Ambient · night city
City Skyline Clock
A city at night with windows flickering on and off across the towers, under a low moon. Generated fresh each time, so the skyline is never quite the same twice.
—
Press F for full screen. Motion pauses automatically if your system asks for reduced motion.
How it is made
A City That Draws Itself
No Two Are Alike
The towers are generated when the page loads: their widths, heights and spacing are random within sensible limits, and each window is lit or dark by chance. Reload and you get a different city.
Why the Windows Flicker
Each lit window fades on its own slow cycle, between three and nine seconds. In aggregate that reads as a city where people are moving around, without anything obvious enough to distract.
A Dark Scene
The background is close to black, which suits a dim room and an evening shift. On an OLED screen it also draws noticeably less power than a pale one.
Where It Works
Overnight on a spare monitor, in a bar or a lobby, or behind a stream. It is calm without being empty.
Under the hood
How This Scene Is Built
The city is generated when the page loads rather than drawn in advance, so the arrangement of towers and lit windows differs every time. Nothing is downloaded to make that happen: it is a few hundred small elements positioned by script.
The pause button stops the windows flickering and leaves the city lit as it stands. The page also honours your system reduce-motion setting without being asked.
Answers
City Skyline Background Questions
Is it a real city?
No. The skyline is generated from random numbers each time the page loads, so it does not depict anywhere in particular.
Does the moon move?
No, it sits in one place. Moving it would be the sort of detail that pulls your eye back to the screen, which is the opposite of what a background is for.