Charcoal Tutorial UI

Charcoal Tutorial UI is a set of 12 tutorial and onboarding markers drawn in the hand-drawn style, where every edge is sampled and nudged, so no line is truly straight. It contains four directional callout balloons, a solid and a dashed highlight ring, a corner-bracket highlight box, two step indicator states, a tap mark, a drag gesture trail and a skip strip.

Every other kit in this catalogue covers part of the screen. This one points at it, and that inverts the rules: a highlight that fills its middle hides the thing it is highlighting, and a callout that can only point one direction is useless on three of the four screen edges.

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.

The callout ships with the tail on each of the four sides as separate sprites rather than one balloon to rotate, because rotating it throws the shading to the wrong side and a tutorial balloon is used at all four screen edges in the same session. The highlight ring and box are hollow, stroke only and no fill, so whatever is underneath stays fully visible, which is the entire point. The step dots are countable so a player can see how much of the tutorial is left, which is the one thing that keeps them pressing next.

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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