Beautiful Backgrounds: Animated Web Components for Stunning Pages
How do you make a website truly come alive without heavy frameworks? Beautiful Backgrounds is a TypeScript library that does exactly that: elegant, animated backgrounds as Web Components that are interactive, high-performance, and easy to integrate.
Stefan Nieke
Backgrounds have always played a key role in web design. From the subtle gradients of early websites to the immersive, animated pages of modern platforms like Apple.com or Raycast, a compelling background can define a website’s identity and capture attention. They provide not just decoration, but a feeling, a mood, a subtle interaction that makes a site memorable.
For years, creating such effects often meant diving into heavy frameworks or WebGL, which could be complex and sometimes overkill for simple 2D animations. Beautiful Backgrounds was born as a side project to fill this gap: a lightweight, stable, and performant library that uses only the 2D context of the HTML <canvas> element. The goal is simple — provide dynamic, visually appealing backgrounds without sacrificing performance or stability.
Built entirely in TypeScript as Web Components, Beautiful Backgrounds is easy to integrate into any modern frontend framework. Whether you use Angular, Vue, or React, you can drop these components into your project effortlessly, enjoying full type safety and simple customization.
Highlights
- Lightweight and stable – no WebGL, no heavy frameworks.
- Fully TypeScript – ensures type safety and easy integration.
- Web Components – compatible with Angular, Vue, React, or vanilla JS.
- Customizable animations – tweak colors, speed, shapes, and motion.
- Responsive and performant – optimized for all devices.
Example: Star Trail
import { BbStarTrail } from "beautiful-backgrounds";
<bb-star-trail></bb-star-trail>
Conclusion
Beautiful Backgrounds provides a lightweight, stable, and performant way to add dynamic, visually appealing animated backgrounds to websites without WebGL or heavy frameworks. Because it’s built in TypeScript as Web Components, it’s easy to integrate into Angular, Vue, React, or vanilla projects, letting developers quickly enhance a site’s visual identity with interactive backgrounds.
It emphasizes that compelling backgrounds don’t have to be complex — you can get memorable, professional results with a simple, maintainable approach.