Paper Shaders goes open source, Toolcraft arrives
Paper opens up their shader library, Pixel Point ships a starter kit for building your own design tools, and a few more things worth knowing about.
Paper↗ made their shader library fully open source this week. shaders.paper.design — 30+ WebGL effects including mesh gradients, noise textures, halftone, and aurora backgrounds — is now Apache 2.0, free for commercial use. Install via npm, design in their visual editor, export zero-dependency JS that works with React or vanilla.
Figma↗ released a Shaders↗ feature at Config (June 23) that takes plain-language descriptions and generates GLSL. Generative and flexible, but the output varies run to run. Paper↗'s library is hand-curated and consistent. Now that Paper↗'s is free, the case for reaching for Figma↗'s generative version is mostly when you need something outside the 30+ presets.
Also this week: Toolcraft, from Pixel Point. The premise: building a bespoke creative tool has always been slower than it should be. A custom image editor, a WebGL playground, an animation controls panel — you know roughly what you need, but assembling it from scratch burns time you don't have. Toolcraft is a starter kit with the parts most of these share: sliders, pickers, timeline editors, curve controls, canvas scaffold, export utilities. Run npx @pixel-point/toolcraft create and you have something to work from. It ships with AI prompting instructions tuned for more consistent first-pass results, which is what actually makes "AI writes the logic" work in practice rather than in theory.
One more from the bookmarks: Grainient. Unlimited gradients, animated backgrounds, AI-generated images up to 8K for landing pages and UI. Yearly or lifetime plans. It has been around a while and keeps improving — useful if you are doing a lot of visual production work and want something more reliable than a fresh AI prompt every time.