What is CardKit?

CardKit is a simple to use image creation tool, built for the web.

A recent report from Twitter found that tweets with multimedia and images in perform significantly better in terms of retweets when compared to normal tweets. CardKit makes it simple to create visually stunning images for use on social media, with minimal effort, and without the need for complex or expensive image editing software. CardKit only gives you the controls you need and hides the rest.

Why did we develop CardKit?

Initially CardKit was a fork of Vox Media's Meme library, a canvas based image editor. Whilst it was good and offered us a great starting point, we quickly came up against a number of issues with Meme, particularly around theming and quickly adding multiple elements.

We had a number of different themes to apply to our 'cards', and wanted an easy way to add or remove elements, and tweak the amount of control on a per-element-basis. We based the new CardKit on Snap.svg, a great open source SVG manipulation library. This gave us much more control over every element, and integrating it with AngularJS allowed us to quickly build an interface around our configuration file.

CardKit has gone on to gain additional controls over output scale, dimensions, multiple images, image filters and more. We have been using this version of CardKit in production at The Times and Sunday Times since early 2015, and it has revolutionised the way we create images for use on social media. We are also using it for many other purposes, including templated asset creation for email newsletters.