Popcorn
A design editor that runs in a browser tab and hands a printer a file it can actually put on a press: separated CMYK, spot inks, overprint and a die line, packaged as PDF/X-4.
Browser design tools
stop at the export.
They give you a beautiful canvas, then hand you an RGB PDF and wish you luck. Everything a printer actually needs happens after that button, and somebody else pays for it.
The colour shifts
RGB becomes CMYK somewhere downstream, in a converter you did not choose, with an intent you were never asked about. The brand red arrives brown.
The spot ink is gone
A Pantone or a varnish is not a colour, it is a plate. If the file has no Separation, the plate does not exist and the job gets re-made by hand.
The cut line is a drawing
A die line drawn as a pink stroke prints as a pink stroke. It has to be a named separation the cutter recognises, or it is just decoration.
So we moved the last stage into the editor.
One file.
Six plates.
A die-cut sticker leaves Popcorn as a single PDF/X-4 with four process inks, a spot ink set to overprint, and the cut contour on its own separation. Nobody has to explain any of it to the printer.
Bleed, trim and safe margin come from the print preset, not from a ruler. The magenta contour is a named spot separation, so a cutter reads it as a path and a press does not ink it.
The file leaves as a production PDF with the output intent attached, so the printer knows which press and which paper it was made for. Nobody has to ask.
You pick the output profile and the conversion happens here, in front of you, instead of downstream in a converter nobody chose. The brand red that goes in is the brand red that comes out.
A Pantone, a varnish or a white underbase leaves as a real separation with its own plate, with tints and overprint. Bring your own colour book: .ase, .cxf, .gpl or .soc.
Before you export: images below the effective PPI you need, text outside the safe margin, missing bleed. Flagged in the document, not discovered at the printer.
Step-and-repeat onto a sheet, with die lines offset from the artwork silhouette. Stickers, labels and short-run packaging come back as one file already laid out to fit.
We wrote the RIP.
The part that turns a design into ink coverage is normally borrowed from somewhere else. We built ours, from the published standards up, and it runs in the same browser tab as the editor. That is why the colour you approve on screen is the colour the press gets asked for.
The same engine that writes the file also draws the preview, including how two inks behave where they overlap. What you sign off is what gets made.
Real ICC profiles, checked against the reference results the colour industry already uses. Not an approximation, and not a guess made inside somebody else's converter.
It is ours. So a colour problem gets fixed on a Tuesday instead of filed as an issue and waited on, and there is no licence sitting in the chain telling you what you may do with your own output.
What you set is what gets written. The same line breaks, the same kerning, the same baselines on screen and on paper.
Every release is tested against files we know are correct and against a set of real jobs. A format is not supported here until something physical comes out right.
You will not find the words “world first” on this page. CMYK design tools with PDF/X output already exist, and several of them are very good. What is unusual here is narrower and checkable: we wrote the print and colour engine ourselves, and it runs in the browser.
If we ever make a stronger claim it will arrive with a dated comparison of the tools we measured against, and an independent preflight report attached. Until then, this is the accurate version.
Built from the published standards: the PostScript Language Reference, ISO 32000-2, ISO 15930 and ICC.1:2022.
A full document
editor, not a poster tool.
Long documents, flowing text, styles, master pages and data merge. The things you need when the job is a 24-page catalogue rather than one Instagram post.
Type
- Threaded frames with autoflow
- Columns, baseline grid, tab stops
- Optical kerning and tracking
- Character, paragraph and object styles
- Text on a path, and around objects
- Find & change, including GREP
- Tables, pasted straight from a spreadsheet
Colour and ink
- Process and spot swatches, with tints
- Overprint, per side
- Lab spot colours preserved as Lab
- Gradients on fills and strokes
- Import your own colour book (.ase, .cxf, .gpl, .soc)
- ICC output profile chosen per document
Documents
- Master pages and blocks that stay linked
- Facing pages and spreads
- Page numbers and text variables
- A table of contents that renumbers itself
- Data merge from a CSV, one record per page
- Variable-data output, imposed N-up
Drawing
- Pen, curvature, anchor and node tools
- Boolean pathfinder operations
- Live corner rounding
- QR codes and barcodes as real vectors
- Trace a raster image into editable paths
- Import from PDF, AI, SVG and PSD
Production
- Print presets per job, with bleed and safe margin
- Imposition and step-and-repeat
- Dielines offset from the artwork silhouette
- Effective-PPI warnings before export
- Document preflight report
- PNG at a true DPI, not a guess
Working together
- Real-time collaboration on one document
- Share by link, with edit or view rights
- Workspaces with shared assets and brand kits
- Sandboxed plugins
- An MCP server, so an agent can produce a design
- A desktop build for people who want one
Three jobs,
start to finish.
Illustrative jobs rather than customer case studies. We do not publish a client's work without their name on it, so these are written from what the tool does, not from someone else's invoice.
5,000 die-cut stickers for a coffee roaster
The designer draws the sticker, picks the roaster's green as a spot ink rather than a lookalike mix, and draws the cut line where the shape ends. Bleed comes from the job preset, so there is nothing to remember.
One file goes to the printer. No prepress email, no phone call about the green, and no proof coming back a shade off.
A 24-page product catalogue, twice a year
Text flows from page to page on its own, so adding a product in March does not mean rebuilding the back half of the book. Change a heading style once and the whole catalogue follows. The contents page renumbers itself.
The supplier photo that is too small to print gets flagged in the document, days before anyone sends it.
1,200 conference badges, names arriving late
One design, one spreadsheet of names, and a press-ready file with every badge laid out to fit the sheet. When forty more people register on the Thursday, you re-run it rather than re-do it.
Nobody proofreads 1,200 names by hand, because nobody retyped them in the first place.
It opens in a tab.
No account needed.
Start drawing immediately; drafts save locally. Sign in when you want to keep the document, share it or export a production file.