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No.79 · Cards

Orbit Card

Profile cards where hovering sends a swarm of coloured dots orbiting the border, in an endless draggable marquee.

The prompt

Written for the variant you picked above: Marquee

Design a compact team card (288×104px, 10px radius, near-black surface, hairline border) showing a name (medium, -0.015em tracking) and a two-line muted role. Each person has a unique signature colour. On hover or keyboard focus, seven small glowing dots in that colour (4–6px, each with a soft glow of the same hue) begin travelling around the card's rounded border. Use CSS offset-path: inset(0 round 10px) and animate offset-distance to 100%, each dot with its own duration (3.55–5.1s) and a negative delay so they're already spread around the edge when they appear — like electrons around a nucleus. The animation stays paused and the dots invisible until hover, then they fade in over 400ms and start moving. At the same time the border mixes 55% toward the person's colour. The cards can also be presented in an endless strip: a rAF loop drifting 30px/s (22px/s on mobile) that pauses while a card is hovered or focused, stops when offscreen, and has pager buttons plus arrow keys that step exactly one card with a 480ms ease-out-cubic tween. Touch users can swipe: a drag past 45% of a card's width steps in that direction. Duplicated sets are aria-hidden. Edges fade out with a horizontal mask. Under reduced motion, show a static grid with no orbit. Selected variant — Marquee: Marquee: six cards in the endless drifting strip described above (OrbitMarquee with label "Team"), with pager buttons, arrow keys and swipe.

Notes

Interaction
Hover/focus a card to start its orbit; the marquee pauses underneath you. Pager buttons, arrow keys and swipe step one card.
Motion
Dots: offset-distance loop at 3.55–5.1s each, 400ms fade-in. Marquee: 30px/s drift, 480ms ease-out-cubic steps.
Accessibility
Cards are focusable articles; duplicate loop copies are aria-hidden and untabbable. Pager buttons have labels. Region is labelled and arrow keys work while focus is inside.
Responsive
Fixed-size cards, fluid marquee. Mobile drift slows to 22px/s, and below 640px the pager arrows sit under the track instead of over the cards. Reduced motion swaps to a 1/2/4-column grid.
On touch
Orbit is hover-only (fine pointers); on touch the marquee is swipeable and cards show their static border.

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301 components