Vitrine

A cabinet of web interface effects. Each one numbered, taken apart, and yours to take away.

No.001 Glyph Rain Columns of glyphs falling on, each trail dimming character by character No.002 Nimbus One circle warped three dozen times by the same turbulence, stacked into a flowing band of light No.003 Refresh A front settles the text one cell at a time — a hard edge, or scattered into dissolve No.004 Sfumato Two soft lights meeting in the dark, on a sheet the pointer drags aside No.005 Soul Particles A line of type broken onto a grid of dots, each springing back to its place, parting as the pointer passes No.006 Byte Drift A field of digits reading a horizon that will not hold still, parting for the pointer and collapsing at a click

What is Vitrine?

Vitrine is a cabinet of web interface effects. Each one is given a permanent number and then taken apart: every parameter it exposes is listed together with the reasoning behind its bounds. The 6 specimens in the cabinet expose 139 parameters between them, and 122 of those carry written reasoning about where their bounds come from — including, where nothing forces a number, a plain statement that nothing does. The remaining 17 were tuned by eye, and the page says so instead of inventing a reason.

The numbers work the way museum accession numbers do: once assigned, a number is never reused, even if the work it names is withdrawn. No.001 will point at Glyph Rain for as long as this cabinet exists.

Every specimen also records its lineage — what it was learned from, and what it deliberately does not copy — and can be opened in a panel where any parameter can be changed and the result taken away as a link, as source, as a PNG, or as a video.