What's Left Behind: We Make the Things You Still See After You Close the Tab | Blog

Commission Studio site for Afterimage, a fictional experiential web studio whose creative director is obsessed with Active Theory. The site is built on the mission statement. Audience: brand and creative leads hiring a studio, and designers choosing where to work. Message: this studio’s work stays with you, and the site proves it on you

Rival activetheory.net (Awwwards Site of the Day), with lusion.co as the second benchmark

Inspired by Afterimage (Wikipedia)

Built with Three.js (WebGL2) · pmndrs postprocessing · GPUComputationRenderer · Web Audio

Techniques 590,000-particle GPGPU light sculpture · photo-derived particle reliefs from generated images and depth maps · eye-space afterimage buffer with gaze lag and saccades · opponent-colour ghosts derived from the room colour · through-the-eyelids blink · favicon drawn from your last ghost

Direction A James Turrell room in cobalt, not a black void; Bricolage Grotesque as the only typeface; amber only exists as the ghost, so warmth is only ever in your eye; sound scored to the interaction (lids, an exposure thump, a swell)

Result You stare at the mission line until a word burns out, blink, and find its amber ghost following your eyes. Four case studies burn in and leave ghosts behind. When you close your eyes, every ghost you collected plays back, and the site asks you to close the tab

The Story

Stare at something bright for a few seconds and look away, and you keep seeing it in the opposite colour. The cells in your retina that were working hardest have tired, so the neutral room behind looks shifted the other way. That ghost is fixed to the retina, so it goes wherever your eyes go. You can’t look away from it, because it’s in the looking.

Afterimage is a studio that doesn’t exist, and its mission is “We make the things you still see after you close the tab.” Studio sites usually show a reel and talk about it. This one tries to do the thing to you instead. Most of the leading agency sites open with a loading screen and a reel; this one opens with a point of light and the words “Look here.”

This is the second time afterimages have turned up here. The Afterimage, a Canvas 2D sketch from January, did dwell-and-burn with fading complementary ghosts on a single canvas. What’s Left Behind takes the same eye trick to a full studio site: GPU particles, ghosts that ride your gaze rather than the page, case studies, blinking, and a tab that plays along.

The Take

The cursor is your gaze and a click, tap or Space is a blink. The point of light bursts into the mission line, hanging in depth in a glowing cobalt room. Rest your gaze on a word and it starts to overexpose: it goes white-hot, fringes and burns out. A moment later its amber ghost arrives where you were looking and drifts with your eyes rather than staying with the page.

Blink and the line is gone, but it stays in your eye. Each blink after that brings in a case study, built as a relief of light from a photograph: an observatory’s night-sky exhibition, a perfume launched as a light, an electric car revealed by its own headlights, a documentary about salt flats that whites out as you read. Each one leaves a ghost behind when you blink past it. In the studio the room turns viridian, so the ghosts turn rose, and your ghost becomes the lamp that reveals three lines about how they work.

Then the site asks you to close your eyes. Hold, and behind red eyelids every afterimage you collected plays back at once, from the frames you actually looked at. The last screen says “Now close the tab.” If you switch away, the tab title becomes “still here.” and the favicon becomes your last ghost. When you come back it tells you how many seconds you looked away, and that it stayed.

The Tech

The ghost lives in eye space. The page lives in world space, but every afterimage is stamped into a separate buffer anchored to a lagged gaze: a critically damped spring on the cursor that jumps like a saccade and follows like smooth pursuit. After each blink the eye drifts once, so ghosts slide while the world stays still. That split between what moves with the page and what moves with your eyes is what makes it feel physiological rather than like a cursor trail.

A ghost never sits next to its source. The first look-dev frames put the ghost beside the live type, and every judge read it as a drop shadow. So ghosts are only stamped from things that are gone: a word that burned out, or the whole line once you blink. The burn is overexposure, not particles flying away: heat whitens the word, spreads each point into glare and adds a chromatic fringe until it flares and disappears.

The colour comes from the room. A ghost’s hue is computed every frame as the opponent of the field colour in Oklab, with saturation committed early so a fading ghost becomes a dimmer amber rather than passing through grey. When the room shifts from cobalt to viridian, the same maths turns every ghost rose.

The light is particles. The mission line is 590,000 particles (262,000 on phones) in a GPGPU simulation, sampled from the typeface at runtime and bloomed out of a single point along 120 radial spokes, with depth of field on the ones in flight. The case studies are generated images with depth maps, resampled into weighted particle homes by brightness, edges and local detail, so you see the observatory’s beam and the car’s light bar rather than a filled silhouette. Each relief’s ghost mask is built from the same edge and highlight data.

The tab is part of the site. On visibilitychange the title changes and a 64px favicon is cropped from your last ghost, the observatory dome or the perfume bottle or the burned word, and tinted amber on a cobalt tile so it reads on light and dark tab strips.

Experience: What’s Left Behind

This blog post was AI generated with Claude Code. Authored by Artificial Noodles.