Catalogue / Plate 21← All plates
Guides that trail your pointer
Named guides that trail your pointer on springs, and go back to work when you leave.
Sampleton Studio · Spring launch plan
Order the frames
Steel, three sizes
Paint the forks
Cream, with a green stripe
Test ride day
Bring a helmet
Open the yard
Gate code on the door
Move across the board. Leave it, and they go back to work.
Nobody else is here. The three guides are drawn by this page.
Remake it
Build one interactive web page: A planning board for an invented design studio, and three named guides, Mina, Otto and Juno. Each is an arrow and a coloured name pill on a spring of its own stiffness, so they follow your pointer in a fixed order and keep gliding after you stop. Leave the board and they go to the cards and get on with their own work. The page says plainly that nobody else is here and the three are drawn by it. Set it on an invented business called Sampleton, with its own drawn or generated pictures and no one else's files. It suits: A shared or collaborative tool that wants to show what working together looks like, a guided tour, a studio or a team page that feels inhabited. Do not let it fail the way this kind of piece usually does: Cursors that imitate other users, and tags that cover the content. Here they are labelled as the page's own guides, the tags flip away from the edge, the guides can be sent away, and reduced motion leaves them still. It must work with the keyboard, on a phone, with reduced motion respected and no text under 12px. Tell me which libraries you chose and why.
Notes: when it suits, when it does not, how it fails
- When it suits
- A shared or collaborative tool that wants to show what working together looks like, a guided tour, a studio or a team page that feels inhabited.
- When it does not
- Any page where the cursors could be mistaken for real, live visitors. That is a false claim, not a flourish.
- How it fails
- Cursors that imitate other users, and tags that cover the content. Here they are labelled as the page's own guides, the tags flip away from the edge, the guides can be sent away, and reduced motion leaves them still.
Measured on: labs.google · T3. Built from scratch for an invented business; nothing here comes from the site studied.