Your procedural toolbox for 2D content creation
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
Valley of Spires — The layer stack is represented, under the hood, by a node graph (shown fully expanded)
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
Software overview
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
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.
The power of proceduralism
Graphite is the first and only graphic design package built for procedural editing — where everything is nondestructive.
Explore more creative avenues
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...
Want them denser? Bigger? Those are sliders.
Want a different placement area? Just tweak the path.
Open this artwork and give it a try yourself.
Mix and morph parameters
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.
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)
Support the mission
If you aren't paying for your free software, someone else is covering your share. Chip in so Graphite remains sustainable and independent.
Ready to dive in?
Get started with Graphite by following along to a hands-on quickstart tutorial.
Recent news / More in the blog
Graphite progress report (Q3 2024)
Graphite, an open source 2D procedural graphics editor, has spent the months of July, August, and September introducing node graph organisation, non destructive vector editing, faster boolean operations, and many more improvements. In this quater we have continued iterating on the usability of our unqiue node powered vector workflow. As we reach the conclusion of the Google Summer of Code projects, we now have a polished node graph organisation system, a working RAW image pipeline (not yet in the editor), and a WebGPU based renderer (File -> Preferences -> Vello). Thanks to the students for their hard work on this and to Google's open source team for sponsoring.
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.