Unicode as a UI primitive

We reach for SVG and canvas by reflex. But the humble character set is a surprisingly rich animation surface — braille spinners, block-shade gradients, box-drawing frames, and geometric glyphs all render crisply at any size and cost almost nothing.

Here's one spinning right now: ⠋ — it's a single <span> cycling through ten braille frames.

Why bother

• Weightless. No image requests, no shader compilation.
• Themeable. It's text, so it inherits color and font.
• Playful. It signals craft without shouting.

Where it works

1. Loading and status indicators
2. Section dividers and rules
3. Ambient decoration (marquees, borders)

The trick is restraint: pick a small vocabulary of glyphs and reuse them like a typographic system. This site uses ◇ ❋ ▤ ❍ ⛁ as its section marks — five characters doing the work of five icons.