React background components
Full-bleed canvas and generative backdrops — terrain, topographic lines, ASCII fields — meant to sit behind other content rather than carry it. Reach for one to add ambient motion or texture without competing with the foreground.
80 components
Crack Polygon Order
A decorative panel fill that tiles itself the way drying mud actually cracks: widely-spaced primary cracks grow first, then two more generations nucleate inside the largest surviving cells after a 900ms stress-rebuild pause each, every new crack tip T-junctioning into an existing one at ~90 degrees instead of crossing it, until the mature tiling holds, rewets to blank, and a new unrelated cycle begins.
Delta Frame Macroblock
A quiet full-width band that visualizes a video codec's own P-frame change-detection decision: a grid of macroblocks sits mostly static, and every 220ms tick a small, capped subset is flagged changed with a brief outline flash and a slightly shifted tone while every other block is explicitly left untouched, exactly the sparse per-block change map a real codec decodes.
Honeycomb Draw
An ambient background where wax cells start as loosely packed circles and locally relax, wall by wall, into a tight hexagonal comb: each neighbour pair's shared wall straightens on its own schedule once the circles overlap, so a cell can show straight facets and still-round ones at once, with new circles seeding in from the left edge and a periodic recap flash keeping the finished lattice alive at rest.
Knit Ladder Run
An ambient status/health card background: a field of knit stitches builds downward course by course, and at random intervals a dropped stitch opens a ladder that runs a few rows before a latch-hook repair catches it and reknits the column. Structurally sound, with occasional self-corrected faults, in place of a static health badge.
Millstone Furrow Flow
An ambient processing-section background modelled on a dressed millstone pair: a static bedstone furrow layer under a slowly rotating runner layer, their crossing sweeping a drifting moiré band around the stone, while grain particles spiral outward from the eye, shrinking as they grind finer, and disperse into fading meal dust at the rim.
Ropewalk Lay Twist
Ambient card background modeling rope laying in a traditional ropewalk: three strands spiral together at a fixed convergence point into one rope, continuously hauled off and wound onto a take-up drum whose layer count keeps climbing, never stopping and never resetting.
Spall Face
A card-scale background texture panel modelling frost (freeze-thaw) weathering of a porous rock face: the sampled field conveys slowly upward, and every second or two a flake somewhere lifts, tips outward, and falls off, exposing a fresh patch that brightens then weathers back into the surrounding stone over the following seconds.
Warp Knit Tricot Lapping
An ambient divider/background texture whose guide bar shogs a short lateral distance every course, lapping each needle's thread diagonally across its neighbours to build a continuously-scrolling zigzag chevron field. The diagonal wale structure of warp knitting, distinct from a weft shuttle's full-width crossing.
Arc Ladder Climb
A full-bleed section-divider background modelled on a Jacob's ladder: two rails diverge from a narrow base gap, a bright plasma arc strikes there, climbs the widening gap as it burns, dies near the top, and a fresh arc restrikes at the base almost immediately. This runs continuously, at a re-randomized ~1.6-2.2s cadence.
Bitplane Cascade
A full-bleed hero/background that composites a real Amiga-class planar framebuffer image one bitplane at a time: a coarse 2-tone silhouette lands first, then three more binary-weighted planes each add a finer layer of tonal detail on top of it, before the full 16-level image holds and the stack clears to rebuild from plane 0 again.
Brinicle Descent
A full-bleed underwater backdrop modelled on brinicles: dense, sub-zero brine sinking off newly formed sea ice freezes a hollow ice sheath around itself as it descends, flashes an expanding freeze halo where it touches bottom, then breaks free and drifts off while a fresh tip nucleates elsewhere. Several overlapping lifecycles running at once so the pane is never empty.
EDM Crater Field
A full-bleed metal plate eroded by electrical discharge machining: sparks continuously pit the surface with small raised-rim craters that fade back to base as later discharges erode the recast layer, holding the plate at a steady simmer of pockmarks rather than ever saturating.
