See the Pen Twinner Spinner by Katy DeCorah (@katydecorah) on CodePen.

A few days ago, I wanted to create a single element spinner. (Just for funsies.) After several minutes of tinkering, I whipped up Twinner Spinner.

Meet the elements

The main element, .loader, acts as a container for the spinner. The real magic happens in its pseudo elements. I did this because once you animate a main element it can be tricky to control its pseudo elements. I also used the main element to dictate the size of the project since I’m using ems.

Pseudo what

I styled the :before and :after similarly; each element is an 1em circle with a transparent border. But, one element received left and border-left-color values, while the other received right and border-right-color values.

My use of the border properties may seem redundant, but the elements need a border all around to keep the border from pinching in.

Animation

Once I got the elements styled and in place, I created an animation to rotate the elements. I found that by adding an animation-delay to one of the elements, I could give the spinner a little more personality, especially paired with an ease animation-timing-function.

Variable-ing Up

Even though I had everything looking pretty darn sweet, I put variables in where I could. By doing so, I can now control the speed, size, and colors of the spinner from the top of my Sass.

Naturally, I created a few spin-off spinners.

I absolutely love a scalable project with smart variables. It really helps push the boundaries on the simplest of properties.

p.s. the color palette I used for all spinners is from Flat UI Colors.

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