Student projects

Graphite offers a number of opportunities for students to contribute by building a self-contained project as part of a structured format. These projects are designed to be completed over several months and are ideal for Google Summer of Code or similar internship programs, solo or group university capstone projects, and other arrangements. Each project has a distinct focus and is a great way to make a meaningful contribution to open source over the length of the program while receiving mentorship and guidance from the Graphite team.

Student projects require adherence to a set schedule with regular check-ins, milestones, and evaluations. The structured setting is designed to provide a supportive environment for students to learn and grow as developers while gaining real-world industry experience from collaborating on a sizable software product and remaining accountable to stakeholders. It's our goal to make sure you succeed!

Use this contributor guide to start out with the code. Then when you're ready, reach out through Discord and use the #🎓student-projects channel to discuss and work towards proposing a project with the Graphite core team.

Google Summer of Code

GSoC is a program offering students a stipend for successful completion of an internship-style experience with an open source organization. Read about how it works.

Graphite participated in GSoC 2024 and we anticipate doing so again in 2025. Getting involved early is a great way to have a head start and stand out next summer.

Writing a proposal

Writing a good proposal is an important first step that demonstrates your understanding of the project and your ability to plan and execute it. A well-defined proposal will set you up for success throughout the rest of the program.

You are encouraged to reference the project idea list below to find several potential projects suited to your experience, interest, and choice of scope. Then, you must reach out to a core team member through Discord to discuss your plan in detail before writing a proposal. This will help you understand the project's scope and requirements and develop a detailed timeline for your expected summer-long work schedule. Importantly, it will also help us understand your background and capabilities to offer you feedback and suggestions for the best outcome in the competitive applicant selection process.

When it comes to writing the proposal, which you will submit to the GSoC application website, we offer some guidelines below:

Proposal structure: Please consult the Blender GSoC application template as reference for our desired format. For project ideas already listed below, omit the "Benefits" section. Remember: don't waste your—and our—time restating information that we already know, like background info about Graphite or our tech stack; we just want to hear your thoughts and plans about what you uniquely bring to the table and how you'll execute the project. Proposals should be utilitarian, not formal, while also demonstrating your professional communication skills. Using an LLM to write your proposal won't be to your advantage.
Experience: We're especially interested in your background and work experience, so attaching a résumé or CV is an optional but recommended way to help us understand your capabilities. If able, please also include links to past open source contributions or personal projects in the bio section. Our goal is to provide an environment for you to learn and grow as a productive software engineer and team collaborator, not to help you learn the basics of coding, so any included work examples will help us understand your potential as a self-motivated contributor to the open source community.
Work timeline: Your goal is to write a proposal that inspires confidence in your ability to successfully complete the project, which means understanding in detail what's involved at a technical level and how you plan to tackle it. A detailed work timeline is the most important written part of your proposal. It should be broken into weekly or bi-weekly milestones with a couple sentences of technical detail. The summary in the project idea list below doesn't give enough information to develop a timeline, so you'll need to discuss this with the core team on Discord.
Prior PRs: The largest factor in our selection decision will be the quality and extent of your prior contributions to Graphite made during the proposal formulation period (or before, if applicable). Include a link to https://github.com/GraphiteEditor/Graphite/commits?author=YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME in your proposal and feel free to write up a summary of what you've contributed and learned from the process. You may also keep contributing during the month after applications close, before we've finalized our selections, for those additional PRs to be considered.

Project idea list

Marquee selection masking

Graphite's raster editing features requires the implementation of Select mode, where users can draw a mask which becomes a marquee (marching ants) selection.

Needed Skills: Rust, computer graphics
Project Size: Large (GSoC: 350 hours)
Difficulty: Medium
Expected Outcomes: Complete implementation of Mask mode and its marquee selection. Marching ants visualization shader effect. Integration of selection mask with the node graph and raster editing tools. Useful raster editing workflow.

A central part of the workflow in raster image editors is the selection of portions of the image to constrain manipulations just to the masked areas. Tools such as the circular and rectangular marquee, lasso, and magic wand are used to create masks. Instead of using dedicated tools, Graphite's design reuses the existing vector and raster drawing tools (like Rectangle, Ellipse, Pen, and Fill) to create masks in a dedicated Mask mode. Returning from Mask mode reveals the marching ants selection that constrains further editing operations.

This is a key feature in Graphite's evolution to a fully-featured raster editor.

Machine learning architecture

Generative AI and vision ML models will need to run in Graphite's node graph with a Rust-centric, modular, portable, deployable, scalable environment.

