Meet Logmi — a journal app I designed to feel like an Animal Crossing village, one obsessive UI detail at a time
Hi, it's Kei again. The solo iOS developer from Japan who keeps writing about her apps on Medium like therapy.
If this is your first time reading, here's the short version: I'm 30, I live in Japan, I've been teaching myself iOS development for two years, and I have a small collection of apps that almost nobody uses. I've cried about it on Medium before. People were nice about it. I kept going.
So today I'm here to tell you that I shipped another one.
I know. I know. Another one.
Its name is Logmi, and it's a diary app. With a cat.
But more than that — it's the first app I've built where the entire experience, from the mascot's facial expressions to the way the buttons round their corners, was designed to feel like one specific thing.
I wanted Logmi to feel like an Animal Crossing village.
The aesthetic I was chasing
Here's the thing about most journaling apps: they look like productivity tools. Day One is sleek and minimal. Apple Journal is institutional. Notion templates feel like spreadsheets in disguise.
None of those apps make me want to write down what I ate for breakfast. They make me feel like I'm doing a chore.
The apps and games that do make me want to open them every day all share something in common. They feel soft. They feel warm. They feel like a place. Animal Crossing is the obvious one. But also Stardew Valley, the cooking sections of older Studio Ghibli films, the corners of Tumblr where people post pictures of their hand-drawn bullet journals.
I wanted Logmi to live in that universe.
That meant making a hundred small decisions that nobody is going to consciously notice, but that I hope add up to a feeling.
Meet Romi
The most visible of those decisions is the mascot.
Her name is Romi. She's a small pixel-art cat who lives at the bottom of the screen.
I want to be careful explaining this, because mascots in apps can go very wrong. They can feel pushy. They can feel infantilizing. They can make a serious tool feel like a toy you're supposed to outgrow.
I tried very hard to make Romi the opposite of all of that.
Here's how she works:
- She has 43 different facial expressions. Different for morning, evening, after you log a meal, after you finish a streak, when you tap her on the head.
- She never shows the negative ones. I drew sad faces and angry faces and grumpy faces, and then I locked them in a folder marked "do not display." Romi will never judge you. She will never frown at you. If you skip three days, she'll just look at you with the same warm face she had on day one and say good morning.
- She greets you once per session. Not constantly. Not every screen. Once when you open the app, with a little message that fits the time of day.
- She speaks 35 languages. Her name even changes depending on your device language — Romi in English, ロミ in Japanese, 로미 in Korean, and so on through the rest.
- She disappears after 5 seconds. Tap her once, she'll say something else. Tap her twice, she goes back to being quiet.
The two rules I made for myself when designing her: never demand attention, and never make the user feel bad. Both of those are violated constantly by mascot characters in productivity apps. I think that's why people hate them.
The buttons. Oh god, the buttons.
This is the part where I sound a little obsessed, but here we are.
I spent more time on the buttons in Logmi than on any other piece of the UI. Probably more than is reasonable.
Every button in the app has:
- A specific corner radius that's slightly different from the iOS default — softer, rounder, closer to a marshmallow than a rectangle.
- A subtle inner shadow on the top edge so it looks like it's catching light from above.
- A press animation that scales the button down to 96% with a spring curve, not the linear ease iOS gives you for free.
- A custom haptic — not the standard
.mediumimpact, but a softer one that feels closer to a paper page turning than a switch flipping.
The category picker, where you tap to choose what you're logging, was redrawn three times. The first version was a standard iOS grid. The second was a wheel picker. The third — the one that shipped — is a hand-arranged grid where each category has its own watercolor icon and the spacing between them was tuned by eye, not by a layout system.
I drew over 117 watercolor icons by hand for this app. 13 main categories, plus 56 different cuisines for the meal category, 8 drink types, 16 exercise types, 5 mood faces, and a handful of others. Every one of them is a real PNG file with real brush textures. Where an icon doesn't exist for a custom category, the app falls back to an emoji. Even that fallback was designed.
I know nobody is going to open the app and think "wow, the corner radius on these buttons feels exactly right." That's the point. You're not supposed to notice. You're just supposed to feel like the app is a nice place to be.
