Hybrid canvas for designers who sketch in raster but deliver in vector

A UI designer or illustrator starts a project by sketching rough shapes in Photoshop — because that's where their brushes, textures, and photo references live — but the final deliverable has to be vector: icons for a design system, a logo for a client, spot illustrations for a website. Every complaint in this space points to the same structural mismatch: 'you cannot create vector images directly in Photoshop', 'in order to paint in vectors, you need to restorize paths', 'less control than Illustrator, no drawing'. The creative process starts in one tool and has to finish in a completely different one, with an awkward manual export in between.

This gap exists because the major vector tools were designed for precision drafting — Bézier curves, anchor points, technical illustration — not for the loose, exploratory sketching that precedes a finished vector design. Illustrator added brush tools but they feel bolted on. Photoshop added shapes but they feel like an afterthought. Neither app was designed from the ground up around the specific workflow of someone who draws first and vectorizes second. The incumbents can't fix this without admitting that two of their major products have overlapping, poorly integrated workflows.

What's missing is a canvas where a designer can lay down loose brush strokes, trace over photo references, and have the app progressively clean those strokes into editable vector paths — not as a post-process conversion step, but as part of the drawing act itself. The designer should end a session with a file they can hand to a developer as SVG or take to a printer as EPS, without ever opening a second application.

This is a business because the handoff between sketching and final vector delivery is a recurring cost in every project that involves illustration or iconography. Studios that produce icon sets, brand illustrations, or infographics do this dozens of times a month. The alternative — licensing both Photoshop and Illustrator, maintaining parallel files, and manually recreating artwork — costs real money and loses something in translation every time. A designer who finds a tool that closes this loop will advocate for it loudly because the pain is daily.

What to build

Build a Mac and iPad desktop app with a pressure-sensitive drawing canvas that converts brush strokes to clean Bézier paths in real time using stroke-to-vector inference, exports native SVG and EPS, and imports Photoshop PSD files as reference layers so designers can trace and vectorize without switching apps.

Where to start

Launch specifically for icon designers producing UI icon sets — their strokes are simpler and more geometric than illustrative work, which means the vector conversion quality bar is achievable early, and the community is vocal and well-networked enough that one strong advocate can drive significant word-of-mouth.

The hard part

Real-time stroke-to-vector conversion that feels natural rather than mechanical is a genuinely hard computer vision and UX problem — if the path cleanup is too aggressive it destroys the designer's intent, and if it's too loose the output isn't clean enough to use, so finding the right default behavior for the majority of users will take many iterations with real illustrators.

How it makes money

One-time purchase at $79–99 for the desktop app, with an optional $8/month plan that adds cloud sync and the iPad version — matching the pricing expectations of the Affinity-style market that has already shown willingness to pay for non-subscription pro tools.