Needed Skills: Machine learning (and potentially: Rust, Python, ONNX, Candle, Burn)
Project Size: Large (GSoC: 350 hours)
Difficulty: Hard
Expected Outcomes: Specifics will vary by proposal. In general, a useful end-to-end integration of at least one GenAI or vision model into Graphite's node graph which can run locally and deploy to a server.

AI is filling a rapidly growing role as a tool in the creative process. Graphite's procedural node-based workflow is uniquely suited to leveraging the power and flexibility of machine learning nodes.

Segment Anything (object segmentation), Depth Anything (depth estimation), and Stable Diffusion (image generation, generative fill, style transfer, etc.) are currently the three models we are most interested in integrating. The challenge is settling on an architecture and tech stack which is well suited for Graphite's requirements.

The approach should be extensible to future models. It needs to run fast and natively on the assorted hardware of local user machines with hardware acceleration. It should be a one-click installation process for users to download and run models without requiring dependencies or environment setup. Ideally, it should allow the more lightweight models to run locally in browsers with WebGPU. It needs to also be deployable to servers in a scalable, cost-viable manner that reuses most of the same code that runs locally. Runtime overhead, cold start times, and memory usage should be minimized for quick, frequent switching between models in a node graph pipeline. The tech stack also needs to be permissively licensed and, as much as possible, Rust-centric so it doesn't add complexity to our Wasm and Tauri build processes. For Stable Diffusion, we need the flexability to track the latest research and extensions to the ecosystem like new base models, checkpoint training, DreamBooth, LoRA, ControlNet, IP-Adapter, etc. and expose these functionalities through modular nodes.

To meet most of these criteria, our current thinking is to distribute and run our models using the ONNX format. This would integrate ONNX runtimes for WebGPU, native (DirectML, CUDA), and GPU cloud providers. The issue with this approach is that these models (particularly Stable Diffusion) aren't available in an ONNX format.

A potential direction for students proposing this project is to reimplement parts of these ML models for ONNX (potentially in Candle or Burn to leverage the Rust ecosystem, if possible).

Another potential direction is to find a portable, modular, lightweight approach for bundling existing Python-based models. It would need to work across simple and complex models with different architectures. License compliance, if GPL code is involved, would be a consideration.

Based on the experience and insight brought to the table by the student, the nature of the project should be defined through preliminary discussions with the mentors and codified in the proposal. Machine learning and MLOps are fields that Graphite's team lack deep expertise in, so we are looking for a knowledgable student who can bring forth a well-researched and well-architected proposal and then execute on it.

Graphite's UI needs an upgraded layout system to support more complex and dynamic widget arrangements defined from the backend.

Needed Skills: Rust, web (Svelte, CSS, TypeScript)
Project Size: Medium (GSoC: 175 hours) or Large (GSoC: 350 hours)
Difficulty: Medium
Expected Outcomes: An improved system for defining widget layouts with better control and flexibility over arrangement and dynamic data binding. Reduction in boilerplate and plumbing required to define each new layout. Better control of styling between rows.

The current system for defining the arrangement of widget layouts from the backend, created during a previous student project, has served us well thus far but has limitations. This project aims to extend the system to better model our evolved requirements.

The present system is very row-centric, which makes it challenging to create multi-row layouts that distribute their widgets across the space in concert with other rows. It also requires manual updates to the backend data model for each widget, which makes dynamic layouts require extra plumbing and room for mistakes. Defining popover and dialog menus is also cumbersome because each requires several new files in the backend architecture.

Students should have a good level of familiarity with Rust design patterns to envision, prototype, propose, and robustly implement a new system that can handle the complexity of Graphite's use cases. The size of this project can vary depending on the proposal's scope and extent of refactoring to these and adjacent systems.

Node data table editor

The node graph data model for procedural content generation can be thought of as a spreadsheet, which needs a dedicated viewer/editor panel.

Needed Skills: Rust, web (Svelte, TypeScript)
Project Size: Medium (GSoC: 175 hours) or Large (GSoC: 350 hours)
Difficulty: Easy-to-medium
Expected Outcomes: A functional panel in the editor that displays the selected node output data as a spreadsheet across multiple domains. Connection to the graph engine to read and edit the data. Virtual scrolling and efficient transfer of data to the frontend.

The node graph is a powerful tool for procedural content generation, but it can be difficult to understand the data that flows through it. Node data can be represented as a spreadsheet, where each row presents a domain-specific instance (e.g., a point, segment, or face) and each column displays an attribute (like position, color, or radius).

This project involves implementing the frontend as a cleanly-written Svelte component that can display the data in a tabular format, where virtual scrolling lets it efficiently process only the visible portion of the full data table. Help will be provided in building the frontend component and especially its CSS styling, but the student should be familiar with efficient TypeScript and Rust programming to handle both frontend and backend challenges while maintaining a focus on performance. The backend portion will need to integrate with the node engine and surrounding tooling to query the data coming from the selected node.

