Gobo Designer
Coming soon to gobo-designer.com
Gobo artwork that reads straight on the wall.
A free tool for lighting designers, in your browser. Tell it where the profile hangs, where it points and what surface it hits, type your words or drop in a logo, and it draws the gobo already corrected for the angle, ready to send to the maker.
What it does
Keystone, worked out
Set the fixture position and aim in your own coordinates, Vectorworks focus points included, and pick the wall, floor or a custom plane. Type your words or upload an SVG logo: the artwork comes out pre-distorted, so it lands square.
Checked before you order
It warns when the image spills out of the beam or off the edge of the wall, strokes are too thin to cut, enclosed shapes would fall out of steel, or the focus spread is too wide.
Ready for the maker
Exports a 1:1 SVG, PDF and DXF with a title block, scale bar and orientation marks, plus the keystone figures a maker such as Rosco asks for: projected image size, perpendicular throw and offsets. It knows 18 common profiles.
Two to four fixtures, one image
Stack the same image from several positions for more punch, to fill shadows or to cross-fade. Each fixture gets its own gobo, worked out so they all land on top of each other, and every sheet says which is which.
Shape it on the surface
Bend text into an arc, pin the corners by hand, or have it read square from one seat: the classic trick for floor projections seen from the stalls. The gobo is worked out to land exactly that shape.
See it before it's cut
A face-on preview with real dimensions, a 3D view of the rig from the fixture or the seat, a brightness map, and PNGs of the wall image and the gobo for a visualiser such as Capture.
On the way
- Gobo Designer at its own address, here
- Open an MVR scene from your lighting plot and pick the fixture and focus straight from it
- Curved surfaces: cycs, columns and curved flats, not just flat planes
- A printable focus card: pan, tilt and marks to line the image up on the night
- Share a project as a link, still with nothing stored on a server
- Install it to work offline, for venues with no signal
- More fixtures and gobo-maker presets
Free, private, no account
Everything runs on your own device: your text, positions and artwork are never sent to us. No sign-up, no tracking, no cookies. Questions or a fixture you'd like added? Email [email protected].