Effects

Border Radius Morph

Melts between a square and a circle while turning.

Edit this in the studio

Opens with this animation loaded. Nothing is uploaded — the scene travels in the link.

animation.css
.morph {
  transform: translate3d(180px, 100px, 0);
  width: 120px;
  height: 120px;
  background: #6366f1;
  border-radius: 20px;
  animation: morph-anim 2000ms linear 0ms infinite both;
  will-change: transform, opacity;
}

@keyframes morph-anim {
  0% {
    transform: translate3d(180px, 100px, 0);
    border-radius: 12px;
    animation-timing-function: ease-in-out;
  }
  50% {
    transform: translate3d(180px, 100px, 0) rotate(180deg);
    border-radius: 999px;
    animation-timing-function: ease-in-out;
  }
  100% {
    transform: translate3d(180px, 100px, 0) rotate(360deg);
    border-radius: 12px;
  }
}

@media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) {
  .morph {
    animation: none;
    transition: none;
  }
}

Why it is built this way

border-radius is one of the few non-composited properties worth animating: it repaints but does not reflow. Combined with rotation it gives the blob motion normally reached for with SVG.

What it animates

2 properties across 2 CSS declarations. The bar shows when each one is moving.

Radius
border-radius
12 12
3 stopsrepaint
Rotate
transform
0 360
3 stopscompositor

What it costs to run

Mixed: rotate runs on the compositor while border-radius repaints. The compositor half is nearly free; the painted half is what to watch if you scale the element up or run several at once.

It runs for 2.00s across 6 keyframe stops, with every property moving over the same window.

One curve throughout: Ease In Out on a plain box. Keeping a single easing across every property is what makes a multi-property animation read as one movement rather than several things happening at once.

Accessibility

Nothing here hides content — border-radius and rotate move over 2.00s and the element is visible throughout. The exported prefers-reduced-motion guard still silences it, which matters most for the looping ones: motion that never stops is the kind that makes people feel unwell.

Related animations

morphborder-radiusblobloop