Microsoft Fresh Paint

Fresh Paint — shipped in-box on Windows 8

Fresh Paint was a digital painting app Microsoft shipped in-box on Windows 8, born out of Microsoft Research's Project Gustav — a physics model that reproduced the behavior of real oil paint on a digital surface. The team partnered with the Museum of Modern Art and tested the app with 60,000 people for a year before the Windows 8 launch.

I was the sole design developer on the application UI — owning the entire surface from interaction design through production code.

• Built the application UI end-to-end in XAML/C#, with DirectX C++ integration for the 3D paint effects pipeline.

• Shipped in-box on Windows 8 — reaching 1 billion monthly active users on the platform.

• The app remained in active distribution on Windows 10 for the better part of a decade after the original release.

Invented BoundsType

While building Fresh Paint I designed and implemented BoundsType — a property that strips the optical insets browsers and OS frameworks add around blocks of type, giving designers and developers true typographic grid control on the Windows platform. It later became part of how internal teams hit grid in production.

Why this work matters

Fresh Paint was the moment where the disciplines collapsed for me: the same person designed the interaction, drew the icons, wrote the XAML, wired up the C# event handlers, and hit performance targets against DirectX. That's the seam I've been working ever since — and it's the same shape as the work I do now at Pulumi on Neo and Facet.