Accretion

Four and a half thousand particles circle a dark void, tilted toward you so the far side of the disk slips behind the horizon. Every few seconds the orbit gives way. The particles leave the disk, gather into the off/form wordmark, hold, swap to a second word, then fall back into the spin.

We wanted an ident that is never quite finished. A logo that has to be pulled together every time it appears says more about a studio that builds things than one that just fades in.

It was also a test of how far plain Canvas 2D can go before you need the GPU.

1. 1

   Each particle orbits in three dimensions with its own speed and height. The disk is tilted, projected with a simple perspective divide and depth-sorted, so the void hides whatever passes behind it.

2. 2

   The words are rasterised off-screen and every inked pixel becomes a candidate anchor, bucketed into a coarse grid. Held particles random-walk between neighbouring anchors, so the letters keep flowing instead of freezing.

3. 3

   A single phase clock (orbit, gather, hold, swap, release) drives one morph value that every particle interpolates against. Trails fade slowly while a shape holds and much harder during transitions, so one structure never ghosts into the next.

4. 4

   Drawing is batched. Particles are quantised into eight alpha buckets and each bucket fills as a single path. That is what keeps thousands of dots at frame rate.