Free and open source · Local & works offline · Made for Mac
Over the past twenty years, design software has moved from canvas to cloud, from file to system, from designer to organization. Accomplice brings it back to the pixel, the path, and the person.
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It was discontinued in 2013 because it belonged to a company whose plans changed. Nothing since has wanted to be what it was: one person, one file, pixels and paths in the same canvas, assets out the door by lunch. Early Sketch came closest, before it became a platform.
Early Sketch came closest. Then Figma arrived and Sketch did the reasonable thing: it chased. Cloud, multiplayer, shared libraries, a subscription. None of that was a mistake. When your competitor is winning on collaboration, you go get collaboration. It went from about 45% of designers to under 5% anyway, and the fast, quiet, single-player tool people fell for isn’t really what’s left. That’s the second way a tool stops being itself. Nobody took it away. It just kept adding.
I know how that story ends, because more than half the design files on my own disk are in formats that no longer open. The work didn’t wear out. The software left.
So Accomplice is built so it can’t happen again. Every document is a PNG with the source riding inside it. The file is its own preview, and every page ships as plain SVG in the archive. If the app vanished tomorrow, your artwork doesn’t: unzip it. No app required, ten years from now.
And the app itself can’t be taken away either. It’s MIT licensed and open source. If this project ever stops, fork it. The build instructions are in the README, and they work.
That covers the tool disappearing. The other promise is that it won’t creep. No real-time cursors, no comment threads, no variables or token management, nothing to maintain before you can draw. Not because those are bad ideas, but because they’re someone else’s, and every tool that goes and gets them stops being this one.
I can promise that for a boring reason: there’s nobody to make me break it. No investors, no seat count to grow, no board asking about enterprise. Sketch meant it in 2013 too. The difference isn’t discipline, it’s that I don’t have the pressure they had.
This tool is aimed at one person making one file. Being clear about the edges is the point.
Subtract one shape from another and both stay editable. Double-click straight into the combined shape, even into the holes. Corner radius stays a number. A star remembers its point count. Erasing a photo never destroys a pixel underneath.
One file per document, in a folder you chose. It previews in Finder because it is a PNG. Diff it, commit it, email it, back it up. What you see on canvas and what exports are drawn by the same code, so they can never disagree.
Rename forty layers. Reorder the list to match the canvas. Recolour every black fill at once. It runs against a model on your own machine or a key you own, it only acts when you ask, and every change is one ordinary undo step. Your files are never used to train anything.