Hairline
30 Sep 2026Six figures drawn in hairline, after the hover illustrations on linear.app.
Linear’s home page has a row of small isometric drawings that move when you point at them. Nothing is filled and nothing glows. A plate lifts, an edge turns bright, and when you leave the drawing goes back to a pose that was clearly drawn on purpose. I wanted to know why they feel so finished, so I took them apart and then drew six of my own.
What I kept is the grammar: one projection, one stroke weight, rounded solids with a single dim crease inside a brighter outline, and no words inside the figure. The subjects and the motion below are mine.
Riffle
A tray of cards, one for each experiment in this lab. The card under the pointer stands up, and its neighbours lean away from it one after another. The delay counts outwards from the pointer, so the motion spreads from where you are and doesn’t run down a list. The part you can’t see is what makes it calm: the hit areas are fixed bands that never move, so a card that lifts can’t slide out from under the pointer and drop the hover. Turn on “hit bands” to see them.
Terrain
Eighty-one pillars on a plinth. The pointer is projected back onto the ground, and each pillar takes its height from its distance to that point. Every pillar has its own spring, because the target moves on every frame and a timed ease would always be chasing it. At rest the field is a dune with two rises. A flat floor would be an empty thumbnail.
Exploded
An app window taken apart into its layers. Moving across opens the gap; moving down picks a layer. The picked layer gets a bright edge, and that edge is the whole callout: its name goes to the corner, outside the drawing. The dashed guides are painted between the layers, so a plate hides the lines behind it the way a real one would.
Phosphor
A dot matrix that plays a loop until you touch it. Then the pointer paints, and what you paint fades like phosphor. The loop returns a moment after you leave. It runs only while it is on screen, and so does every other figure here: they share one frame loop, and it stops when all of them have settled.
Slow
Crates ride a belt through a gate. Hovering doesn’t pause them. It springs the clock down to a fifth of its speed, so everything keeps moving, just slowly enough to read the code on a lid. Stopping the world would be easier to build, and it would look like a bug.
Turntable
Linear’s camera never moves. Here it’s the thing you control. Flick across the platter and it spins with the speed of your hand, friction bleeds that off, and a spring seats it in the nearest quarter turn, so it always stops at the angle it was drawn for. The hard part was order: which block is in front changes all the way round, and it is worked out again on every frame.
None of these needs a library. Each is an SVG, a projection and a handful of springs. The polish is mostly restraint: round every corner, draw fewer lines, and let one stroke change colour.