Brandmarks
Logo API alternative to Clearbit
This weekend we put some tweaks in place in order to identify the best possible quality version logo for an organization. We are now doing this by retrieving all of the possible detected logos and selecting the one with the highest width x height dimension.
This allows developers to feel better that the logos returned by the Embed API to show the best possible logo. (In the future, we might make it possible for the developer to choose which one to actually show, but we're still looking into whether this is even necessary)
My hope is that this increases developer use of the service, and eventually grows our traffic due to reputation.
Even though we don't have a ton of traffic yet, I have done some performance optimizations so that we can handle the first loads of traffic reasonably. The first implementation was so rough and crude that it was slower than molasses.
Now we take advantage of caching important information so that we're not refetching logos unnecessarily, and when users specify a size we only go and resize it once. The first time it can take about 500ms-1000ms (depending on how long it takes to process the original and convert to the new size), but subsequent requests are only 30-50ms.
OK, so while the full API is still in development, here's how you can use the Brandmarks Logo API right now:
Create an IMG tag in your content (HTML):
<img src="//brandmarks.io/logo/DOMAIN_NAME">
replacing the DOMAIN_NAME with a domain that you want a logo for. This is especially useful if you have a database of users that you want to visualize their company, or for a portfolio system that needs to show the companies or websites that people are using.
For example, here at Indie Hackers, it could be used to show a logo for each of the Products automatically, based on the website that is set (hint hint: @csallen).
Give it a go and give me some feedback.
Cheers!
Alright, it's ready. It is simple, but it is useful.
If you make websites and you have URLs, domains, etc, and you want to show a logo that relates to that, the Brandmarks basic Image API can discover, cache and show a corresponding organization's logo for a given domain.
Please, give it a try and let me know how it works for you. Critical feedback welcome.
And if you end up using it in something useful, don't forget to tell me here and also on Twitter so we can mutually benefit from the awesomeness.
Alright! Surprisingly got a few hits of traffic that I didn't expect on something that I quite literally just launched. That is giving me a lot of incentive to make improvements rapidly.
I pushed out some improvements to layout and design, and I am starting to flesh out the documentation and other related areas of the site (such as the API).
Very soon people will be able to actually use this thing for their own products.
I got incredibly tired of using Clearbit's Logo API, so I decided to build Brandmarks. This initial version is clearly not complete, has no marketing presence, has no revenue generation, and needs tuning for scale. But it's an exciting start that I was able to build very quickly.
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