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No.123 · Backgrounds

Aperture Rings

Concentric rings of ticks and dashes turning at their own slow speeds, like a lens barrel or watch bezel — pure CSS.

The prompt

Written for the variant you picked above: Frost

Create a purely geometric, CSS-only background inspired by a lens barrel or watch bezel. Centre a stack of seven concentric rings, each a circular element with a mask that keeps only its outer 1.5px (or 9px for the tick ring) and a repeating-conic-gradient fill that draws its pattern: fine ticks (0.5° every 3°), coarse ticks (1.2° every 15°), long dashes (9° every 13°), and a broken arc (110°, gap, 50°, gap). Cycle the four patterns across the rings. Each ring rotates on its own linear loop (70s for the innermost up to ~270s for the outermost), alternating direction, with a negative animation delay so nothing starts aligned. Opacity fades from 0.5 at the centre to 0.2 outward. Behind the rings sit a soft blurred radial glow that breathes on a 12s loop and, at the centre, a small bright core dot with a halo. Size everything in container-query units (cqmin) so it scales to any container without JavaScript. Colours are two props: ring colour and background. Reduced motion holds everything still. Selected variant — Frost: Ring colour #b9cce4 (frost blue) on #08070c; corner labels in the ring colour at 55%.

Notes

Interaction
None — ambient.
Motion
Ring rotation loops of 70–270s (alternating), glow breathing 12s.
Accessibility
Purely decorative and aria-hidden; reduced motion stops all rotation.
Responsive
Sized with container-query units, so it fits any box; rings beyond the container are clipped.

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301 components