Inkwell Loading
===============

20 cel-shaded loading and waiting indicators for light interfaces — flat
poster with signal red accents. SVG plus transparent PNG at 1x, 2x and 4x.

Inkwell Loading is a set of 20 loading and waiting indicators drawn in the
cel-shaded style, where a thick ink outline wraps two flat tones split by a
hard diagonal terminator. 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 shadow is a single hard-edged shape with no falloff — the defining
property of cel shading, and the thing a gradient can never imitate. The
outline uses the darkest tone in the palette rather than the border tone, or
it reads as a thick grey frame instead of ink.

Inside that style this is the Inkwell reading of it: a light interface on a
flat poster palette with signal red accents, built around a single bordered
frame, square-cornered buttons at 152x52, banded bars divided into 5 segments,
and solid 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 Inkwell family,
which means this kit and the Inkwell panel kit line up without either being
resized. A good fit for cel-shaded and toon-rendered 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/inkwell-loading
More free assets: https://www.colorosse.com
