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Comment by Retr0id | Hacker News Reader

This webpage doesn't provide any reasoning for why one is better than the other.

I think I prefer the one on the left, but if I happened to be of the opposite opinion, this page would not have changed my mind.

Edit: I'm curious what they'd think of my design[1], which is simultaneously "animated in a pulsing fashion" and "rotated with a fluid, linear animation". Is this a good design or a bad design, according to their criteria?

[1] https://retr0.id/stuff/spinner.html

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Surely someone can do better than this, but the spinning one looks broken to me, as if something snapped and it just began rotating violently. Why do some dots have different shades if not to convey the same motion as the rotation? It might as well be any random image spinning on the page. Maybe it feels like there's a lack of intention?

The right one should be fluid by design, ie. the image is a single curve teardrop-esque stroke and not segmented.

You only need brightness to simulate the illusion of rotation in stationary dots. If the dots are actually rotating then you can just make them all the same brightness. Using two attributes to simultaneously recreate the same effect is overkill and ruins the effect altogether.

Completely agree, as evidenced by the fact that the same fontawesome package includes both as an option it feels very wrong to suggest that one is "wrong"

I, personally, prefer the one on the left too but I wouldn't ever say the one on the right is wrong or broken or needs to be "fixed"

I'll speculate that smooth animations like the rotating spinner (right) made for larger gif images due to needing more frames. So historically the pulsing spinner (left) was preferred. You don't want the spinner itself to take very much time to load, either.

Personally I like both, and might pick one or the other as a stylistic choice.

Can't you do the smooth animation with a still image and css?

You can do it now, but "historically" as the parent post qualifies it it wasn't the case.

Personally I like both

If you combine them, you get one where the dots spin slowly, while there's another spinning effect with the colours of the dots themselves.

I think you have to wait until loading is finished.

Are you old enough to remember the <blink> tag?

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