Pastel
Pastel
Kevin Yang has been designing since age 12 and leads one of Harvard's flagship builder clubs. Elena Baskakova built a real-time ray-tracing web renderer. Leah Vashevko completes a founding team drawn from three campuses.
Kevin Yang has been designing since age 12 and leads one of Harvard's flagship builder clubs. Elena Baskakova built a real-time ray-tracing web renderer. Leah Vashevko completes a founding team drawn from three campuses.
Meet
Meet
Elena, Leah & Kevin
Elena, Leah & Kevin
Empowering artists to create professional vector assets more efficiently and iteratively, while retaining full creative control.
Empowering artists to create professional vector assets more efficiently and iteratively, while retaining full creative control.
Professional assets for print, web, and branding require the pixel-perfect precision of vector software. AI tools that generate finished images remove control from the artist, and the output usually isn't editable SVG. At the other end, Illustrator can achieve almost anything, if you invest years learning it.
Pastel is for the artists in the middle: people who need fine control over asset creation but aren't willing to master a tool as complex as Illustrator. It should feel native to artists who grew up sketching on paper, stay powerful enough for professionals, and use AI to recognize patterns in the artist's behavior and complete repetitive work. All the control stays in their hands.
Over the summer the team rebuilt the rendering engine with an infinite-resolution blending system and spent Config, Figma's conference, interviewing designers.
Professional assets for print, web, and branding require the pixel-perfect precision of vector software. AI tools that generate finished images remove control from the artist, and the output usually isn't editable SVG. At the other end, Illustrator can achieve almost anything, if you invest years learning it.
Pastel is for the artists in the middle: people who need fine control over asset creation but aren't willing to master a tool as complex as Illustrator. It should feel native to artists who grew up sketching on paper, stay powerful enough for professionals, and use AI to recognize patterns in the artist's behavior and complete repetitive work. All the control stays in their hands.
Over the summer the team rebuilt the rendering engine with an infinite-resolution blending system and spent Config, Figma's conference, interviewing designers.