Cell trail

A crisp grid whose cells light up one by one behind the pointer and fade out, with a spotlight on the lines and a pulse of cells on click.

element
grid
cells
trail
cursor
canvas
since 0.2

Background Studio: tune it below, then copy the code

Your system asks for reduced motion: the demo shows its final state and nothing moves.

Live demo

Cell trail example

Code

It follows the controls above: change an option and the code changes with it.

<script src="https://search.axi0.io/axi0/motion/motion.js" defer></script>

<axi0-cell-trail cover></axi0-cell-trail>

import { CellTrail } from "./motion/react/CellTrail";

<CellTrail />

<script setup lang="ts">
import CellTrail from "./motion/vue/CellTrail.vue";
</script>

<template>
  <CellTrail />
</template>

const fx = document.createElement("axi0-cell-trail");
document.querySelector("#hero").append(fx);

The wrappers: CellTrail.tsx (React, TypeScript) and CellTrail.vue (Vue). Both render the same attributes as the HTML; the loader does the rest.

Options

Attribute	Default	What it does
`cell`	`52`	Cell size
`fade`	`1.2`	How long a lit cell takes to fade
`style`	`lines`	Grid style
`pulse`	`true`	A click sends a pulse of cells outward
`colors`	auto	Colors, comma separated (empty: the palette for the page's theme)
`background`	auto	Background color (empty: the theme's)
`speed`	`1`	How fast it moves
`theme`	`auto`	Light or dark palette (auto: from the page behind it)
`cover`	`false`	Fill the nearest positioned parent, behind its content

Decorative: the canvas is aria-hidden and takes no focus; with cover it ignores the pointer for clicks, so the content above it stays clickable and readable. Under reduced motion the grid shows still and no cells light. Drawn on a 2D canvas at device resolution (capped at 2); it starts when it comes within 300 px of the screen, the frame loop stops off screen and in hidden tabs, and reduced motion draws one still frame with no movement.

Size

cell-trail.js is 1.5 KB gzip, with backgrounds-kit.js 3.4 KB it needs. A page loads the loader (2.9 KB) and core.js (1.4 KB) once, whatever it uses.