Brilliant on the web

Brilliant is a desktop app first, and your work lives as plain files on your own disk. But there is a whole other half at brilliant.design: a place to publish your designs, share them by link, collaborate live, and give every project a home on the web.

If you have used GitHub for code, the shape will feel familiar. You get a profile, you publish projects, you can fork what other people share, and small pieces travel around as drops. Nothing goes online until you choose to publish, and going public is always free.

Signing in

Brilliant has no passwords. You sign in one of two ways:

Email code. Enter your email and Brilliant sends you a 6-digit code. Type it back and you are in. The code is good for a few minutes.
Google. One tap, and you are signed in with your Google account.

It is the same account on desktop and on the web, so publishing from the app and browsing your profile in a browser are the same identity. Signing in on desktop is required to use the app at all. See Handles and profiles for what your account looks like once you are in.

Your profile is your home

On the web, your home is your profile at brilliant.design/{handle}. Every account gets a friendly word-pair handle automatically (something like @blue-penguin), and your profile lives there.

Your profile has four tabs:

Overview: a README card (drawn from a project named after your handle), your pinned and recent projects, and a year-long activity graph.
Projects: everything you have published.
Drops: your published drops.
Stars: the projects and drops you have starred.

Full details on handles, pinning, and the blue badge are in Handles and profiles.

Opening a project in the browser

A published project opens right in the browser. It is the real Brilliant editor, compiled to run on the web, not a watered-down viewer.

If you own the project or were invited as an editor, you get the full editor: the same tools, panels, and design commands you use on desktop. A couple of desktop-only things stay on desktop (moving files around on disk, importing another .bl file, and video export), but drawing, editing, importing images and SVGs, and exporting to PNG, SVG, and the rest all work.
If you are just visiting a public project, you get a view-only editor: pan, zoom, select, inspect properties, and copy elements out. You can look at everything and take pieces with you, but you cannot change the owner's work. The first time you try to change something, the owner's work stays untouched and you get a couple of doors: Open in playground flips the project into a throwaway, editable scratch space right where you are, so you can try your own edits with no account and no commitment; and, when you are signed in, Fork makes a permanent copy under your own handle.

The web editor renders on WebGPU, so it needs a recent browser. Open it in Chrome, Edge, Safari 26 or later, or Samsung Internet and it works. In a browser without WebGPU, Brilliant tells you so instead of rendering a broken canvas.

On a phone or tablet, a project opens in a read-only viewer built for touch: pinch to pan, tap an element to inspect it, and share or fork from there. To edit, come back on a desktop browser.

The playground

Want to try Brilliant with no account at all? brilliant.design/playground drops you straight into the editor. Design something real, then sign in and keep it: the canvas becomes your first project, live, right where you left off.

The desktop home screen ties it together

Back in the desktop app, the home screen is the bridge between the files on your disk and your projects in the cloud. It is a sidebar plus a grid of project tiles.

The sidebar groups your work: Recent, Local (folders that live on your machine only), Synced (projects that live on your machine and in the cloud), and Cloud (projects that live only in the cloud). Each tile shows a few canvas thumbnails, the project name, and a small badge: nothing for a purely local project, a cloud or sync icon for a published one (sync when it also lives on your disk), plus a lock when it is private.

So the same project can start as a local folder, become a published cloud project when you are ready, and show up on your web profile, all without ever leaving the app to make it happen.

Put a project online: Publish a project covers publishing, visibility, checkpoints, and forks.
Understand what leaves your machine: How sync works is the honest data story.
See what you pay for: Plans and billing.