Custom Cursor

A gallery of four cards under a cursor of its own. Crossing into the stage swaps the arrow for a dot that follows the hand a beat behind, and hovering a card grows the dot into a pill naming the lab the card opens. Move to the next card and the name morphs into the next one rather than popping out and back in.

Key insight: a custom cursor is two positions, not one. The hand is where the browser says it is, and the drawn cursor is a tween chasing that point, retargeted on every move, so it arrives a beat late and settles rather than stopping dead. The lag is the whole feel of it, and it is also why the pill leans: its tilt is read off the speed of that chase, so a fast sweep tips it over and a stop swings it level.

It is desktop only by the pointer's own account. A touch has no hover to take a cursor from and no arrow to replace, so a finger gets the cards as plain links and nothing is drawn. Reduced motion keeps the dot and the pill and drops the chase: the cursor sits exactly on the hand and the pill arrives without the overshoot.