Charcoal Panel UI Kit — single-framed panels and buttons

The same restless line as the light hand-drawn family, inverted: pale chalk on a dark ground. That inversion is not a recolour — a drawn line reads as ink when it is dark on light and as chalk when it is light on dark, and the stroke had to go from 3px to a heavier weight because a thin pale line on black disappears the moment anything is behind it.

Two nine-slice panels — a single-framed window frame with 12 px corners and a recessed inset frame with 10 px corners — cover almost every box a menu needs: dialogs, inventory grids, list backgrounds, tooltips and stat panels. A single continuous border keeps the panel quiet enough to sit behind dense text. Both stretch cleanly to any size because the corners never scale and the centre is a flat fill.

On top of the panels sit twelve tab button sprites: default, hover, pressed and disabled, each drawn three times — a standard 160×52 bar, a square icon button and a compact button for toolbars and inline actions. The three sizes are separate files rather than one scaled sprite because the drawing is size-dependent: the chamfer computed at 52 px is recomputed at the smaller ones, not shrunk. The pressed state drops its face two pixels and removes the top highlight rather than just darkening, which is what makes a button feel clicked rather than merely recoloured.

Four smaller parts cover what a menu needs between the panels: a tooltip with a pointer tail, a header bar that sits along the top of a panel, a section divider with a centre mark, and a label chip for counts and status tags. None of them are the window panel at another size — a nine-slice already stretches to any size, so a second file at a different width would be filler rather than a component.

Everything ships twice. The SVG sources are the files the kit was drawn in — open them, change the six smoke grey tones or the single ember orange accent, and re-export. The PNG exports are flat, transparent and pre-scaled at 1x, 2x and 4x for engines that want bitmaps, with no premultiplied alpha and no baked-in shadow outside the sprite bounds.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — Free for commercial use. Credit required. Full terms · What this means in practice