Faceplate - vector art to kicad

You can absolutely make a front panel directly in KiCad, or in whatever PCB software you use. Plenty of people do, and for simple panels it works fine. But PCB tools were never really built for drawing artwork. They are brilliant at precision, holes, layers and manufacturing data, but they are not where you go when you want full creative control. For that, you want the freedom of proper design software: curves, typography, colour, composition, texture, all the little visual decisions that make a module feel like yours.

For that, I would highly recommend Affinity. I had an Adobe subscription for many, many years, but these days Affinity feels like the better, more modern tool for this kind of work. And now that Affinity is freely available, it is very hard to argue with. You get proper vector drawing, typography, layers, colour and layout tools without having to keep feeding a subscription. For designing panels, that kind of freedom matters.

The tool that first bridged it

Years ago I found Gingerbread, by Thea Flowers of Winterbloom, and it completely changed how I thought about making panels.

Before that, getting artwork from a design app into KiCad felt like something you had to wrestle into place with clunky plugins, fragile exports, and a lot of manual fixing afterwards. Gingerbread made it feel possible. You could draw your panel in Affinity or Illustrator, run it through the tool, and open the result as a real KiCad board. For a lot of us, that was a bit of a magic moment. The workflow suddenly made sense.

Faceplate exists because Gingerbread existed first.

Gingerbread is no longer maintained, and over time I found myself curious how far I could refine that workflow for my own needs. I wanted to see if I could build a similar kind of tool, but make the conversion more exact, more predictable, and a little closer to perfect.

alignment

The part I wanted to understand was alignment.

Gingerbread treats the board outline and drill holes separately from the artwork layers. The outline is converted from SVG paths, and drill holes are read from circles on the drills layer, which helps preserve their position and size. The silkscreen, copper and solder mask layers take a different route: they are rendered to bitmap images, traced back into polygons, and then placed into KiCad as graphics.

That is a perfectly understandable approach, and it is also what made Gingerbread so useful in the first place. But it means the mechanical parts of the panel and the artwork do not all travel through exactly the same conversion path.

In my own panels, that difference sometimes showed up as alignment drift. Holes and artwork could end up far enough apart to notice, and occasionally by whole millimetres, though how much you saw depended a lot on the artwork and the export settings. On a purely decorative PCB, maybe that is something you can work around. On a Eurorack panel, where a jack socket needs to sit exactly under its label, it becomes a real problem.

I often ended up nudging things back into place by hand in KiCad, which worked, but it was exactly the kind of manual fixing I wanted the tool to remove.

One pATh for the whole panel

Faceplate takes the problem in a different direction.

Instead of sending some layers through one process and other layers through another, it keeps everything on the same vector path. The board outline, drills, silkscreen, mask and copper all go through the same geometry pipeline. No raster round-trip. No bitmap tracing. No separate interpretation of the artwork after the fact.

That means the whole panel is transformed as one piece. The same affine transform is applied to every layer, so the relationship between the holes and the artwork stays locked together throughout the conversion.

Faceplate also checks its own work.

If you include a 100 mm reference bar in the artwork, the converter measures it after transformation. If the scale is off by more than a micron, it refuses to generate the board. It is a small safeguard, but an important one: the tool is designed to prove that the panel it creates still matches the artwork you started with.

Drop art in, get a board out

Faceplate runs entirely in your browser.

Drop in an SVG or PDF exported from Affinity, Illustrator or Inkscape, and Faceplate turns it into a KiCad board you can download and open in KiCad.

Nothing is uploaded. The conversion happens on your own machine, so your artwork stays with you.

One thing I really wanted was to shorten the feedback loop.

In the old workflow, I would check the flat 2D output, download the board, open it in KiCad, switch to the 3D view, and only then notice that something did not feel right. Maybe a label was too close to a jack. Maybe a graphic looked odd once it was actually sitting on the panel. Then it was back to Affinity or Illustrator, export again, convert again, download again, open KiCad again, check 3D again.

That loop gets tiring quickly.

Faceplate gives you the flat front and back preview, but it also gives you an interactive 3D board right there in the browser. You can spin the panel around, check the proportions, and make better decisions before you export the KiCad file.

There is also a layers panel where you can show and hide the drills, silkscreen, solder mask, copper and edge cuts, and change the colour of any layer. It makes it much easier to inspect the panel the way you actually need to inspect it, rather than being stuck with one fixed preview.

The preview is not a separate mock-up. It is built from the same geometry that goes into the KiCad file, so what you are checking is the actual board Faceplate is about to give you.

It checks your Eurorack panel against spec

If you tell Faceplate the panel is Eurorack, it will measure the design against the format and tell you what it finds.

It checks the panel height against the 128.5 mm standard, works out the width in HP, and looks for the mounting holes. It also checks where those holes sit on the rail grid, and how many it found.

The point is not to be strict for the sake of it. Faceplate does not try to take control of the design or stop you from doing something unusual. It just gives you a clear report before you send the board away.

The board is still yours. The checks are just there to help you catch boring mechanical mistakes before they become expensive ones.

Try it on Vamp

The example loaded on the tool is Vamp’s faceplate, one of our own 8 HP panels.

You can spin it around in 3D, show and hide the layers, change layer colours, and download the .kicad_pcb file to see exactly what Faceplate sends to KiCad.

I have also included the source files: Affinity, PDF and SVG. So you can trace the whole route from the original artwork, through the browser preview, and into the finished KiCad board.

Thank you, Thea

Faceplate does not use Gingerbread’s code. Not a line.

But it is very much built on the idea Gingerbread proved could work. It was the first tool I used that made the whole thing feel possible: draw the panel as artwork, convert it, and open a real board in KiCad.

That was a big deal.

Faceplate is my attempt to explore that same idea in my own way, and to push the parts I cared about a little further.

If you have never seen Gingerbread, go and look. It is lovely work.

It’s out

Faceplate is out. Not a preview or a beta, the actual tool. It is free, it runs entirely in your browser, and it turns a vector panel into a fab-ready KiCad board.

Drop in an SVG or PDF from Affinity, Illustrator, or Inkscape, check it in 2D and 3D, and download the .kicad_pcb file. Your artwork never leaves your machine. If you are starting from a photo or a texture, trace it to vectors in your design tool first and bring that in.

It is Eurorack-first but also supports other reasonable sizes and shapes. Faceplate is ready to make real boards today.

If you run one of your own panels through it, I would genuinely like to know how it goes.