Codrops published a breakdown of how the team at Vercel built the animated prism effect on their site, using shaders (small programs that run on your graphics card rather than your main processor), custom geometry and rendering that adapts to the device it's running on.
It's a genuinely interesting piece of engineering. It is also almost entirely irrelevant to a plumbing company in Cave Creek, and I want to explain why, because these articles have a way of turning into client requests.
Effects like this are built by teams whose product is developer tools. The visual is the marketing. They have people on staff who do nothing but this, and the article makes clear how much care went into keeping it fast: adaptive rendering exists precisely because this kind of work is expensive to run on a phone. That expense doesn't disappear when a smaller site copies the idea. It just lands on your visitors instead, as a slow first load, a hot phone, a drained battery, or a page that stutters while someone is trying to find your opening hours.
There's a second thing worth noticing. The reason that effect works for Vercel is that it signals something true about them: we are good at rendering things in browsers. If your business is landscaping or dental work or accounting, a spinning glass prism signals nothing except that someone had budget. Visitors don't read it as sophistication. They mostly don't read it at all.
What actually moves the needle on a small business site is duller and better understood: pages that load quickly on a mid-range phone on a patchy signal, a phone number that's tappable, and clear next steps. None of that is exciting to write about, which is part of why articles like this get the attention instead.
What to do: nothing. If you've seen an effect on a big tech site and wondered whether yours should have something similar, the useful question to put to your developer isn't "can we do that" (usually yes, at a cost) but "what would that cost us in load time on a phone, and what would we get back". Ask it before the work starts, not after.
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