What you can actually log
Logmi has 13 built-in categories:
- Mood — five faces, that's it
- Meal — broken down by breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, with watercolor icons for each cuisine
- Sleep — bedtime, wake time, hours
- Exercise — 16 types, each with their own little illustration
- Weight
- Reading — what book, what page
- Water — eight drink types
- Purchase — what you bought, what it cost
- Photo
- Memo — for the things that don't fit anywhere else
- Medication
- Steps (synced from Apple Health)
- And one for tracking, um, bowel movements, because some of you asked your doctor to start logging that and you know exactly why this category exists
You can also create unlimited custom categories with your own emoji, color, and input format. So if you want to track how many cups of tea you drank or how many times you went outside or how many times your cat sat on your laptop, Logmi can do that.
There are 50 achievement badges spread across seven categories, including some secret ones I won't spoil. There's a calendar month view. There's a separate "Plans & Wishlist" tab for books you want to read, movies you want to watch, and places you want to visit. There's a built-in music player so you can journal to your own MP3s. Everything syncs through iCloud — no external server, no account required, your data stays on your devices.
Apple Health integration pulls your steps, sleep, and weight automatically when you tap a button.
It's a lot. I know it's a lot. I have a hard time stopping.
The font choices
While I'm being a UI nerd about this — the typography matters too.
Logmi ships with 10 custom fonts. When you pick the "Cute" font option, the app automatically chooses a different typeface depending on your device language:
- Nunito for European languages
- Zen Maru Gothic for Japanese
- Jua for Korean
- LXGW WenKai for Chinese
- Mitr for Thai
- Baloo 2 for Hindi and Arabic
Each one was picked because it has the same quality as the others — soft, rounded, warm — even though they're completely different writing systems. A Korean user and a Japanese user and a French user should all open Logmi and feel like they're looking at the same app, even though the actual letterforms are different.
I had no idea this was going to take 28 megabytes of font files when I started. It does. It was worth it.
The IAP confession
In my first Medium post, I bragged about how HieroNote is completely free with no ads. I felt morally superior about it. I said I hated the idea of cluttering up a notes app with banner ads.
I'm going to eat my own words now.
Logmi has in-app purchases. Tiered ones.
- Free — 7 categories
- $1.99 one-time — 11 categories
- $4.99 one-time — all 13 categories plus unlimited custom categories
Nothing is gated forever. There's no subscription. There's no limit on how many entries you can write. The free tier is fully functional — you can keep a diary for the rest of your life without paying me a cent. The paid tiers just unlock more categories.
I made this decision because I want to keep building Logmi for years, and "free with no ads forever" is a great way to burn out. If even a small number of people pay $4.99 once, I can keep the lights on and keep adding things. If nobody pays, well, that'll also be informative.
I'm telling you this upfront because my last post was full of moral grandstanding about not charging for software, and I want to be honest that I changed my mind.
Why another diary app, though
Day One exists. Notion exists. Apple Journal now exists, made by Apple themselves. The diary app market is so saturated it's basically a swamp.
So why did I build this?
Because none of those apps feel like a place. They feel like tools. And the apps that feel like a place — Animal Crossing, Stardew, all the games I open at the end of a hard day — none of them are journaling apps.
I wanted to build the thing that doesn't exist: a journal that feels like the kind of game you open just to walk around in.
I genuinely use Logmi every day. I logged my mood this morning. I logged the coffee I just finished. I tapped Romi on the head and she did a little tail flick. I closed the app, and felt slightly better than when I opened it.
If anyone else in the world feels the same way I do — that journaling apps are sometimes too serious for what's actually a tender, vulnerable little daily ritual — maybe Logmi will work for them too.
That's the whole pitch.
What I'm asking for
If you've made it this far, thank you. Truly. Here's where I'd love your help:
Honest feedback on whether the Animal Crossing feeling actually lands. I know what I was aiming for. What I don't know is whether it reads that way to someone opening the app for the first time, or whether it just reads as "yet another cute app." Both answers are useful.
Marketing advice for journaling apps specifically. Pet apps have pet communities. Step counter apps have fitness communities. But journaling is so personal that the "communities" tend to be more like quiet corners of the internet. Where do diary people hang out?
Or just download Logmi and say hi to Romi. That's the easiest one. She's been waiting.
Links
- Logmi: Life Log, Diary & Mood — search "Logmi" on the App Store
- My website: keik.co.jp
I'm planning to write another post in a couple of weeks about the other thing I just shipped — a complete redesign of my step counter app, MyDailySteps, which got a Studio Ghibli–inspired makeover and 26 new languages in 10 days. That one nearly broke me. Stay tuned if you want the gory details.
Until then, thank you for reading. It still surprises me every time someone does.
— Kei
