adhithya90/design-lens-compose — explained in plain English
Analysis updated 2026-05-18
Study how to build touchable, physically feeling UI materials like clay, silicone, or glass using AGSL shaders in Jetpack Compose.
Reference the hand built pixel art and dot matrix font techniques for a retro style Android app.
See a working example of resolution-independent layout using rescaled custom density units instead of standard responsive design.
Run the app locally to browse three complete design systems as a source of visual inspiration.
| adhithya90/design-lens-compose | blindman81/snippets | figurophobia/milk-filter-mobile | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Language | Kotlin | Kotlin | Kotlin |
| Setup difficulty | moderate | moderate | easy |
| Complexity | 4/5 | 2/5 | 1/5 |
| Audience | developer | general | general |
Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.
Requires Android Studio and a minSdk of 33 because it depends on the RuntimeShader graphics feature.
Design Lens is an Android gallery app that shows off three different visual design styles, and every single image in it is drawn live by code rather than loaded from a picture file. The creator explains that the project started after being inspired by a terracotta colored moodboard, and it grew from there into rebuilding each look entirely out of running graphics code. You open the app, choose a style, and swipe through twelve screens built in that look. The first style, called Dot Terracota, is a warm industrial look with dot matrix lettering, brushed metal textures, glowing tubes, and clay-like shapes. It includes touchable elements like a subwoofer that visibly thumps when tapped and a knob you can spin that clicks as it turns. The second style, Soft Machine, is a lavender neumorphic look with rounded, squeezable looking shapes, including a cloud rendered with a real time lighting technique that squishes like a marshmallow when tapped, and a silicone-like surface that dents under a finger and springs back. The third style, Pixel Craft, is a playful pixel art look with a cat and a sailboat, built entirely without any of the shader effects used elsewhere, using hand typed character grids for every sprite and instant, spring-free button presses that snap rather than ease. Under the hood, the app is built with Jetpack Compose, Android's modern toolkit for building user interfaces, combined with a graphics shading language called AGSL for anything meant to feel like a physical material, such as metal, glass, or clay. Regular drawing code handles anything meant to feel like a user interface element, including a hand built dot matrix font and dozens of pixel art sprites stored directly as text in the source code. Every screen is laid out in the developer's own made up units and rescaled to fit whatever screen size the device has, so there is no separate responsive design logic. To run the project, you open it in Android Studio and press run, or build it from the command line with Gradle. It requires a fairly recent version of Android, since it depends on a graphics feature called RuntimeShader. The README does not mention a license.
An Android app showcasing three fully code-drawn design styles, built with Jetpack Compose and shaders instead of any image files.
Mainly Kotlin. The stack also includes Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, AGSL.
Setup difficulty is rated moderate, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.
Mainly developer.
This repo across BitVibe Labs
double-check against the repo, no cap.