Foam Drain Coarsen
A full-bleed weighted-Voronoi (Laguerre) foam mesh that coarsens under von Neumann's law (cells with more than six sides grow, fewer shrink and vanish) while its Plateau-border stroke width drains from hairline at the top to thick at the base, slowly re-wetting from below on a repeating 40s cycle.
Interlace Field Comb
A full-bleed background reproducing analog interlaced video's defining artifact: two temporally-offset fields drawn a beat apart, disagreeing on a moving diagonal edge and serrating it into a comb, then periodically re-weaving into one clean frame.
Magnetron Racetrack Sweep
A full-bleed background built on sputter target erosion: a magnetron's plasma racetrack sweeps back and forth across a target face, slowly grooving it wherever the ring has lingered, rendered as a persistent radial erosion field under a live, non-accumulated glow ring.
Mailbag Hook Exchange
A full-bleed ambient background reproducing the Railway Post Office catcher-crane mail exchange: a trackside crane holds an outgoing mailbag on a hook, swaying between passes, while a train sweeps through on a fixed cadence, its catcher arm snagging the bag and kicking a replacement onto the trackside net without ever stopping.
Orb Web Construction
A full-bleed hero background where a web builds in the real orb-weaver sequence: bridge, frame, radii laid hub-outward, a dashed scaffold spiral hub-outward, then a solid capture spiral laid outside-back-to-hub that visibly replaces the scaffold turn by turn. It then rests, tears a random sector, and rebuilds only that sector before resting again.
Pancake Lap
A full-bleed ambient background modeling real pancake sea-ice formation: circular ice pans nucleate, grow, and drift on open water, and roughly every two seconds one pan's edge visibly rides up over a neighbour's raised rim, crosses, and welds into a permanently thicker doubled floe.
Photostat Reverse
A full-bleed hero headline reproduced like a photostat camera: each exposure flips the field between a negative and a positive generation, a little softer and thicker than the one before, until a fresh crisp exposure resets the drift.
Plasma Filament Wander
A full-bleed hero background modelled on a plasma globe: filaments reach from a center point to a faint outer ring, each retracting and regrowing toward a new point on its own staggered 1.2-2.6s cadence, with pointer proximity biasing where a filament next reroutes, never when.
Ripple Migrate Slip
A full-bleed dune-ripple field built on real aeolian bedform migration: each ripple's gentle windward face keeps piling higher until it crosses the angle of repose, its steep lee face avalanches, and the crest kicks one step downwind. Many ripples do this on independent, staggered clocks, so the whole train visibly creeps at rest with no two slips in sync.
Roast First Crack
A full-bleed ambient background modeling first crack in a rotating coffee-roaster drum: beans tumble continuously (carried up the wall by rotation, then cascading back down once they pass their repose angle), and individual beans intermittently crack open at an irregular, clustered cadence, each releasing a fleck of chaff that curls off the fissure edge and drifts free while the bean settles back into the tumble.
Rotor Window Bank
Full-bleed hero backdrop modeled on a rotor cipher machine's stepping mechanism: three letter-wheel windows where the right wheel ticks steadily, kicks the middle wheel once per revolution, and the middle wheel occasionally double-steps, moving twice in one beat and dragging the left wheel with it, the real Enigma-family stepping anomaly compressed to a 9-position ring so it recurs roughly every minute instead of every eleven.
Spiral Chute Accrete
A full-bleed ambient background reproducing a gravity spiral chute, the helical slide used to move bulk parcels/mail sacks between floors in sorting facilities and department-store stockrooms without powered conveyance. Parcels drop in at the top, descend the helix in continuous view, and pile up in a landing area at the base until the pile is periodically swept clear.
Stack Step Carousel
A full-bleed background modelling vacuum thin-film deposition on a planetary carrier: 8 mirror/lens blanks each orbit a fixed 30-degree source arc every 3.5s, each pass stepping that blank's reflectance up a notch along a real quarter-wave-stack recursion, staggered swaps keeping the batch permanently mid-cycle while a slower 14s armature ring turns underneath.
