Recraft released V4 in July, and its pitch stays pointed at a niche the raster and video models keep ignoring: production graphic design. Where most generators produce a flat PNG, Recraft V4 outputs true editable vector artwork — paths, fills, and grouped shapes you can open in Illustrator or Figma — and its headline feature is a brand style system that constrains every generation to a defined palette, typeface, and visual language so a whole asset set actually looks like it came from one studio.
Watch: Recraft V4 & Recraft V4 Vector — New Model Tutorial (YouTube)
Vectors are the load-bearing difference
A generated raster logo is a dead end: you can’t recolor it cleanly, scale it to a billboard, or hand it to a print shop. Recraft V4 generates geometry, not pixels — the output is an SVG with named layers, so a designer can nudge a curve, swap a fill, or export at any resolution without quality loss. For icon sets, logos, and editorial illustration, that turns “nice reference I have to redraw” into “asset I can finish in minutes.”
Brand style as a constraint, not a suggestion
The workflow most teams need isn’t one striking image; it’s forty images that match. Recraft V4 lets you define a brand style — upload examples, lock a palette and type system — and every subsequent generation is pulled toward it. The infinite canvas extends this: place existing artwork on the board and the model reads it as context, so a new spot illustration inherits the line weight and color logic of the ones already there. It’s the difference between prompting in isolation and designing in a system.