HTML/JS/CSS. I went with the .fyi domain since it was $5.66 yearly through Porkbun; croissant.club, the domain I wanted, was $54 the first year and renewing at around $20! Just too much money to spend on something so foolish. Who values the domain croissant.club at $54?