An iPad app from Old Beach, 2011.

Procreate is a drawing and painting app for Apple’s iPad, and its maker is a long way from Silicon Valley. Wikipedia says Procreate is developed and published by the Australian company Savage Interactive, based in Tasmania, and that it was released on the App Store in 2011. Make It Tasmania, a site promoting business in the state, profiled the company in April 2019 and said Procreate was born in an Old Beach home in southern Tasmania.

The founders are a couple. The same profile described James Cuda as chief executive, co-founder, product designer and creative director of Savage Interactive, and quoted him saying he moved to Tasmania in 2000 with the woman who became his wife and fellow co-founder, Alanna. Cuda told the site that when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad, the pair saw the potential of the device and decided to build creative tools for creative professionals on it. He also said that he designed the Procreate interface himself, that the team works from Hobart, and that Savage had not taken venture capital.

The app drew notice from artists early. A guest post on the iPad art blog fingerpainted.it, dated 24 March 2011, introduced Procreate as a new painting app for the iPad and named Savage Interactive as the developer. The writer reported that Savage said it had built a custom painting engine written in OpenGL ES 2.0, and described a brush editor that let a user take the shape and grain of a brush from their own photos.

The name is an ordinary English verb rather than a coined term. To procreate is to bring something new into being, and the word contains “create” in plain sight. Savage built its whole product family on that single word, and later the company itself came to be known by it.

The early reviewers noticed the interface as much as the engine. The fingerpainted.it writer singled out the size and opacity sliders placed on the left-hand side of the screen, which could be adjusted while painting, a detail that fits Cuda’s description of himself as the designer of the app’s interface.

Engines, a pocket version and a studio name.

The product grew in steps, and each one has a date. Digital Arts reported in December 2014 that Savage had released Procreate Pocket, an iPhone version of the iPad app. James Cuda told the magazine that ever since Procreate 1.0 came out in 2011 the team had wanted to bring it to the iPhone, and that the larger screens of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus made it the right moment. The article said Pocket ran on Procreate’s Silica painting engine.

A new engine followed. The Verge reported in September 2019 that the coming Procreate 5 update would bring a graphics engine called Valkyrie, the ability to import Adobe Photoshop brushes, a full-screen Brush Studio, colour tools called Color Dynamics, and support for CMYK and RGB colour profiles for print and web. The same report noted that the app had gained an animation feature in April 2019.

Animation later became a product of its own. Creative Bloq, reviewing Procreate Dreams on 22 November 2023, described it as an animation app for the iPad and noted that Savage Interactive now trades under the name Procreate. That small detail matters for the brand: the product name has become the company’s public name, and the family of apps, Procreate, Procreate Pocket and Procreate Dreams, all carry it in front.

The engines carry names too. Silica and Valkyrie are internal technologies, but the company has named them in public, which gives a technical update a label that can be talked about. The pattern of the brand is consistent: one word, Procreate, for everything a customer buys, with descriptive second words for the iPhone and animation versions.

Wordmarks, symbols and screens.

Design software carries its identity on surfaces that most brands never have to think about. The first is the app icon: a square of a few hundred pixels that sits in a dock, a taskbar or a launcher beside dozens of others, and that has to be recognisable at a size smaller than a fingernail. Icons for creative tools are often redrawn when an operating system changes its visual language, so a single program can accumulate several generations of icon over its life.

The second surface is the splash screen or start window, the image that appears while the program loads. For many users it is the moment they see the product name at full size, and it is frequently refreshed with each major release.

A third surface is the file format. A document extension appears in file names, in email attachments and in folder listings, and a distinct document icon lets a user spot a working file among exports. The extension often outlives the interface around it.

Finally, release names and version numbers act as a kind of sub-brand. A numbered release, a year-based name or a renamed edition tells users which generation of the tool they have, and the way a developer numbers its versions becomes part of how the product is talked about.

A human at the centre of the canvas.

In August 2024 Procreate made a statement that became part of its identity. Ars Technica reported on 20 August 2024 that Procreate had announced the previous Sunday that it would not incorporate generative AI into its iPad illustration app. The company posted its position on its website and James Cuda set it out in a short video on X. In it he said the company would not be introducing any generative AI into its products, and that its products are always designed and developed with the idea that a human will be creating something.

Ars Technica placed the announcement in the context of a backlash from parts of the art community over the use of AI image tools, and reported that the replies to Procreate’s post were largely positive. For a brand, the effect was to turn a product decision into a public promise. The statement is short, delivered by the chief executive in person and published on the company’s own site.

The rest of the identity is quieter. The app is named after a verb about making, the company now trades under the product’s name, and its founders describe a studio in Hobart that has stayed in Tasmania. The two strands, a small team in an island state and a statement about human creativity, tell a single story about who the software is for.

For a design guide, Procreate shows how a single word can carry a whole family of apps, and how a company’s published stance can become as much a part of the brand as its icon. Compare Adobe, whose Photoshop brushes Procreate 5 learned to import, and Affinity, another maker of creative apps for the iPad. For this guide we use wet ochre, brush pink and ink violet with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Procreate’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.