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← All work Desktop app, in use

BrandForge, the software behind the logo work.

A logo is the creative part of branding a business. The rest, the favicon set, the social sizes, the business card, the letterhead, the palette files, is hours of export work. I built a desktop app that does the whole thing on my own machine, with a brand designer built on Claude driving six different image models.

BrandForge gallery: eight logo variants of a sample mark with vectorize, remove background, variants and export actions, and the Claude brand assistant docked on the right
The gallery, from a self-test run on a sample project
  • ShapeWindows desktop app, Electron
  • Built withAbout 3,900 lines of plain JavaScript, no framework
  • Point of itA brief in, a whole brand kit out

Why build software instead of buying it

No single AI image model is good at everything. One is strongest at lettering, one returns real vector files, one is best at editing from a reference, one at illustrated marks. Using them well meant juggling several dashboards, prompts and file formats. 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 wrote my own. It runs locally, uses the keys I already pay for, and adapts to whichever providers I have set up. Nothing leaves the machine except the generation requests themselves.

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 the results and critique them, make variants, vectorize, remove backgrounds, write an SVG logo directly, set the master logo and build the kit. It is briefed as a designer, so it writes prompts the way a designer briefs a renderer and knows which model to send each job to.

BrandForge brand brief and identity panel: business name, personality tags, logo types, palette swatches and font pairing
The brief: business, audience, personality, logo types, palette and fonts

A real workflow

Projects, then a brief: the business, who it is for, its personality, the kinds of logo that fit, style words, and things to avoid. Then generate, either through the assistant or by hand with a provider, a prompt, presets, an aspect and a transparency setting. Refine by dropping in a sketch or a reference and going image to image with any provider. The gallery is where you favourite, vectorize, strip backgrounds, make mono, white and black variants, ask for a critique and export. There is a proper canvas editor with sixty-odd Google fonts, shapes, layers and undo, and at the end, the brand kit.

Six image models behind one screen

OpenAI, Google Gemini, Recraft, Ideogram, Black Forest Labs FLUX and Stability. You add only the keys you have and the app and the assistant adapt to what is configured. The local jobs, variants, vectorizing, background removal and resizing, do not touch a provider at all.

BrandForge brand kit export: master logo, deliverables list and the Build brand kit button
The brand kit screen, one button from the finished logo

One click, the whole kit

Transparent, black, white, primary and grayscale logos, an SVG, a favicon set from 16 to 512 pixels with the touch icon and 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. In the self-test run these screenshots come from, that was 49 files in about a second.

Shipped like real software

It installs from a proper Windows installer with a Start Menu entry, a desktop shortcut and its own icon. API keys are encrypted by Windows and stored per user. And it carries a self-test that drives the real interface end to end without spending a single API call, so a packaging change can be checked in a minute.

BrandForge app icon
The app icon

What this means for your business

When a site needs a logo, or a logo needs every size and format a business actually uses, I am not sending you to a template site or quoting you a week of export work. The tooling is mine, it is fast, and your files stay on my machine rather than on a subscription service. Version 1.0 was packaged and installed on 1 September 2026 and it is the tool I use.

Need a logo with the site?

Tell me what you run. You get a fixed price for the site, and the logo work is quoted alongside it.