SwarmGen

SwarmGen is Swarm Labs’ image and PDF generation platform: design a template once, connect your data, and get a finished graphic for every row, automatically. Swarm Labs built the application; Spotlight’s brief was everything around it: a dark, precise product identity and the rendering engine underneath, which can queue thousands of jobs and hand back finished files without breaking stride.

Turning an internal tool into a public platform set design and infrastructure challenges in equal measure:

• The bottleneck is hand-offs, not design: every personalised variant used to mean another request to a designer; the product had to make “design once, render thousands” feel obvious from the first screen.
• Two audiences, one editor: marketers needed a friendly fill-in-the-fields workflow, while developers needed precise control; the same editor had to serve both.
• Pixel-perfect fidelity: the file that comes out had to match the approved design exactly, every single time. Near enough was never going to be acceptable.
• Big batches without babysitting: one image should appear instantly, but a thousand shouldn’t need someone watching over them; the system that asked for them should simply be told when they’re ready.
• Other people’s designs, safely: an open platform renders whatever its users upload, so it had to be locked down against abuse before launch.

Spotlight designed SwarmGen’s product identity and built the rendering engine behind it:

• A dark, focused editor: near-black screens with a violet-to-magenta signature, a split view where changing a field instantly updates the preview, and an AI assistant that edits the current template from a plain-English request.
• A real browser does the rendering: every file is produced by the same engine that powers Google Chrome, so what ships is pixel-for-pixel what the designer approved.
• Instant one-offs, effortless batches: single renders come straight back; large batches queue up quietly and announce themselves the moment they’re finished.
• Share-safe links: finished files come back as time-limited links that can be shared without exposing anything else.
• Locked down by default: each workspace’s templates and data are sealed off from every other’s, uploads are strictly checked, and access is controlled and rate-limited.

SwarmGen launched as a genuine product rather than a repackaged internal script: anyone can start on a free tier of 50 renders with no card required, and plans scale to 25,000 renders a month on the same engine. Because every render goes through a real browser engine, the file that ships matches the approved template exactly, across more than 40 ready-made sizes, from social posts and ad creatives to certificates. And because it connects to tools like Make, Zapier and Shopify, whole workflows can generate finished graphics with no human in the loop.

Spotlight continues to run everything behind swarmgen.io, from the rendering engine to the hosting and delivery, alongside Managed Website Hosting and support across the wider Swarm Labs product family. Design and infrastructure by Spotlight Studios; application by Swarm Labs.