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Lunacy

About Icons8

Icons8 is a bootstrapped graphics company that has been profitable since year one. From a remote-first team they ship one of the largest icon libraries in the world, alongside illustrations, AI tools, and Lunacy — a full-featured graphic design application used by millions of designers around the world.

When the Lunacy team set out to take their Windows-only WPF application cross-platform, they evaluated the modern .NET UI landscape and chose Avalonia. This is the story of why, and what they found.

2012

Year founded

4M+

Users worldwide

15K+

Icon packs produced in-house

Platforms from one codebase

Avalonia Highlights

"A better WPF" — sensible improvements over WPF that save real time
Extremely similar to WPF and UWP, so existing knowledge transferred cleanly
CSS-like styling system that is "far more flexible and a joy to use"
Excellent performance, with "extremely smooth" zoom and pan on graphics-heavy canvases
High code quality — clean enough to read on GitHub and debug straight from the IDE
Open enough to fix bugs themselves and get PRs merged quickly
Robust platform with a huge and active community

I believe the port would have taken us at least 3x longer if we had chosen a different framework.

Sergey Mikolaitis· .NET Developer & Team Lead, Lunacy at Icons8

Lunacy by Icons8 — built once with Avalonia, shipped natively across Windows, macOS, Linux, and the browser.

A Cross-Platform Graphic Design Tool

Icons8 has been quietly building one of the largest in-house graphics libraries in the world since 2012, with over four million users and a portfolio that spans icons, illustrations, photography, and AI tools. Lunacy is the team's flagship desktop application — a full-featured graphic design tool with built-in graphics, auto layout, collaboration, and offline mode. The brief was straightforward: take a Windows-only WPF product and ship it natively on macOS and Linux without sacrificing the flexibility a content creation tool demands.

From WPF to a Single Cross-Platform Codebase

Lunacy began life on WPF and was tied to Windows. The team evaluated the modern alternatives — UWP and Xamarin among them — and found that none offered the flexibility a graphic design application needs. Avalonia did. The XAML and styling model felt familiar enough to feel like home from day one, and the CSS-like customisation system gave the team fine-grained control over a UI that has to handle dense, graphics-heavy interaction.

Lunacy editing a vibrant studio website, with multi-user cursors and a design canvas full of typography and illustration work — running natively on macOS

We had been using WPF and our application was tied to just Windows. The newer replacements to WPF were not able to offer us the flexibility that we needed for a content creation application.

Sergey Mikolaitis· .NET Developer & Team Lead, Lunacy at Icons8

Multiple Lunacy windows open across native desktop environments, showing the same application running consistently from a single Avalonia codebase

Performance and an Open-Source Foundation

For a graphic design tool, rendering performance isn't a nice-to-have — it is the product. The Lunacy team found Avalonia's performance excellent for graphics-heavy work, with smooth zoom and pan even on demanding canvases. Equally important was the framework's open-source nature: when the team needs to understand exactly what is happening, they can debug directly into Avalonia from their IDE. And when questions came up, the active community gave them somewhere to turn.

The performance is excellent. Our application is very graphical and we were able to make zooming and panning extremely smooth.

Sergey Mikolaitis· .NET Developer & Team Lead, Lunacy at Icons8

And now, the browser

In early 2026, the Lunacy team extended the same Avalonia codebase one step further — out of the desktop entirely. Using Avalonia's WebAssembly target, Lunacy now runs natively in the browser, alongside its Windows, macOS, and Linux applications. One codebase, four surfaces — and the case for cross-platform .NET on Avalonia is stronger than ever.

Lunacy is free, and now runs natively on Windows, macOS, Linux, and the browser.

Try Lunacy

Avalonia powers production software at some of the world's leading software companies.

From financial trading floors to global manufacturers, teams choose Avalonia for cross-platform .NET reach without compromise.