Hold Still: the web rewards you for doing nothing
The story behind Hold Still
Premise The web always asks you to click, scroll and hurry. This piece rewards the opposite: your cursor is a twig, and if you keep still, birds come to it. Audience: web-literate visitors arriving from X or the archive. Perf target: under a millisecond a frame on one 2D canvas
Reference Charley Harper’s geometric bird prints; Japanese bird-and-branch prints (kachō-e); the timing of real small birds
Built with Canvas 2D, no libraries
Techniques Birds drawn in code from arcs and triangles, with a two-plate print offset; a twig that grows a shoot for each new bird and bows under their weight; graded fear (carry, flinch, scatter) driven by pointer speed; a stillness arc that keeps paying out; sprites for the swaying leaves; a pixel budget, a 30 fps idle and a pause when hidden
Direction Spruce green with leaf greens and an ochre accent, flat bird colours (cardinal red, goldfinch yellow, robin orange, jay blue), a slipped under-plate and paper grain. Jost for the page
The Story
Almost everything on the web is built to make you move: scroll, click, swipe, keep going. Hold Still asks for nothing. Your cursor turns into a small twig, and if you leave it alone for a second, a chickadee swoops in and lands on it.
Then a goldfinch. Then a robin. The twig grows a new shoot for each one and bends under their weight. Stay still and they keep coming, onto the branches and even onto the title, until the whole screen is a print full of birds. The only thing it asks is the one thing the web never does.
The Take
- Keep still. The first bird lands within a second and a half, and five or six are on the twig within seven seconds. They look around, cock their heads, preen, shuffle along and bump shoulders.
- Move gently. The birds ride along, leaning against the motion and fluttering to keep their balance, and they turn to look where you’re going.
- Move a little faster. They crouch and flinch, and the nervous ones leave.
- Move fast, or click. They burst away in every direction, and feathers rock slowly down. One or two bold ones wait on a branch, and they all come back about a second after you’re still again.
- Keep still for longer. At around twenty seconds a chickadee hops under the twig and hangs upside down. Later the birds fluff up and doze off, and if you wait long enough a hummingbird comes to visit.
- On a phone, put your finger down and keep it there. The twig sits just above your fingertip so you can see who lands.
The Tech
Birds made of geometry. Each species is drawn every frame from a handful of flat shapes:
- an egg-shaped body from two arcs;
- a round head;
- a triangle beak;
- a dot eye;
- a wing that’s a lens in flight and a leaf at rest;
- a tail that grows out of the body as one shape.
Every mark is a field mark: the chickadee’s cap and bib, the goldfinch’s wing bars, the jay’s necklace and barred tail, the cardinal’s mask and crest. One darker plate is drawn slightly out of register, the way a two-colour screen print slips.
A twig that grows. Before each bird arrives, the twig lengthens to make room and a new shoot buds with a leaf. Each bird’s drawn width is measured once at runtime, so there’s always a gap between neighbours. The weight of the perched birds bows the arms down, and every landing kicks the twig with a small spring.
Graded fear. Pointer speed is smoothed every frame. Below a slow walking pace the birds ride and balance, in a middle band they flinch, and above it they scatter, each on its own curved escape. Bold species come back first, and the last bird to leave is the first to return.
A living print. The big leaves and both branches are pre-rendered once into sprites with their print plates, then drawn with a slow, out-of-phase sway. A bird landing on a branch dips it and shakes the nearest leaf.
Quiet by default. The paper grain, the field and the leaves are baked once per resize. A frame costs well under a millisecond, it drops to 30 frames a second when nothing moves, and it stops when the tab is hidden.
The birds are drawn after the mid-century flat style of Charley Harper’s bird prints; they are an homage, not his work.
This blog post was AI generated with Claude Code. Authored by Artificial Noodles.