While writing articles for our website, we kept running into friction around Open Graph images. We were using Vercel OG, which is powerful, but every time we wanted to change the design — layout, typography, branding — we had to go back into code, redesign components, and copy things over again. It worked, but it was tedious and made iteration unnecessarily slow. We started looking for tools that would let us design once and reuse everywhere. Most of what we found fell into one of three buckets: - Too generic - Not flexible enough - Or still required manually recreating designs in code So we decided to build something for ourselves. The first version was simple but effective: a way to design templates visually and render images dynamically through an API. The core idea was clear from the beginning — design and logic should be separate. If we wanted to change how things looked, we should only have to update the design, not rewrite code. As we used it more, it became obvious that this problem wasn’t just about Open Graph images. The same friction showed up everywhere: - Social media images - Marketing banners - Certificates and badges - Reports and invoices - PDFs and other documents generated at scale That’s when we realized we were sitting on a much bigger opportunity. What started as a personal workaround evolved into the foundation for a broader platform focused on image and document automation. Today, that product is Canvelete. Canvelete provides: A flexible visual editor for designing reusable templates APIs and SDKs to generate images and PDFs dynamically No-code integrations with tools like Zapier and n8n A single dashboard to manage templates, generations, and automations We’re incredibly proud that just the two of us were able to take this from a day-to-day frustration to a live product in only a couple of months. This is still the beginning, but it reinforced something important for us: the most meaningful products often start by solving problems you personally feel every day — then grow as you recognize the pattern extends far beyond you. If you’ve dealt with image or document generation, design automation, or scaling visual content, we’d love to hear your thoughts or feedback.

Canvelete

Design Once, Automate

Design Once, Automate