A larger-scoped version of the project can expand this to focus also on displaying thumbnail previews of data coming from each node's output. -->

Animation system

Adding a timeline-based animation system to Graphite would begin realizing the vision as a versatile content creation suite supporting motion graphics.

Needed Skills: Rust, web (Svelte, CSS, SVG, TypeScript)
Project Size: Small (GSoC: 90 hours) or larger if proposed
Difficulty: Easy-to-medium
Expected Outcomes: A timeline panel in the editor that can create and edit keyframes and timing curves for animating data channels used by nodes. Ergonomic experience for keyframing properties. Efficient curve interpolation. Rendering optimizations for relatively smooth animation playback.

A powerful outcome of Graphite's node-driven architecture is the relatively simple ability to vary data parameters over time.

In the frontend, the student will be responsible for hooking up useful animation features into the existing editor UI (like exposing node parameters to the timeline) and building the new timeline panel with both simplified keyframe indicators and editable curves. A scrubbable playhead, playback controls, and other common timeline features should be included.

In the backend, the animation curves need to be evaluated at the playhead position for each animation channel, then fed into the compiled graph. The node graph system (Graphene) needs to be updated so it can accept these time-varying parameters and route them to the appropriate nodes without requiring a full recompilation of the graph each frame. Any other rendering bottlenecks should also be found and optimized, where feasible and reasonably within scope.

Testing and performance instrumentation infrastructure

Graphite has many areas that could benefit from better automated testing for bugs and performance regressions.

Needed Skills: Rust, unit testing
Project Size: Small (GSoC: 90 hours) or larger if proposed
Difficulty: Easy
Expected Outcomes: Specific focus and scope may vary by the student's interests and proposal. In general, a significant increase in the coverage of tests in useful code areas (such as document loading, manipulation, and rendering) and attention towards systems which measure performance metrics and identify bottlenecks and regressions.

Graphite could benefit from better testing coverage in a number of areas, especially end-to-end testing in the tool, document, and node graph systems. This project is about identifying and addressing areas that are lacking and most vulnerable to suffering from regressions. The student will be responsible for identifying areas that could benefit from better testing.

Architecture visualization

Infrastructure to generate visualizations of Graphite's system architecture would be a valuable addition to the project's documentation and debugging tools.

Needed Skills: Rust (especially proc macros)
Project Size: Small (GSoC: 90 hours) or larger if proposed
Difficulty: Medium
Expected Outcomes: A system built from proc macros which can generate useful visualizations of Graphite's system architecture. Depending on proposal scope, this can include static visualizations added to the documentation, dynamic message flow visualizations for debugging, and tools to help identify redundant message traffic.

Graphite's editor architecture, based around a message-passing processing queue, is structured as a hierarchical system of message handlers. Each handler stores its own state, and references to the state data may be passed along to its child handlers they need it.

It is challenging to document the hierarchy of this system as a tree in the documentation because the code is often changing. Generating a visualization would ensure it remains up to date. Additional visualizations could also be generated with greater detail, such as message flow diagrams for each message.

If proposed as part of the project's scope, a runtime component could be added as an extension of the aforementioned documentation visualizations. These would help developers understand and trace the flow of message traffic, essentially becoming a visual debugger for the message system. Instrumentation included with this could help identify message traffic that causes particularly high load, or locate redundant message traffic, to keep Graphite's performance under control. Timing could also be measured for each message and visualized in a custom flame graph. Current debugger tools can't provide this information because the message-passing approach "flattens out" the traditional function call stack.

Your own idea

If you have an idea for a project that you think would be a good fit, we'd love to hear it!

Needed Skills: Varies
Project Size: Varies
Difficulty: Varies
Expected Outcomes: Stated in your proposal.

If none of the projects above suit your interests or experience, we are very open to discussing your own project ideas that could benefit Graphite. You may consult our task board and roadmap to get a feel for what our current priorities are.

As is the case with all projects, please discuss this with us on Discord to flesh out your idea. Unsolicited proposals that have not been discussed with us will almost certainly be rejected.

More ideas for 2025

In addition to the detailed projects above, here are some loose ideas that may be expanded into full project descriptions before the 2025 GSoC application period opens:

Sophisticated text layout and advanced typography features
PDF import/export? (Scope and viability depend on the state of available libraries)
Traditional brush engine
Procedural brush engine
Color management for HDR/WCG (requires good understanding of color science)
Image processing algorithms for photography
Snapping system overhaul
Photo processing graphics algorithms
Node equivalence rewriting

Successful past projects

2024: Interactive node graph auto-layout

Graphite's graph UI needs a system to automatically arrange layers and nodes given incremental changes to the graph contents.

