Charcoal Input Prompts

Charcoal Input Prompts is a set of 16 input prompt sprites drawn in the hand-drawn style, where every edge is sampled and nudged, so no line is truly straight. 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 wobble is deterministic rather than random: the same box wobbles the same way every build, which is what lets it live in version control. Shading is cross-hatching, because a gradient under a drawn line reads as a filter rather than as a hand.

Inside that style this is the Charcoal reading of it: a dark interface on a smoke grey palette with ember orange accents, built around a single bordered frame, tab-shaped buttons at 160x52, hollow-cored bars divided into 7 segments, and two-tone icons on a 24px 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 Charcoal family, which means this kit and the Charcoal panel kit line up without either being resized. A good fit for notebook and storybook games.

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