Inkwell Panel UI Kit — single-framed panels and buttons

A comic kit that gets its weight from ink, not from lighting. Every surface is a flat fill inside a heavy dark outline with a hard offset shadow underneath — no bevels, no gradients, nothing that pretends the screen has a light source. That is what makes it sit next to hand-drawn character art without looking like a different game.

Two nine-slice panels — a single-framed window frame with 26 px corners and a recessed inset frame with 18 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 square button sprites: default, hover, pressed and disabled, each drawn three times — a standard 152×52 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 flat poster tones or the single signal red 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.

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