# Flower lattice

A row of two-colour flowers that blink in unison, stepping at 12 frames a second behind a heavy frame. Live at https://design.how/vault#flower-lattice. Watch only: it has no skill to install.

## What it is

Cream paper, a thick rust-red frame inset from the edge, and inside it one row of the same flower repeated every half of the card's height, with the centre column on the card's centre line. Two colours and nothing else: no strokes, no gradients, no shading. The wider the card, the more flowers it shows.

The flower does not rotate. It blinks. Eight thin swirled petals flood closed with ink until a few fat white petals with slash highlights are left, then sweep open again. That is a change of shape, eight petals becoming five, so it cannot be modelled as a rotating motif. Instead the 48 poses are traced data in flipbook.ts, closed rings in pitch units around the flower's centre. Each pose becomes one Path2D at mount and fills even-odd, so the white petals and the hub punch out on their own.

One blink is 24 frames, and the second blink lands rotated by about half a petal, so the true cycle is 48 poses, played twice per 96-frame loop. The engine steps in whole frames at 12 per second and redraws only when the frame changes. Interpolating would dissolve the hand-drawn blink into mush.

The row drifts left at a constant one pitch per loop, which is what makes the eight-second loop seamless. Everything is clipped to the frame's inside, then the frame is drawn on top as one even-odd fill of two rectangles. The traced cells carry thin slivers from their neighbours at 0.572 pitch, which the engine drops by testing each ring's centroid against half a pitch.

Last updated: 2026-11-02