About
Made for the part of printmaking no software bothered with.
Drawing apps optimize for the drawing surface. Inventory apps optimize for the gallery. Between them sits the actual work of a relief printmaker: planning a reduction, carving the block, keeping the ink recipe that worked, numbering an edition, running an exchange. No tool covered that ground coherently, so Brayer does.
Built by printmakers · iPad and web · no AI, ever
01Principle
No AI, ever.
Posterize, threshold and contour extraction are classic image algorithms. They quantize colours and find edges, the way they did decades before the current wave, and they run on your iPad against the picture you gave them.
Brayer generates no images and no text. Nothing in it is trained on anyone’s prints, and nothing you draw or photograph is used to train anything.
This is a commitment, not a position held until it becomes inconvenient. If that ever changes, it changes in public, with an explicit opt-in, and never by touching your imagery without asking.
02Principle
Buy it once.
$7.99 at launch, $9.99 within six months of it. That buys all six modules in full, with no paywall inside the core workflow.
Studio+ exists at $2.99 a month or $24 a year, and it is genuinely optional. It covers cloud sync, cloud storage, the web studio, certificate pages and backups. The app is complete without any of it.
Printmakers buy tools and keep them. A 2 mm V gouge does not charge rent, and does not stop cutting because a card expired. Software for the same bench should behave the same way.
03Principle
Your archive is yours.
Every project can be exported as a .relief bundle: a zip archive holding a manifest, one JSON file per record, and the assets those records point at as PNG, HEIC, PDF and audio.
The manifest carries the schema version, the app and version that wrote it, an index of what is inside, and an SHA-256 checksum of the bundle. An import validates that checksum before it touches anything, shows you what the bundle contains, and asks how to resolve conflicts with what you already have.
The JSON is human-readable on purpose. You can open a bundle, read it, and write your own reader for it. Buyer and sale details are left out of exports by default, and go in only when you say so.
Exporting a project and importing it on another device comes back identical, timestamps and file paths aside. The reason you can leave is the reason you stay.
04Principle
The craft’s own words.
Impression, edition, BAT, AP, kento, chine-collé, à la poupée. The data model is built out of those words, so the interface uses them too. No records, no assets, no posts.
An impression is a first-class record from the moment you pull it, not once it sells. An edition can be committed, and after that the size cannot shrink and the BAT is frozen, because that is what signing an edition means on paper.
05Where it is now
Built, running, and headed for a private beta.
All six modules are built and running on iPadOS. The first version goes to a private beta of working printmakers before the App Store, and what that beta finds is what ships.
The exchange tools on this site are running now, free, with a web account: organize an exchange, join one with a code, track submissions, print mailing labels, publish a colophon. The same account signs in to the iPad app when it lands.