Carbon Input Prompts

Carbon Input Prompts is a set of 16 input prompt sprites drawn in the realistic style, where a five-stop specular gradient runs down a brushed metal face with rivets at the corners. It contains square, wide and pressed keycaps, four arrow keys, four gamepad face buttons, a shoulder button and a trigger and three mouse button prompts.

A game that supports both a keyboard and a gamepad has to show both, at matching sizes, in the same sentence — and almost nobody ships that art, so it gets drawn by hand at the end of a project when there is no time for it.

The brush texture is a 3px line pattern rather than real noise: noise triples the PNG weight for a texture nobody can see at 1x. The shadow is layered rather than blurred so it holds up at 4x.

Inside that style this is the Carbon reading of it: a dark interface on a near black palette with warning amber accents, built around four corner brackets in place of a closed border, chamfered buttons at 152x44, hollow-cored bars divided into 14 segments, and two-tone icons on a 32px grid. Those measurements are why two families can share an art style without being interchangeable: the style decides how an edge is drawn, the numbers decide what the interface is for.

No letters are drawn anywhere in this set. Embedding a typeface means embedding its licence, and a baked-in "E" is wrong in every remapped control scheme and every language; the shapes are here and your engine draws the glyph on top with the font it already has.

Every sprite ships as an editable SVG and as transparent PNG at 1x, 2x and 4x, so you can drop the PNGs straight into an engine or open the vector and change a colour. Built to the same measurements as the rest of the Carbon family, which means this kit and the Carbon panel kit line up without either being resized. A good fit for realistic and simulation interfaces.

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