BrandForge, custom branding software

Why I built my own

The creative part of a logo is the part worth paying for. What follows it is not: a favicon set, social avatars and headers, a business card, letterhead, palette files in whatever format the next developer wants, and a guidelines page. That is hours of repetitive export work after the decision has been made, and every client needs all of it.

The other problem is that no single AI image model is best at everything. One is strongest at lettering, one returns real vector files, one edits well from a reference image, one is best at illustrative marks. Using them well meant juggling several dashboards and prompts. And the web tools that promise to do this keep your client's assets on somebody else's server and charge per seat. So I built the tool I wanted: local, using the keys I already pay for, adapting to whichever providers I have.

A brand designer, not a prompt box

The assistant is Claude with fourteen tools it can use on the project: update the brief, set the palette and fonts, generate logos through a chosen provider, look at and critique the results, make variants, vectorize, remove a background, write an SVG logo directly, set the master logo and build the kit. It is briefed as a designer. It writes prompts the way a designer briefs a renderer, and it knows which model to send which job to.

Six providers sit behind one interface: OpenAI, Google Gemini, Recraft, Ideogram, Black Forest Labs and Stability. You add only the keys you have, and the app and the assistant adapt to what is configured.

A real workflow

Projects, then a brief: the business, the audience, its personality, the logo types worth trying, style keywords and things to avoid. Then generation, either by asking the assistant or by hand with a provider, prompt enhancement, style presets, aspect, transparency and reference images. Then refining, where you can drop in a sketch and work from it. Then a gallery where each result can be favourited, vectorized, stripped of its background, turned into mono, white and black variants, critiqued and exported. A canvas editor with layers, undo and sixty-odd fonts sits alongside for the hand work.

One click, the whole kit

Once there is a master logo, the kit builds itself: transparent, black, white, primary and grayscale versions, an SVG, a favicon with every icon size from 16 to 512 pixels plus the phone icon and web manifest, social avatars, headers, banners and a link preview image, a business card and letterhead at print resolution, the palette as CSS, SCSS, JSON, Tailwind and GIMP files, and a generated guidelines page. The local image work, variants, vectorizing, background removal and resizing, runs on the machine, so none of it costs a provider call.

In the self-test run that produced these screenshots, one imported sample mark became eight gallery assets and a 49-file brand kit in about a second.

Local and private by design

API keys are encrypted with Windows' own key store and kept per user. Projects, assets and exports live in a local Documents folder. Nothing leaves the machine except the generation requests themselves. It is packaged as a proper installer with a Start Menu entry and an icon, and it ships a keyless end-to-end self-test that drives the real interface, so a packaging change can be checked without spending a single API call.

What it means for you

When a logo and a brand kit are part of your quote, this is the tool behind them. The judgement is still mine. The hours of exporting are not, which is a large part of why a full set of brand files does not turn a small website job into a large one.