EA Cropping Tool

Working with game IP images at a company like EA means constantly cutting characters out of backgrounds, fitting them into layouts, and making sure they look right across a dozen different contexts. It’s tedious work that falls on designers, and it’s the kind of thing that creates a queue. So we built a tool to take that queue down to zero.

How it works

You drag in a full IP image — a game character, a creature, whatever — and the tool automatically removes the background using an AI-powered background removal API. From there, you can place the subject inside one of several brand shapes: sphere, cube, pyramid, or the EA trio. The real design challenge was what we called the breakout effect: the ability to have the character extend beyond the edge of the shape, so their head or arms push past the boundary and create something that feels dynamic rather than just stamped inside a circle.

To make that work, the tool is built as three independent layers — a background image, the shape itself, and a foreground image — all sharing the same crop. You control a vertical breakout line that determines where the shape clips the image, so you can dial in exactly how much of the character spills out. Shape scale, zoom, and horizontal position are all adjustable too, because you genuinely can’t predict how a given character is going to interact with a given shape until you see it. The flexibility isn’t nice-to-have — it’s the whole point.

Color options let you set the shape fill and background independently, with preset brand colors, a custom hex input, or an eyedropper that pulls the top three dominant colors straight from the uploaded image. Export gives you full quality or transparent background, and a tight crop option that trims to the exact edges of the composition. The tool also shows you the scale relationship between your upload and the output dimensions, so you don’t accidentally export a blurry asset from a small source image.

Why it matters

This is the same philosophy as the logo customizer: make the correct thing the easiest thing. Instead of a designer spending twenty minutes in Photoshop for every asset request, anyone with access to the tool can go from raw IP image to a production-ready, on-brand export in under a minute. The brand rules are baked into the shape options and color presets — you can customize within the system, but you can’t easily go off it.