Termite Ventilation Shafts
A full-bleed ambient background modeling Macrotermes mound thermosiphon ventilation: a fixed network of surface ridge conduits, generated once from a central chimney and never re-grown, visibly fills and drains with flow in alternating directions over a slow 42s diurnal cycle driven by a rising and falling temperature differential.
Tricone Bit Teeth
A full-bleed rock face worked by a rotary tricone bit: three cone cutters orbit the bit centre in a fixed 120-degree pattern, each tooth row stamping a crater cluster into the face that heals back to flat before the next pass, so the surface reads as a ring being continuously worked rather than a diffuse pockmarked plate.
Winnow Chaff Drift
A full-bleed hero built on a real grain-cleaning mechanic: winnowing. A mixed charge of grain and chaff falls through a steady crosswind: heavy grain's momentum wins over drag and it drops in a tight, near-vertical column, while light chaff loses to the wind and fans out laterally before it lands. The separation reads entirely from trajectory and softness, never colour.
Riso Drum Pass
A loader / background ambient texture reproducing a risograph duplication run: three sequential drum passes reading the same shared stencil field, each a rotation sweeping the sheet top-to-bottom, cumulatively drifting a few pixels out of register against the pass before it, with per-rotation drum-pressure banding baked into each row as it prints.
Bed Fluidize
A full-bleed ambient background modeling a gas-fluidized particle bed: voids nucleate at the distributor plate, grow with height (the Darton bubble-growth relation), coalesce when they touch, and burst at the surface with a ballistic spray of ejected particles, while the surrounding bed circulates downward in each bubble's wake. A standing boil with no saturated end state.
Film Gate Weave
A full-bleed ambient background modeling projector gate weave and bounce: a rigid, never-displaced aperture mask against an academy-leader test-pattern frame that drifts on two non-resonant sinusoids and snaps on a real critically-damped-ish spring every claw-pull interval, never sitting flush with the fixed edge.
Offset Fountain Split
A full-bleed ambient background modeling a web-offset press ink train: ink splits and smears across six rollers from fountain to form, driven by 24 independently drifting fountain-key zones so the field's ribbed banding never converges flat.
Rolling Shutter Skew
A full-bleed ambient background modeling CMOS rolling shutter: a vertical rule grid bends into a shifting parallelogram because each virtual sensor row captures the simulated pan at a slightly later instant than the row above it, the readout period accumulating into more displacement toward the bottom of the frame.
Tray Weep
A full-bleed section-divider band built on a bubble-cap distillation column tray: a stack of trays froths continuously as vapor bubbles up through submerged caps, liquid creeps toward a weir and spills to the tray below, and any cap running short on vapor visibly weeps liquid back down through itself instead of bubbling.
Background Capillary Wick
A full-bleed ambient background modeling paper chromatography: ink fronts wick along a fixed fibre-vein lattice, decelerating per the Washburn capillary-rise law as they climb, stalling at every junction, and re-igniting a subset of the node's dry outgoing edges before evaporating back to dry to make room for the next front.
Background Engine Turn Guilloche
A full-bleed ambient background reproducing engine-turning (guilloché), the rose-engine lathe technique used to engrave the dense woven rosette patterns on banknotes and security documents: three superimposed hypotrochoid passes at close, unequal lathe ratios beat against each other while the ratios drift and each pass spins independently, so the weave never locks into a static pattern.
Background Halftone Rosette
A full-bleed ambient background of two same-ink halftone dot screens drifting at independent, non-commensurate angles: a real duotone/double-hit moiré rosette, with a coverage gradient keeping the frame edges readable and the visual center where the interference peaks.
Background Text Branch Canopy
A full-bleed ambient background where an L-system tree grows entirely out of readable text: every limb is one run of words drawn with a single fillText, pivoting on its own foot as it angles from its parent, with the outer canopy senescing and regrowing forever so it never settles into a finished frame.
