The generation workflow

The whole app is one page. This is what each part of it does, top to bottom.

1. Upload a source image

Drag an image onto the drop zone, or click it and pick a file. With the drop zone focused, Space opens the file selector.

Accepted: png, jpg, jpeg, gif, webp. Size limit: 16 MB by default — change it with BRANDKIT_MAX_UPLOAD_MB.

Pick the right source

Everything downstream is a resize of what you upload, and BrandKit does not upscale intelligently. Give it the largest, cleanest version you have:

• A square or near-square PNG with transparency is the ideal input. It composites cleanly onto any background and crops well into both landscape and portrait canvases.
• At least 1024 px on the short edge if you want the large formats (square_large at 2048×2048, print_a4 at 2480×3508) to look sharp.
• Avoid pre-flattened JPEGs with a white box around the logo — or turn on background removal to get rid of it.

As soon as the file is accepted, two things happen automatically: EXIF metadata is stripped (unconditionally, by re-encoding through Pillow) and the image is analysed for its prominent colour and for the presence of a large white region.

2. Choose formats

Formats are grouped into categories — Social Media, Website, Mobile, Branding, Web Application, E-commerce, Print, Business Documents, Publishing, General Purpose. Expand a category and tick what you need, or type in the search box to filter the whole catalogue by name.

Nothing ticked? BrandKit falls back to every format in the catalogue, which is 45 renders per output type. That is rarely what you want and it is slow. Tick deliberately.

The complete list of names and pixel dimensions is in the format catalogue.

3. Choose output types

Type	Transparency	Good for
PNG	yes	logos, icons, anything that will sit on an unknown background
JPG	no	photographic sources, large banners where file size matters
WebP	yes	modern web delivery — smaller than PNG at equal quality
ICO	yes	browser favicons only

You can select several at once; each selected format is rendered into each selected type.

ICO is coupled to the favicon format

If you tick ico as an output type but do not tick the favicon format, BrandKit silently drops ico from the list. If that leaves no output types at all, it falls back to png. The ICO file itself is multi-resolution: 16×16, 32×32 and 48×48 are packed into one .ico.

4. Preprocessing (optional)

Everything in this panel is applied once, to the source image, before any format is rendered — so a hue shift or a watermark appears identically across the whole kit.

The controls are documented in detail in Image preprocessing and Background removal. The two settings that most often surprise people:

• Quality (default 95) applies to JPEG and WebP encoding. PNG ignores it.
• Strip metadata (default off) removes the ICC profile and any remaining metadata from the generated files. Note that EXIF on the uploaded file is always stripped regardless of this switch.

5. Smart background fill

If the analysis in step 1 found a significant white area (more than 15% of the image is near-white), BrandKit offers to replace that white with the image's prominent colour, or with a radial gradient built from it.

This is what turns a logo-on-white into a logo-on-brand-colour without you picking a hex value. It is a heuristic: check the previews.

6. Variations mode

Turning on variations mode renders each selected format ten times, once per preset:

Preset	Effect
Original	no change
Grayscale	desaturated
B&W	1-bit black and white
Inverted	colour-inverted
Hue_+60 / Hue_-60	hue rotated ±60°
Warm / Cool	colour temperature ±40
Grayscale_Contrast	desaturated with contrast boost
Inverted_Blur	inverted with a 2 px blur

This multiplies your render count by ten

Ten formats × two output types × variations mode = 200 images. On a small machine that will take minutes and a lot of RAM. Use it to explore a direction on two or three formats, not to generate a deliverable.

7. Generate

Click Generate, or press Ctrl+Enter (⌘+Enter on macOS). The button is only active when you have a file, at least one format and at least one output type, and nothing is already running.

Uploads are rate-limited to 5 per minute per IP address, on top of a global default of 200/day and 50/hour. If you hit the limit you get a 429; wait and retry.

8. Review and download

The result grid shows a thumbnail per generated asset with its name and dimensions. Click any thumbnail to open the full-size file, or take the whole set as a ZIP.

Files are named predictably:

<source-basename>_<format>.<ext>
<source-basename>_<variation>_<format>.<ext>   # variations mode
<source-basename>_favicon.ico

so acme-logo.png rendered for website gives you acme-logo_website.png. The pixel dimensions are not in the name — look them up in the format catalogue, or read dimensions from the JSON response.

Generated files are publicly readable

Assets are served out of /static/uploads/, which Flask exposes without authentication. Anyone who knows or guesses a filename can fetch it. On a public deployment, put an authenticating proxy in front of the whole app — see Deployment and Privacy.

9. Start over

Esc resets the form, cancels an in-flight operation, closes the help dialog or clears the format search, depending on what is on screen. Full list in Keyboard shortcuts.