Microsoft Paint Photo Studio: Custom Software That Made Paint a Live Event

For a one-day Microsoft event at Vesper in Brooklyn, Microsoft and its agency partner Squeak E. Clean Studios came to us with a brief no off-the-shelf photo booth could meet: the guest experience had to be Microsoft Paint itself. Not a lookalike editor and not a web app styled to resemble it. The real Paint, on the Surface Pro devices Microsoft makes, in the hands of every guest.

That is a hard brief, because Paint was never meant to be part of anything like this. It has no API, no plug-in model and no way for another program to open a file in it, watch what the guest does, or collect the result. Paint is made for one person at their own PC, and Microsoft's recent additions to it are Copilot features like Cocreator and generative erase. None of that was designed for a line of guests at an event.

So the job was not to deploy a booth. It was to write the software that turned an everyday Windows app into a dependable event experience, then run it live, and to do it in eight days from kickoff to doors.

Every guest touchpoint ran on Microsoft hardware and software. Four Surface Pro stations on Windows 11 on Arm each ran Paint, our companion and a full-screen Microsoft Edge gallery where guests found their portrait, watched their video and sent it to their phone.

The Surfaces were loaners, available only on event day, so setup had to be fast and repeatable. We built a one-file setup that turns a stock Surface into a station from a USB stick in minutes: it installs the companion, registers it to start with Windows and recover by itself, and hardens the device for kiosk use.

The experience was styled in Microsoft's Fluent design language down to the type. Even the operator console looked and behaved like a Windows 11 desktop, so the brand team saw a Microsoft product end to end.

The studio ran for one day, October 15, 2026. Guests sent their first creation just after lunch and kept going until close, with the evening peaks topping 50 deliveries an hour across the four stations.

All 255 deliveries went through: 181 stills and 74 animated videos, with an average delivery API response of 144 ms. Behind the scenes, the operator console showed a live screen thumbnail of every Surface, and staff could reset a station, lock it or send it a message without walking over. A second server kept a copy of every session, ready to take over if the first went down.

Privacy was set by the brief. There was no email capture and no consent form, because nothing was kept: each phone number was used once to deliver the guest's art and then erased.

Squeak E. Clean Studios brought PivotXP onto the project and led event production for Microsoft; we built and ran the technology alongside their team.