Cursor Sixel Reveal
A full-bleed ASCII plasma field rendered twice from one shared scalar field (quantized to glyphs everywhere, and as a true raw-pixel grayscale raster inside a soft circular window), literalizing the real sixel/kitty-graphics-protocol-vs-character-fallback split. The window sweeps an idle Lissajous path and eases to the pointer on hover.
Cursor Subpixel Fringe
A full-bleed field where every grid cell carries three thin vertical luminance slivers standing in for an LCD's physical red/green/blue subpixel stripes. Near the cursor, or the idle sweep target when nothing is pointing, the three slivers of a cell splay apart and diverge in value, as if a renderer were locally re-hinting glyphs to the pixel grid. The whole field shimmers at rest, not only under the pointer.
Hero Faraday Wave Cell
Full-bleed hero background reproducing Faraday's 1831 discovery: a fluid layer vibrated vertically above a critical amplitude breaks into standing surface waves oscillating at half the driving frequency, tessellating into stripe, square and hexagonal cells that keep reorganizing rather than settling.
Hero Glyph Silhouette Pack
A full-bleed hero where a cloud of monospace glyph particles is packed to fill an arbitrary vector silhouette, breathing and repelling from the pointer at rest, and re-solving on its own into a fresh silhouette on a timer as particles migrate to their new slots.
Hero Slice Comb
A full-bleed hero background: a tri-axial superellipsoid sliced by camera-fixed depth planes and spun continuously beneath them, where uniform-spacing slices pile into a bright rim wherever the surface turns tangent to the camera and spread into a dark, sparse interior wherever it faces the camera head-on.
Hachure Fall
A route elevation profile drawn as 18th-century military engravers drew slope: strokes perpendicular to the profile line, hanging down the fall direction, whose length and density both derive from local grade. No colour ramp, no vertical-exaggeration slider.
Cambium Lay
A tree cross-section accreting live in SVG: a cambium ring lays wood outward year by year, each year closing with a thin dense latewood band, the section slightly lobed and drifting off-centre like a leaning trunk, and a scar event pinching a few rings before growth heals around it.
Flash Entrain
A few hundred DOM fireflies pulse-couple over a static nearest-neighbour graph (Mirollo-Strogatz), so the field self-organises from scattered twinkle through travelling bands into unison and a handful of deaf individuals pull it apart again, forever, with no scripted reset.
Floret Pack
A full-bleed phyllotactic hero background where primordia are birthed one at a time at a central meristem, golden-angle sequenced and locally relaxed as they advect outward, so the 34/55 parastichy spirals emerge from genuine growth rather than a closed-form layout.
Agar Starve
A bacterial colony grown from a live, depleting nutrient field: a rich plate spreads into a smooth disc, a starved one forks into dense-branching fingers that never merge because the gap between them was eaten first, and a spent plate dries to interior tone before a fresh colony sprouts from another corner and grows through the ghost of the last one.
Forage Vein
A hero background where a Physarum-style plasmodium forages the page's own content boxes: trail-following agents flood out from the headline, CTA and logo row, fat veins form where deposition keeps outpacing decay, and starved or moved food sources visibly retract and regrow with no scripted path underneath.
Lamina Dome
Stromatolites accreting upward from the bottom edge of a full-bleed pane: a heightfield of columns competes for a light-occlusion clearance integral cast in a cone toward a slowly arcing light direction, so a few tall domes shade and outgrow their neighbours while a slow sea-level line periodically drowns and revives the whole front, and every ~2s the front is committed as a banded lamina stripe until the field reads like cut stromatolite rock.
Ring Graze
Fairy-ring annuli grown from a single consumable, recovering substrate field: fronts expand hollow because they consume the ground they cross and leave it dead behind them, two fronts strand and die along a shared exhausted seam instead of passing through each other, and new rings only germinate once grazed ground has genuinely recovered. A slow ambient backdrop tuned for 404s, waitlist pages and article footers.
