What is Gradiently? The design tool built around living backgrounds

What is Gradiently? Gradiently is a design tool built around Marks: living gradient and material backgrounds that render live behind everything you design, from an Instagram post to a printed poster. You design with any Mark nobody has claimed, for free. When you find the one that feels like your brand, you claim it, and it becomes yours alone: one owner at a time, your name on its public record, a numbered certificate, and nobody else able to export with it.

That one idea, a background with exactly one owner, shapes the rest of the product: the Studio where you design, the Designer that can do it with you, and the Market where Marks are found, claimed and passed on.

Marks: the living backgrounds at the centre

A Mark is not an image file. It is a recipe: a set of colours, up to three stacked materials, a light, grain, motion and a type voice. Because it is a recipe, it is drawn fresh at every size you design in, so a story gets a composition made for a tall frame and a banner gets one made for a wide frame. Nothing is cropped or stretched.

Gradiently crafts every Mark and checks each new one against all the others. Anything too close to an existing Mark is refused, which is what makes owning one meaningful. Each has a public code like GR·K7Q2·MX, a creator that never changes and an owner that can. What is a Gradiently Mark goes deeper into the recipe.

Marks also know where your words are. The calmest, best contrasting part of the material moves behind your text, colours near the letters deepen or lift, and Auto ink picks light or dark type for each line from the Mark's own palette. No boxes, no shadows, no blur.

The Studio, where designs get made

The Studio is the editor. It has templates for posts, stories, posters, menus, cards and wallpapers, and you can swap your Mark into any of them. You add text, photos, shapes and icons, arrange layers with snapping, animate text with rise, pop, wipe or typewriter, and build carousels or decks across pages. Photos can be tinted in the Mark's colours as mono, duotone or a wash, so even a stock photo looks like part of the brand.

The Studio guide covers each tool. If you run more than one business, one account can hold several brands, each with its own brand kit: logos, palettes, a heading and body font, voice, audience and what the brand does.

The Designer and AI assistants

The Designer is Gradiently's AI. You describe what you need, such as "a story announcing our spring opening hours", and it asks what it needs to know, writes the words in your brand kit's voice, lays the design out in your Mark and makes other sizes. It also edits existing designs and picks templates. AI use is measured in credits. More in the Designer guide.

Gradiently also works inside ChatGPT, Claude and any assistant that supports remote MCP servers. With a scoped API key, which owners and admins create in Settings, your assistant can search Marks, read the workspace and create designs that open in the Studio, without spending Gradiently credits. Setup is in connect an AI assistant.

The Market and what owning a Mark means

The Market is where you browse Marks. Search by name, by colour words such as "deep teal", or by code, which works without the dots and in any case. Filter by look, and save the ones you love as favourites.

Owners can give a Mark to anyone on Gradiently for free, or list it on the Market at a price they set; when a brand claims it, Stripe pays the seller and Gradiently keeps a fee. Anyone can look up a certificate number such as GRC-7K2M-9QXA-4TPW or a Mark's code to see who holds it and its full history. If a yearly keeping payment goes unpaid there is a grace period, then the Mark returns to the Market. Designs you already exported stay yours.

Free and Pro in brief

The full breakdown, including what claiming adds on either plan, is in Gradiently Free vs Pro.

Who Gradiently is for

• Small businesses that post every week and want a look nobody else in town has. See Gradiently for small business.
• Creators whose feed, thumbnails and covers should be recognisable before anyone reads the name.
• Agencies and teams running several brands, with roles, comments and shared brand kits.
• Developers and AI power users who would rather ask ChatGPT or Claude for a design than open an editor.
• Anyone who isn't a designer but needs the words to read on every background, every time.

The app speaks 12 languages, and a person reads every support request, through the Help centre or hello@gradiently.design. To start, open the Market, try a few Marks on your own words and keep the one that still looks right a week later.