A few designs in the catalog have always had something moving behind them: rain on one, drifting specks on another, a slow web of connected dots on a third. If you liked the effect but not the design, there was nothing to be done about it. The movement came with the layout or not at all.
That is no longer the case. The effects have been lifted out of the designs they came from, and every member can now put one behind any design.
Where to find it
In the admin, open Website, then Background. Under the colors and tiles you already know from background textures there is a new row called Animated backgrounds. There are six:
- Rising motes, small specks lifting slowly up the page
- Rain, with near and far drops moving at different speeds
- Parallax constellation, drifting dots joined by fine lines
- Scattering dots, larger dots that part and move away from the cursor
- Moving lines, faint diagonals with a dash of color traveling along each
- Rising lines, thin strokes climbing the page
Each tile plays the real effect as a live preview, drawn in your own color, so you can see what you are choosing before you choose it.
Your color, your strength
The effect is drawn in the color you picked under your color scheme, not in the color of the design it was taken from. Next to the color picker sits a Transparency slider that moves in steps of ten, from 0 to 90. At 0 the effect is as strong as it was in its original design. At 90 it is a faint suggestion. Most sites look best somewhere in the middle, where the movement is noticed once and then stops competing with your headshot.
What it draws over
An animated background sits on top of a flat color or a tile. It is deliberately not drawn over an uploaded photograph, because two things moving and textured at once is noise. If you switch to a photo background, your animated choice is kept and comes back when you switch back.
It also works with grayscale mode and the rest of the background settings, so nothing you set before needs changing.
Use it lightly
A casting director opens your site to see your face and your credits. Movement behind them should make the page feel alive, not ask for attention. Rain and rising motes are the quietest. Scattering dots is the most playful and suits a site with a lot of open space. If you are not sure, pick one, set the transparency to 50, and look at your site on your phone before deciding.
New to all of this? Start with a free actor website and come back to the background once your photos are in.
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