Thallus Siege
A full-bleed pane of crustose lichen: a dozen colonies grow lobed radial fronts across a shared occupancy lattice, stall on contact, occasionally creep over a markedly slower rival, and senesce from the centre outward to reopen ground the mosaic keeps renegotiating on a scale of minutes, not frames.
Sand Lock
A full-bleed Chladni plate: forty thousand grains of sand storm across a vibrating steel field and collapse onto the nodal lines of a real plate mode every time the sweeping drive frequency lands on a resonance, then break apart into a different figure as it leaves.
Rime Creep
A full-bleed pane of window frost growing in real time: dendritic ice ferns advance from nucleation points on a fixed 60-degree lattice, sprout side branches, thicken behind their own tips and stop dead where two grains collide, leaving the clear glass between them slowly closing over before the whole pane thaws and seeds again.
Ping Shadow
A full-bleed acoustic image of a seabed drawn by a sector beam that sweeps the frame: grazing-lit sand ripples, boulders with shadows stretching radially away from the transducer, range-growing speckle, and a persistence gradient trailing the wedge.
Granule Churn
A full-bleed stellar photosphere: bright convection cells packed edge to edge, born, swelling against their neighbours, splitting and dying, with the cooled material draining back down the dark intergranular lanes between them and bright flecks flaring in the strongest downdrafts.
Edge Yield
A full-bleed scanning electron micrograph: a packed micro-landscape of spore grains, rod crystals and draped filaments imaged by a detector simulation rather than a lighting model, so steep facets bloom into glowing rims, crevices fall into hard shadow, and the whole frame is crisp at once under a live scan with shot noise and a descending sweep line.
Shear Billow
A full-bleed Kelvin-Helmholtz shear layer: two stratified layers slide past each other, the interface between them ripples, steepens, curls into a train of spiral billows and shreds into turbulence downstream, regenerating continuously with no input at all.
Flyback Tear
A full-bleed dead-broadcast CRT: a live monoscope test signal scanned onto a phosphor face by a timebase that keeps losing its grip, with rolling vertical hold, tear bands, snow and real phosphor persistence.
Dye Whorl
A full-bleed tank of ink diffusing in water: a real GPU fluid solver whose coarse velocity field transports a fine dye field, so plumes billow with dense cores, sheets thin as they stretch, tendrils shear off the shoulders and everything dissipates into haze. Drifting injectors, falling drops and interface buoyancy keep it blooming with nobody touching it; the pointer stirs the fluid and presses drop a fresh bead.
Kamacite Etch
A full-bleed ASCII Widmanstätten pattern: interlocking nickel-iron crystal lathes locked to the four octahedral lattice angles, surfacing out of blank metal as a slow diagonal acid-etch front sweeps the surface over about 90 seconds and loops by repolishing the oldest region rather than resetting.
Background ASCII Domain Walls
An ambient ASCII background running a real Ising model just below its critical temperature and inking only the DOMAIN WALLS (the boundaries between up and down spin regions), so a slowly reorganising network of rough hairlines sits on empty ground, with the pointer applying a local magnetic field that clears walls out of its own neighbourhood.
Background ASCII Force Chains
An ambient ASCII background of a granular packing under load: a static disc packing's contact network is relaxed each frame and only the contacts carrying well above the mean force are inked, so the few percent of grains bearing the load stand out as thin branching chains while the rest of the pile stays dark.
Background ASCII Nodal Lines
An ambient ASCII background of the destructive-interference nodal set of four point emitters: ink appears only where the summed radial waves cancel to near zero, tracing the hyperbolic dead-fringe families across an otherwise empty field, with the pointer as a fifth, phase-shifted emitter that redraws the geometry.
Background ASCII Voronoi Walls
An ambient ASCII background of Voronoi cell WALLS only: ink appears exactly where the first and second nearest sites are equidistant, so a sparse, slowly drifting network of hairlines and clean three-way junctions sits on an otherwise empty field, and the pointer is a weighted site whose territory visibly swells.
