Create designs that scale.

Freshcoat is an open-source, end-to-end design tool for producing print designs in batches. Create a design, add template placeholders, and generate an output for each record in your dataset. Perfect for creating cards, badges, certificates, and even watermarking images!

Freshcoat uses portable template and workspace formats. You can design and export in Studio, work from the command line, or use the packages in your own application.

What Freshcoat is for

Freshcoat is built around reusable designs and batch production. Its editing features are more focused than those of tools like Figma, Canva, or Adobe's design apps, which helps keep designs portable across Freshcoat's tools.

You can use it for other kinds of design work too, and we'd love to see what you make with it!

Why we're open sourcing it

We originally built Freshcoat for Davi's card production pipeline after struggling to find a tool that fit our needs. We're sharing it so others can build on it and adapt it to their own workflows. We also want the format and the code that interprets it to be open and understandable.

We're not experts in graphics engines or compiler design, and most of the work on Freshcoat has been AI-assisted. Our decisions draw on our experience with compilers, existing design tools, Canvas2D image generation, and producing designs at scale. There's still plenty for us to learn.

We'd welcome help finding mistakes, questioning assumptions, and improving Freshcoat's components. If that sounds like your kind of work, see the contribution guide.

Getting started

Whether you're designing cards or building an application, here's where to start.

If you want to	Start with
Try creating and exporting designs yourself	Freshcoat Studio
Turn your existing Figma designs into templates	Freshcoat for Figma plugin
Render templates from a terminal or your CI	Freshcoat CLI
Render templates in your own applications	Freshcoat Coatfile SDK
Prepare images for card printers	Freshcoat for Print SDK
Bind datasets to templates and batch-export them to ZIPs or PDFs	Freshcoat Workspace SDK
Build your own template format on a 2D renderer	Freshcoat Engine

Quick start

A template can be a .coat package or JSON, usually saved as .coat.json. Studio and the CLI also open template JSON named .json, like the example below. See the template format guide for how each format stores assets.

CLI

The CLI and its packages require Node 22 or later or Bun 1.3.13 or later. On Node 22, npm may show an EBADENGINE warning for hucre, the spreadsheet dependency, which declares Node 24. Spreadsheet import and export work on Node 22, so the warning is safe to ignore.

From a terminal, install the command line and render a template. To try it without a template of your own, download minimal-card.json and people.csv into your working directory:

# Install the CLI package
npm install --global @freshcoat-js/cli

# Render a card with "Alex" as its display name to `out`
freshcoat render minimal-card.json --set displayName="Alex" --out out

# Render a card for each row in a CSV with a `displayName` column
freshcoat render minimal-card.json --data people.csv --out cards.zip

See the CLI README for more details.

SDK

Using the same minimal-card.json template, install the Coatfile SDK:

npm install @freshcoat-js/coatfile

import { writeFile } from "node:fs/promises";
import { createTemplateRenderer, readTemplateFile } from "@freshcoat-js/coatfile/node";

const { template } = await readTemplateFile("minimal-card.json");
const renderer = await createTemplateRenderer({ fontOptions: {} });
try {
  const [front] = await renderer.render(template, { displayName: "Alex" });
  await writeFile("front.png", front.bytes);
} finally {
  renderer.dispose();
}

fontOptions: {} resolves undeclared fonts through Google Fonts, including the example's Comfortaa font. Omit it to load only fonts declared by the template or supplied to the renderer. Create the renderer once and reuse it. See the Coatfile SDK README for variants, export sizes and batch rendering.

Figma plugin

To make it easier to use your existing Figma designs in Freshcoat, we provide a Figma plugin that lets you export them as Freshcoat templates.

Develop

Requires Bun 1.3.13 or later. From the repository root:

bun install
bun run test
bun run typecheck

Each app and package has its own README with development commands. For example, bun run --cwd apps/editor dev starts Studio, while bun run --cwd apps/figma-plugin build builds the plugin. The root dev and build aliases target Studio for convenience.

To run the CLI from source, call its entry with Bun:

bun packages/cli/src/bin.ts render card.coat --out out

Release builds for the SDK packages and the command line include compiled ESM, TypeScript declarations and assets. Their source manifests are private and intended for workspace development; use the generated tarballs for publication. See the release guide for npm setup, release checks and Figma plugin bundles.

Documentation

• Architecture: package responsibilities and host boundaries.
• Contributing: repository setup, checks and review conventions.
• Upgrading from 0.4: what changed in 0.5 and how to move over.
• Upgrading from 0.3: what changed in 0.4 and how to move over.
• Releases: npm publication and Figma release bundles.
• CLI, Studio and Figma plugin: commands, behavior and guides for each tool.
• Each package README documents its API, runtime requirements and examples.

License

Freshcoat is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Copyright 2026 Dotside Studios; see NOTICE and third-party notices. The name and marks are not licensed; see NAMES-AND-LOGOS.md.