About

Unicorn Studio is a bootstrapped product designed and built by George Hastings.

Graphics programming started as a hobby. The first time I saw pixels reacting to math equations, I was hooked. The blend of art, technology, and a bit of mad science created a vortex that sucked me in for hours.

My roots are in design. I studied at Hyper Island in Stockholm, where I realized the most talented creatives could also code. That insight led me to New York, working with global agencies like AREA 17 and IDEO. I learned to code early in my career as a UX designer — I made wireframes and prototypes in the day, and JavaScript canvas animations in the evening.

Over the years I moved through the usual design tools — Illustrator, Sketch, Figma — and despite each one being better than the last, I was still making code prototypes. These tools were excellent for exploration, iteration, and spatial thinking, but there was too much distance between them and the browser. Creative coding was fun, but also slow and tedious. I was feeling a tooling gap. Along the way I spent years learning to look for unmet needs and shipping software at startups, and launched Khroma.

I had already started building a toy app for drawing blurry gradients. But in October 2020 I came across The Book of Shaders and something clicked. WebGL shaders had it all. There's immense graphical power sitting right in the browser — lighting, volumetrics, depth, distortion — but accessing it requires grappling with esoteric and intimidating GLSL syntax. The power is there, but for the vast majority of designers (and even developers), it's out of reach. I wanted a space where experimenting with it felt as immediate and iterative as moving layers on a canvas.

That idea eventually became Unicorn Studio.

I have chosen to bootstrap Unicorn Studio solo. This allows me to prioritize product quality and sustainability over hyper-growth or investor demands. When you reach out—whether on Discord, X, or via email—you're talking to me. Some of the best features in the tool came from user suggestions, and I frequently ship updates the same day they are requested.

I love writing shaders; it remains my favorite part of building this product. I am committed to exploring this niche deeper than anyone else, working day after day to make Unicorn Studio more fun to explore, easy to integrate, and powerful to wield.

Drop me a line at george@unicorn.studio, X, or the discord server anytime.

George