: Winter Bash 2014 Graphic Design Merry Christmas, everyone; my expertise lies not in web design, though I have had a little experience in the past. I really enjoy the design of the Winter

@Looi7658678

The snowflake animation for Winter Bash was written by balpha in 2012, and is described in this post by him on meta.SE:


I wrote it for last year's Winter Bash, and I actually promised to open source it after some code clean-up, which to my shame I still, one year later, haven't done yet.

I made it my mission that if Stack Exchange recycles the oldest JavaScript animation that exists on the internet, it should at least be a very nice-looking version. The snowflake movement is actually based on an academic paper (and on a second one that's based on this one, but which I'm unable to find right now).

This year when working on Winter Bash, I was specifically ordered "not to spend a ridiculous amount of time on snow animation."


Alas, the code does not appear to have been officially released yet. Of course, if you want, you can still take a peek at the (minified) source code. One detail that's fairly easy to spot is that the large snowflakes are pre-drawn, and loaded from an image sprite (note: the image is white-on-transparent; view against a dark background to see the flakes), whereas the small round flakes are apparently just dynamically drawn circles.

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