Background Lloyd Relax
A blue-noise dot field that never stops settling: points run one weighted Lloyd relaxation iteration per frame against a drifting density function with genuine zero regions, so ink continually migrates into the dense lobes and leaves the rest of the frame bare paper; the pointer opens a density well the dots crowd into and drain out of.
Background Truchet Weave
An ambient Truchet arc weave whose tile orientation is the SIGN of a slow harmonic field, so the frame reads as interlaced domains of continuous arcs separated by pale seams along the domain walls, and the pointer bends the field so the walls re-route outward from the cursor and retreat when it leaves.
Background ASCII Caustics
Ambient water-caustics rendered in ASCII ink density: three rotated wave grids combined multiplicatively and sharpened into thin bright filaments, the way overlapping light wave-fronts trace a caustic web, with the pointer acting as a lens the pattern visibly focuses toward.
Background ASCII Flow
An ambient ASCII flow-field background: a fixed set of tracer particles ride a time-evolving 2D curl-noise velocity field, each glyph's direction ('-', '|', '/', '\\') and trail alpha encoding its heading and speed, with the pointer stirring a local swirl instead of painting or repelling.
Hero ASCII Eclipse
A full-bleed ASCII hero built around an occlusion event: a dark glyph disc transits a bright sun disc over a fixed starfield, the pointer dragging the transit, and a corona blooms at the rim only as the two centers nearly align, the way a real solar corona is only visible near totality.
Hero ASCII Rainfall
A full-bleed ASCII precipitation hero: every column runs its own independent falling drop with a fixed rows/sec speed and trail length, and the pointer bends nearby streams sideways like wind gusting through rain instead of painting or warping cells directly.
Hero ASCII Terrain
A full-bleed ASCII landscape hero: five ridgelines of deterministic value noise recede toward a horizon, each layer stepping up in frequency, height and ink density the nearer it sits, with the pointer driving parallax so the terrain slides past like a window on a moving vehicle.
Hero ASCII Tunnel
A full-bleed ASCII perspective-corridor hero: sixteen squircle rings advance toward the viewer on a continuous loop, shaded through a density ramp so depth reads from character weight alone, with the pointer steering the shared vanishing point and the whole corridor tilting to follow it.
Background ASCII Wake
Full-bleed monospace cursor-trail field: a sparse ambient scatter at rest, with the pointer dragging a decaying character comet whose length and brightness depend on how fast it moves.
Background ASCII Plasma
A full-bleed animated ASCII plasma field: three octaves of traveling value noise mapped through a density ramp to a monospace glyph grid, with the pointer warping the field outward and letting it relax back like dragging a finger through liquid.
ASCII Engraving Contour
ASCII rendered as a real engraving: glyph density traces concentric contour bands through an orbiting metaball field instead of mapping brightness straight to weight, so the plate reads as ridged hatch linework over a soft rounded subject, with a pointer-driven polish trail and a self-healing burin-slip glitch.
Background Gradient Shader
Full-bleed animated gradient background: a WebGL shader drifts three theme-derived colors through a domain-warped noise flow field into a simple 3-stop ramp, reading as a calm moving current of color rather than a shader demo.
Grid Magnetic Lattice
Card grid on a magnetized hairline lattice: the cursor bends the grid lines and the DOM cards sample the same displacement field, riding the bent sheet.
Terrain Erosion Carve
The cursor is a river: dragging across a live topographic map carves a channel into the heightfield, marching-squares isolines reflowing into canyon walls with a faint waterline; release and sediment heals the terrain back over ~6 seconds. At rest the sheet stays alive: contours drift in a slow traveling ripple and sediment specks trickle downhill continuously.
Background ASCII Dither
Luminance-to-glyph canvas renderer: ASCII, Bayer-dither, and dot-matrix modes with cursor-proximity resolve.