ASCII Magic is built on open-source work. This page names the parts that came from somewhere else and the licences that cover them. It exists because some of those licences ask for it, and because it is the honest thing to publish.
Three of the render modes in the editor run fragment shaders from @paper-design/shaders: Aberration, Fluted Glass and CMYK Drops.
To be exact about what that means, because it matters: those three shaders run unmodified. We compile their GLSL as published. What is ours is everything around it, which is most of the work you actually interact with: the WebGL plumbing, the mapping of roughly thirty uniforms per shader onto controls that make sense next to the rest of the editor, the presets in each panel, and the integration with backdrops, masks, the animation clock and the export pipeline. The shader draws the pixels. The effect, as a thing you can use, is ours.
Licence: Apache License 2.0. The package includes this notice, reproduced as that licence requires:
Paper Shaders
Copyright 2026 Paper
Powered by Paper Shaders:
https://shaders.paper.design
The full licence text is at apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.
The render engine, the style catalogue, the post effects, the dither palettes and algorithms, the recipe format and the generative pipeline are our own. Effects that share a name with a familiar technique, such as halftone, Floyd–Steinberg dithering or Delaunay triangulation, implement that published technique rather than anyone's particular code.
Typefaces used on this site are licensed for web use from their foundries. Demo images in the editor are either our own or licensed stock, and the photographer is credited in the library where one is known. Nothing you load into the editor is covered by this page: your files stay on your machine and remain yours.
If something here is wrong, incomplete, or your work is being used without proper credit, write to kailash@ascii-magic.com and we will fix it. That is a genuine offer, not boilerplate: this page was written after finding that we had been citing one of these licences incorrectly for weeks.