Paper

Paper is a browser-based design tool focused on the early, exploratory phase of design. It gives designers a fast, expressive canvas to think visually, experiment freely, and play with things like shaders, gradients, and motion without worrying about handoff or engineering constraints.

Get to know Paper

Who’s behind Paper?

Hey, I'm Stephen 〰️ designer, engineer, and founder of Paper. I grew up with a cracked version of Photoshop when I was 14 years old. I was making these crazy renders in Bryce, stacking bad effects on top in Photoshop, and posting everything on DeviantArt. I was also a programmer at the time, so I was doing engineering and design and art. My career just naturally took itself more towards the engineering side, but I've always had that design component.

I somehow ended up in ecommerce. I got this really corporate job in New York City. I went from living on a goat farm 〰️ literally a cottage in the back of a goat farm in Northern California 〰️ to Manhattan. Just the craziest transition ever! I loved New York, but the corporate stuff itself wasn’t for me.

Then I saw a tweet from Colm Tuite looking for a cofounder. That turned into Modulz, the code-based design tool. We built Radix there, which is the React component library that's very widely used now by shadcn, Vercel, and Linear.

I worked at WorkOS for two years and ended up running product there. I love the founder, I love the people. But I really wanted to get back into the creative space. I love talking about design, I love talking about art. I love making tools for artists. I started the company in September 2024 as a solo founder. It wasn't called Paper yet. Since then we’ve added a small team and started building seriously. Tens of thousands of designers use the app every week.

What’s Paper and what’s so cool about it?

Paper is built intentionally around designers and the design process. Design and engineering are different jobs. Design is about things like what competitors are doing, what users are saying, and what your boss needs. In that earlier phase of design, you’re trying a lot of different things very quickly, and you don’t want constraints yet.

With Paper, we’re staying focused on designers, not trying to turn everyone into design engineers. Tools that introduce coding or responsive constraints too early can actually be harmful in the early process. We talk to designers constantly, doing design interviews every day, and that helps keep the product grounded in real workflows instead of assumptions.

Tool Stack of Paper

What’s under Paper’s hood? Which technologies were used and why did you choose them?

Paper runs in the browser, and performance is something we think about constantly. We don’t use many libraries and build most things from scratch because performance is critical for a design tool. We try to keep an 8 millisecond frame budget, which means around 120 frames per second.

For state management, we use MobX. It’s very helpful because it allows much more selective updates. On the component side, we use a mix of our own components and Base UI.

On the backend, we use Bun. Our primary data store is MongoDB. We load the entire file as soon as you open it, and we have almost no relationships, so Mongo fits the data model really well.

There’s also real-time multiplayer. We built our own multiplayer system based on WebSockets.

For infrastructure, we host on Fly.io and Cloudflare, using Workers and R2 for storage. Our IDE is Cursor, and we use a lot of AI while building.

Do you use any other tools to run the business?

We try to keep things very lean. For communication, we use Slack. For project management, we rely on tldraw. We’ve also started doing more of our project thinking inside Paper itself to dogfood the product, but tldraw is still hard to beat for quick thinking.

For email and calendars, we’re on Google Workspace. We do use Notion, but it’s more of a lightweight dumping ground than a system we live in every day.

What’s your personal stack? Which apps do you and your team love?

For email and calendars, I use Google Workspace. For notes and to-dos, I keep Sublime Text open all the time. I also keep pretty much every design tool installed. I pay for Photoshop, Sketch, Figma, Illustrator, XD 〰️ all of them. When we build features, like gradient tools, I usually look at how they work across different apps and pull the best parts together.

Anything else you’d like to share?

Early access opened recently, and we’re now in that phase where real usage and feedback start to shape everything. Seeing designers actually use Paper, react to it, and tell us what works or doesn’t has already been incredibly valuable. We’re still building fast, experimenting, and learning where to double down.