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Show HN: Graphite, a Blender-inspired 2D procedural design Rust app

Graphite is a free, open source vector and raster graphics engine, available now in alpha. Get creative with a nondestructive editing workflow that combines layer-based compositing with node-based generative design.

Painted Dreams — Made using nondestructive boolean operations and procedural dot patterns

Design for a magazine spread, a preview of the upcoming focus on desktop publishing

Valley of Spires — All layer stacks are represented, under the hood, by a node graph

Mandelbrot fractal filled with a noise pattern, procedurally generated and infinitely scalable

Coming soon: mockup for the actively in-development raster workflow with new nodes for photo editing


Starting life as a vector editor, Graphite is evolving into a generalized, all-in-one graphics toolbox that's built more like a game engine than a conventional creative app. The editor's tools wrap its node graph core, providing user-friendly workflows for vector, raster, and beyond.

One app to rule them all

Stop jumping between programs— upcoming tools will make Graphite a first-class content creation suite for many workflows, including:

Graphic Design

Image Editing

Motion Graphics

Digital Painting

VFX Compositing

Desktop Publishing

Current features

Vector editing tools

Procedural workflow for graphic design

Node-based layers

Forever free and open source

Presently, Graphite is a lightweight offline web app with features primarily oriented around procedural vector graphics editing.

Upcoming features

All-in-one creative tool for all things 2D

Fully-featured raster manipulation

Windows/Mac/Linux native apps + web

Live collaborative editing

Roadmap

Desktop-first and web-ready

Graphite is designed principally as a desktop-grade professional application that is also accessible in-browser for fast, casual usage.

Where's the download? Desktop apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux should be available later in 2024. Until then, you can install it as a PWA.

Developing and maintaining a native app on four platforms is a big task. To not compromise on the optimal desktop experience—which takes longer to do the right way—priorities called for initially supporting just web, the one platform that stays up-to-date and reaches all devices.

Once it's ready to shine, Graphite's code architecture is structured to deliver native performance for your graphically intensive workloads on desktop platforms and very low overhead on the web thanks to WebAssembly and WebGPU, new high-performance browser technologies.


Graphite is the first and only graphic design package built for procedural editing — where everything is nondestructive.

Save hours on tedious alterations and make better creative choices. Graphite lets you iterate rapidly by adjusting node parameters instead of individual elements.

Scatter circles with just a couple nodes...

Open this artwork and give it a try yourself.

Nondestructive editing means every decision is tied to a parameter you can adjust later on. Use Graphite to interpolate between any states just by dragging sliders.

Blend across color schemes. Morph shapes before they're scattered around the canvas. The possibilities are endless.

Open this artwork and give it a try yourself.

Geared for generative pipelines

Graphite's representation of artwork as a node graph lets you customize, compose, reuse, share, and automate your own content workflows:

Pixelation-free infinite zooming and panning of boundless content

Modular node-based pipelines for generative AI (soon)

Asset pipelines for studio production environments (soon)

Subscribe to the newsletter for quarterly updates on major development progress. And follow along—or join the conversation—on social media.

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Ready to dive in?

Get started with Graphite by following along to a hands-on quickstart tutorial.

Graphite Tutorial 1 - Hands-On Quickstart


Graphite progress report (Q3 2024)

Graphite, a new open source 2D procedural graphics editor, has spent July–September building major improvements to performance, node graph organization, nondestructive path editing, a new render engine, and more helpful nodes, amongst over 100 other features and fixes. This has been the most productive quarter yet in the project's three-year history. Most of our Google Summer of Code student intern projects have already reached their goals, adding to the goodies included in this progress report. All Q3 2024 commits may be viewed in this list and all noteworthy changes are detailed below.

Keep reading

Graphite progress report (Q2 2024)

Graphite, a new open source 2D procedural graphics editor, has spent April–June introducing boolean path operations, a new gradient picker, layer locking, and more improvements. Overall, editor functionality has been shaping up and becoming an all around useful tool suite, with notable reductions in rough edges for the vector graphics workflow (our initial focus). Raster and raw photo processing workflows are also now in-development by our Google Summer of Code student interns. Node graph quality-of-life improvements centered around tidy node organization are also the focus of the summer work that's underway. These projects are detailed below.

Keep reading