Doodle Pad

Doodle Pad is a drawing table that opens in the browser. A sheet of slightly textured paper sits on a sunny wooden desk, with a tray of chunky tools down one side and a row of paint blobs down the other. There are eight ways to make a mark: a thin pencil that catches the grain, a bold marker that darkens where it crosses itself, a waxy crayon that skips over the tooth of the paper, a wet brush that blends where two strokes meet, a spray can, a neon glow pen, a rainbow brush whose colour runs along the line, and a rubber to take it all back. Every stroke is smoothed as you draw it, so a quick flick comes out as a curve rather than a row of corners, and a stylus is read for pressure so leaning harder makes a fatter line.

The rest of the tray is the fun part. The paint bucket floods whatever shape you tap, with a spread control for how fussy it should be about edges. Shapes are dragged out as lines, boxes, ovals, stars and hearts. There are seventy-one die-cut stickers to press on — animals, food, rockets, faces and a full alphabet of bubble letters — tapped down and dragged bigger or turned before you let go. And the mirror button folds the page: down the middle, into quarters, or into an eight-way kaleidoscope where one lazy squiggle comes out as a snowflake. Thirty steps of undo and redo sit in the top bar, along with a bin that always asks first.

Start on plain white, on one of six coloured stocks, or on one of twelve outlines to colour in: a cat, a rocket, a castle, a cake, a butterfly, a robot and more, all drawn in-house. When a drawing is finished, keep it on the shelf inside your browser and reopen it later to add to it, or save it to your device as a PNG. On a phone the paper fills the width with the tray along the bottom; turn it sideways and the tools move to a column on the left with the paints on the right. Two fingers pinch to zoom and slide the sheet around, one finger draws, and the whole thing runs at sixty frames a second even when the kaleidoscope is drawing eight strokes at once.