I need to create a simple gui toolkit based on only a raw framebuffer.
Are there any examples or papers describing such a thing?
Obviously I could implement X but I think that's a little beyond the scope :)
Is this for a Linux framebuffer? SDL is a graphics library worth looking at. It is a mature open source project, which makes it a good project to study and learn from. The documentation is also pretty good. Like many GUI toolkits it has a large API set, but you don't have to use all of it and can focus on just what you are interested. Developing a GUI toolkit can be a complex task.