Affiliation: GSoC 2024
Duration: 3 months
Student: Adam Gerhant

Outcomes: A system that manages the placement of nodes based on a set of layout constraint rules and incremental updates to the graph topology. It should run efficiently, even with large graphs. It should be robust enough to handle a variety of graph topologies and user interactions, producing organized, useful, and stable layouts.

Background: The Graphite concept is built around a node graph representation of layer stacks, while tools automatically generate and manipulate nodes. When a layer or node is inserted, deleted, moved, or referenced, the graph needs to be reorganized to maintain a clear and useful layout. Users can also interactively expand and collapse groups of nodes which occupies or frees up graph real estate.

Unlike other node editors that are centered around manual graph editing, where users are fully in charge of node placements within one large node network, Graphite's node UI is more oriented towards automatic layout management and viewing just parts of the graph at one time. This means the shown graph topology is constantly changing and the layout system needs to cooperatively organize the graph in concert with user actions.

While general graph layout algorithms are complex and struggle to produce good results in other node editors, Graphite's graph topology is more constrained and predictable, which makes it possible to design a layout system that can produce good results. Nodes tend to be organized into rows, and layers into columns. This turns the problem into more of a constraint-based, axis-aligned packing problem.

2024: Rendering Performance infrastructure improvements

Graphite performance is bottlenecked by limitations in the new node graph rendering architecture that needs improvements.

Affiliation: GSoC 2024
Duration: 4 months
Student: Dennis Kobert

Outcomes: A holistic, metrics-driven focus on fixing the many unoptimized areas of Graphite's node graph compilation, execution, and rendering systems. Integration of Vello as an integrated rendering backend. A significant improvement in the performance of the editor, especially in the node graph, and a more stable and predictable performance profile. Benchmarking and profiling tools to measure and visualize performance improvements and regressions.

Background: Graphite's node graph system is the backbone of the editor, but it has many performance problems that need to be addressed because the system is relatively immature and performance-impacting shortcuts were taken during its initial development. This project is all about making the node graph system more robust and optimized, which will have a direct impact on the user experience and the editor's overall performance. By the end of the project, the editor should finally feel usable in the majority of user workflows. Vello should be enabled as an alternate render engine that will fully replace the existing SVG-based one in the future, once browser support arrives across major platforms.

2024: Raw photograph decoding in Rust

For Graphite to support editing photos from professional digital cameras, it needs a raw decoding/processing library.

Affiliation: GSoC 2024
Duration: 5 months
Student: Elbert Ronnie

Outcomes: A Rust library that implements raw photo decoding functionality to native Rust. A clean, well-structured code base and API. At a minimum, demonstrate the successful end-to-end decoding, debayering, and color space handling of Sony ARW format photos in Graphite. Publish the library to crates.io.

Background: For Graphite to work as a photo editing app, it needs to import raw photos. These contain compressed sensor imagery and metadata in a variety of formats. Sony ARW is the first target and additional camera brands are stretch goals. Graphite needs a library written in pure Rust with a suitable (non-GPL) license, which does not currently exist in the ecosystem, so we need to create one ourselves.

2023: Bezier-rs library

Graphite's vector editing features require the implementation of Bezier curve and path manipulation computational geometry algorithms.

Affiliation: University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Duration: 9 months
Students: Hannah Li, Rob Nadal, Thomas Cheng, Linda Zheng, Jackie Chen

Outcomes: The student group designed an API for representing and manipulating Bezier curves and paths as a standalone Rust library which was published to crates.io. It now serves as the underlying vector data format used in Graphite, and acts as a testbed for new computational geometry algorithms. The team also built an interactive web demo catalog to showcase many of the algorithms, which are also handily embedded in the library's documentation.

2022: Backend layout system

Graphite's UI needs a system to define and manage layouts for widgets from the backend.

Affiliation: California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, USA
Duration: 3 months
Student: Max Fisher

Outcomes: The student designed and implemented a new system across the editor's frontend and backend which made it possible to define and manage layouts for widgets from the backend and receive input data from those widgets. Previously, all layouts were statically defined in the frontend and extensive plumbing was required to pass data back and forth.

2022: Path boolean operations

Graphite's vector editing features require the implementation of boolean operations on paths, such as union, intersection, and difference.

Affiliation: California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, USA
Duration: 3 months
Student: Caleb Dennis

Outcomes: The student devised and prototyped algorithms for performing boolean operations on paths, such as union, intersection, and difference. These were used as a stopgap during 2022 and 2023 to provide users with a rudimentary boolean operation feature set.