Aqua Loading
============

20 cartoon loading and waiting indicators for dark interfaces — deep teal with
ice blue accents. SVG plus transparent PNG at 1x, 2x and 4x.

Aqua Loading is a set of 20 loading and waiting indicators drawn in the
cartoon style, where a heavy clean outline wraps a glossy face with a single
sparkle. It contains an eight-frame spinner, a three-frame dot cycle, a
loading bar frame with four fill steps, an indeterminate striped bar, two
skeleton text lines and a skeleton image block.

The loading screen is the screen a player looks at longest and the one nobody
makes art for. It is also the one place where a bar means something different
from everywhere else: a resource bar shows a value, a loading bar shows a
process, and using the same sprite for both is how a health bar ends up on a
loading screen.

The gloss is a hard-edged split at 44% of the height, not a smooth gradient: a
soft fade reads as glass, a hard split reads as drawn. The offset drop shadow
is solid rather than blurred for the same reason.

Inside that style this is the Aqua reading of it: a dark interface on a deep
teal palette with ice blue accents, built around a single bordered frame,
square-cornered buttons at 128x40, glossy bars divided into 10 segments, and
outlined icons on a 24px grid. Those measurements are why two families can
share an art style without being interchangeable: the style decides how an
edge is drawn, the numbers decide what the interface is for.

The spinner ships as eight frames rather than one sprite to rotate. Rotation
exists in every engine, but the number of frames does not — and in a pixel
style a spinner that rotates smoothly is wrong, it should step. An eight-frame
atlas is correct in both cases and works everywhere. The skeleton placeholders
are here for the same reason the spinner is: an empty screen while content
loads reads as broken, and a grey block that has the shape of the thing
arriving reads as waiting.

Every sprite ships as an editable SVG and as transparent PNG at 1x, 2x and 4x,
so you can drop the PNGs straight into an engine or open the vector and change
a colour. Built to the same measurements as the rest of the Aqua family, which
means this kit and the Aqua panel kit line up without either being resized. A
good fit for anime and cartoon games.

HOW TO USE

  - Play the spinner frames in order at about 12 frames per second; slower
    reads as stuck and faster reads as noise.
  - Use the indeterminate bar when you cannot report a percentage, and switch
    to the stepped fills the moment you can — a fake percentage is worse than
    none.
  - Lay the skeleton line and block in the same positions as the real content
    so nothing jumps when it arrives.
  - Keep the loading bar in the accent colour rather than a resource colour; a
    loading bar that looks like a health bar is read as one.

License: CC-BY-4.0 — see LICENSE.txt
Page: https://www.colorosse.com/assets/2d/ui/aqua-loading
More free assets: https://www.colorosse.com
