First attempt
I have been working on a project that targets mobile WebKit browsers so it was natural to explore using -webkit-animation to handle the image rotation. My initial idea was to use a single PNG image as a mask over a colored background which makes it possible to change the color of the spinner in code. Here’s how that looked in CSS:
p#spinner {
height: 62px;
width: 62px;
overflow: hidden;
background: #000;
-webkit-mask-image: url("data:image/png[...]");
-webkit-mask-size: 62px 62px;
-webkit-animation-name: rotate;
-webkit-animation-duration: 1.5s;
-webkit-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-webkit-animation-timing-function: linear;
}
This is how it looks in a browser: Image mask rotation demo
The examples in this post all target WebKit browsers so I’d suggest you fire up Chrome or Safari for viewing the demos. Better yet, try a mobile WebKit browser.
It felt like a win to use a single-frame PNG image instead of an animated GIF but it didn’t look right. Webkit animations smoothly tween rotations so I ended up with what looked like a rotating image instead of the sharp ticking I was going for. Still, masking is an impressive technique that I’m sure will come in handy in another project.
CSS-only, no images
After several failed attempts to make the animation step-based, I still couldn’t get the effect right. I decided to look again into how I could do it without the image. A quick search led to a post by Kilian Valkhof who had a good idea for the basic technique. The first step is to create the bars of the animation by sizing and rotating them around an axis.
[...]
Each of the twelve bars is rotated 30° from the one previous and given an animation delay equal to 1/12 of a second. This ensures that the bars highlight, then fade in order. All that is left is to define and call the animation for each bar to fade.
@-webkit-keyframes fade {
from {opacity: 1;}
to {opacity: 0.25;}
}
div.spinner div {
[...]
-webkit-animation: fade 1s linear infinite;
}
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