Consistency at startup speed: How Graphite.dev built a cohesive visual brand with exactly.ai

Graphite.dev helps high‑growth engineering teams ship software with confidence by modernising code review workflows. They are, in their own words, “code review for the age of AI.” That promise carries a particular pressure: if your product exists to remove friction from shipping, your brand has to move with the same ease. When we met Graphite, they were developing their core style and brand for the first time. It was an exciting moment – new narrative, new look, new customers – but also a familiar operational puzzle: how to keep everything consistently “Graphite” while the volume of required visuals kept rising.

The Challenge: Scaling quickly, but constrained by a thin 3D pipeline

It wasn’t about chasing the perfect aesthetic look. It was about building recognition and trust in the places that matter – on the site where prospects land, in the feature announcements where value is explained, in the documents that guide new users. 

Brand consistency is invisible when it’s working, and loudly visible when it’s not. The impact showed up in small, costly ways: a launch page waiting on a header image, a social thread slipping a couple of days, and a blog post that felt “close” but not quite Graphite. As the brand was taking shape, those near‑misses mattered. Designers were context‑switching, stakeholders were checking in for status, and cohesive visual consistency just wasn’t where it needed to be.

Graphite.dev had momentum, and with momentum comes demand. What the team didn’t have was a dedicated 3D function to match that demand. For a growing startup, plugging that demand with an in-house team of specialists wasn’t realistic, but the risk was a brand that felt slightly different each time it appeared. 

In their first brand build, Graphite needed a way to make “looks like us” the default, not the exception. They needed to protect the tone they were defining, keep production moving, and avoid building a hiring plan around a single specialisation. In a company built to speed up software shipping, visual production couldn’t be the slow lane.

The Solution: A brand-trained 3D system: structure, speed, control

Supporting with branding and a core style, exactly.ai enabled the Graphite team to generate and refine visuals that felt unmistakably theirs. Consistently, quickly, and without hiring. 

Exactly.ai lets creative teams train a private, brand‑owned style from their own images and then generate on‑brand visuals, securely and at scale. To get started, the team uploads a small, coherent dataset (as few as ten images are enough to prove the concept) drawn from their own work: illustrations, UI/product visuals, even 3D renders. The platform learns the look and produces new 3D iconography that carries that identity forward.

For Graphite, that meant two things right away. First, control and ownership: styles are private by default, and the outputs are fully licensed for commercial use, so there’s no hesitation about publishing. Second, practical production gains: teammates can share the same style, so everyone generates from one source of truth. 

The workflow is built for busy teams: upload, train, generate, refine, and then move on to the next release without a last‑minute scramble.

“Exactly.ai gave us a reliable way to keep our visuals feeling like Graphite.dev while we grew. We didn’t add a 3D team – we added consistency. Now the assets show up on time and on brand, which is exactly what our launches need.”

— Kirill Sudosa, Founding Brand Designer, Graphite.dev

The Results: A signature brand, recognisable at a glance

The most meaningful change showed up in the calendar. Instead of a blank box labelled “header image?” sitting in the middle of a launch plan, the box filled itself early. Mornings started with viable options on the table, and afternoons ended with assets shipped. Their brand looked like one brand wherever it appeared. People began to recognise it sooner. Internally, the conversation moved from “Do we have something?” to “Which of these works best?”

In numbers, the early indicators are starting to point the same way: 

• Time to market for key visuals is down 90%

• Brand‑recognition signals on visual posts are up 35%

• The first usable style was delivered within two business days

• The cost per new asset has decreased by 120% 

The practical outcome is already clear: visuals stopped being the bottleneck to a scaling startup. No one is waiting on a specialist. No one is re‑inventing the look. The brand does its job and gets out of the way.