Brand Kit for SaaS Founders: What You Need by Launch Day

Most brand-kit advice is written for companies that already have customers. As a SaaS founder shipping v1, you need a shorter list: the handful of assets your product and marketing site will break without, and nothing else.

Launch day is not the day to commission a logo system with usage rules for billboards you will never buy. It is the day your favicon has to show up in a browser tab, your link previews have to not look broken in a Slack channel, and your sign-up page has to look like a real company built it. That is the whole bar. Clear it, then move on.

What you actually need by launch day

Keep the launch kit this small. Each item is here because something visible breaks without it.

• A logo, exported as SVG (for the site) and PNG (for everywhere that won't take SVG)
• A favicon set: 16 and 32px in an .ico file, a 180px Apple touch icon, and 192 and 512px PNGs for installable web apps
• A 1200x630 OG image, so a shared link previews with your name instead of a gray placeholder
• A color palette with hex codes you can paste straight into CSS
• Profile and header images for the two or three social accounts you'll actually post to
• Light, dark, and transparent versions of the logo
• A 1024px app-icon master, but only if you're shipping a mobile app

That's it. If a founder handed me this and nothing else on launch morning, I'd call the brand side done.

Why each one matters

Two logo formats cover the split you hit immediately: SVG stays sharp at any size in the browser and in your app header, while PNG is the fallback for the places that reject SVG, like some email clients and older upload forms. If you're unsure which to hand where, PNG vs SVG for logos breaks down the split.

Founders forget the favicon until they see the generic globe icon sitting in the browser tab next to twelve competitors. It's a tiny file that makes the tab recognizable, and it needs a few sizes to cover browsers, iOS home screens, and installable web apps. Turning your logo into a favicon covers the sizing and the simplification a logo usually needs to survive at 16 pixels.

The first time someone drops your link in Slack, iMessage, or a tweet, the OG image decides what they see. Without one, the preview is a blank card, and a blank card reads as "not a real product yet." One 1200x630 image fixes it everywhere at once. Here's how to build the OG image from your logo, including the safe area so nothing important gets cropped.

A color palette keeps your marketing site, your app, and your social profiles from looking like three different companies. You don't need a twelve-swatch system on day one. You need a primary, a couple of supporting colors, a neutral, and a text color, all with hex codes. Building a five-color palette from your logo walks through the roles.

Social images are sized per platform, and the sizes change often enough that guessing wastes an afternoon. Pull the current numbers from the social media sizing guide rather than eyeballing a crop.

Those logo variants matter because your logo lands on a white nav bar, a dark footer, and a photo hero on the same site. One version can't sit cleanly on all three. Creating light, dark, and transparent versions is the fix, and it takes minutes if you do it up front instead of patching it later.

The app icon only applies if you have a mobile app. If you do, everything derives from a 1024px master, and the platforms want a stack of smaller sizes below it. The app icon size reference has the full list for iOS and Android.

What to skip before launch

The temptation is to treat launch as the moment to get branding "done." It isn't. Leave these alone until someone besides you actually needs them:

• Printed collateral: business cards, letterhead, one-pagers
• A mascot or custom illustration set
• A full brand style guide with tone-of-voice rules and dos-and-don'ts
• Swag: stickers, t-shirts, that kind of thing
• Multiple logo lockups for use cases you don't have yet

The style guide is worth calling out. It's a real asset, just not a launch-day one. Once more than one person is touching your brand, a brand style guide keeps them consistent. On launch day, when the only person touching it is you, it's a document you'll write and never open.

If you're short on time, here's the order

Cut from the bottom. The minimum that keeps you from looking broken:

1. Favicon and OG image. These are the two that make you look unfinished if they're missing, and they're the two founders skip.
2. Logo files (SVG and PNG) and the light/dark/transparent variants.
3. Color palette with hex codes.
4. Social profile and header images.
5. App icon, if and only if you're shipping mobile.

Ship one through four and you're fine. Nobody has ever bounced off a sign-up page because the founder hadn't finalized their letterhead.

Where a brand kit generator fits

Done by hand, this is mostly annoying export work. You save the same logo out at eight sizes, line up the OG safe area, and copy one set of hex codes into three files without letting them drift. A brand kit generator takes that off your plate: the favicon set, OG image, palette, and logo variants come out together and sized right, instead of you finding out three weeks in that the Apple touch icon was never generated.

The payoff is that everything matches. When the favicon and OG image come out of the same source as the app icon, you're not hand-reconciling three near-identical files the night before launch. When you hand any of it to a developer, package it so they can use it directly rather than emailing loose files.

A launch-morning checklist

Before you flip the site live, run through this:

• Does a shared link preview correctly in Slack or iMessage, with your OG image and not a blank card?
• Is the favicon showing in the browser tab, including on an iPhone home screen?
• Does the logo sit cleanly on your dark footer and your light nav, not just one of them?
• Are your marketing site, app, and social profiles using the same colors?
• If you have a mobile app, did the app icon actually get generated at every required size?
• Did you skip anything on this list because it was hard, rather than because you don't need it?

Brandize can generate the favicon set, OG image, palette, and logo variants from one logo file. Once those are exported, get back to the product.