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Added 29 Jul 2026
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card-spotlight
Spotlight Card
Cards

Spotlight Card

Featured

A dark card where a cyan spotlight follows the cursor, revealing the surface only where you point. (Move your mouse over it.)

Cards
lines of CSS
29lines of CSS
dependencies
0dependencies
browser, for years
Everybrowser, for years
motion only on interaction
Hovermotion only on interaction
Backdrop

Spotlight

Move your cursor

Open a live copy in

Vue, Svelte, styled-components and Tailwind exports are part of Pro. HTML, CSS and React are free forever.

card-spotlight.css
.fx-card-spotlight {
  position: relative;
  width: 240px;
  padding: 1.5rem;
  border-radius: 0.875rem;
  background: #1e293b;
  color: #f1f5f9;
  overflow: hidden;
  transition: transform 0.3s ease;
}
.fx-card-spotlight::before {
  content: '';
  position: absolute;
  inset: 0;
  background: radial-gradient(circle at var(--fx-x, 50%) var(--fx-y, 50%),
    rgba(34, 211, 238, 0.35), transparent 60%);
  opacity: 0;
  transition: opacity 0.3s ease;
  pointer-events: none;
}
.fx-card-spotlight:hover::before { opacity: 1; }

// JS hook — track cursor position on the card:
//   const card = document.querySelector('.fx-card-spotlight');
//   card.addEventListener('mousemove', e => {
//     const rect = card.getBoundingClientRect();
//     card.style.setProperty('--fx-x', (e.clientX - rect.left) + 'px');
//     card.style.setProperty('--fx-y', (e.clientY - rect.top) + 'px');
//   });
card-spotlight.html
<div class="fx-card-spotlight" data-spotlight>
  <h4 style="margin:0;font-size:1.05rem;font-weight:700;">Spotlight</h4>
  <p style="margin:0.35rem 0 0;font-size:0.85rem;opacity:0.85;">Move your cursor</p>
</div>

What do I do with this?

  1. Put card-spotlight.css anywhere your page already loads CSS from — in Next.js that is app/globals.css, or any stylesheet with a <link> in your HTML.
  2. Then put the class on the element you want it on: <button class="fx-card-spotlight">. The CSS does nothing until a class name in it matches something on the page.
  • Link the stylesheet, then paste the markup wherever you need it.
npx hoverlab add card-spotlight

What's included

  • The markup and the stylesheet, in whichever framework you pick
  • No runtime dependencies

Works with

  • React
  • Vue
  • Svelte
  • Tailwind
  • styled-components
  • Plain CSS

npx hoverlab add card-spotlight

Or over MCP, from your editor's agent — no account needed.

License

Free to read, copy and install, for personal and non-commercial projects. Shipping it in client work or a paid product needs Pro ($79 once). The source lands in your repo and stops being ours — no attribution, nothing to upgrade.

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Motion safety

Static estimate, read from the CSS

Reduced motion
Brief motion, no guard

Animates briefly or on interaction. Only looping motion gets a guard in this catalog; copy the one from the Insights tab if this ships on a critical path.

What it animates
Compositor only

Only transform, opacity or filter: the GPU can run it without re-laying-out or repainting the page.

Flashing (WCAG 2.3.1)
No flashing found

No repeating change in opacity, colour or brightness large enough to count as a flash.

Layout shift (CLS)
No shift expected

Nothing it animates moves or resizes the box in flow. A category from the CSS, not a measurement for this effect.

Every row is read from the shipped CSS. Only a figure marked measured came from a browser. Customizing the speed changes the timing, so recheck a customized copy. How it is computed

38 more effects in Cards

All of them free to read, copy and install — no account, no locked tiles, no watermarked preview. The whole catalog is open, and so are the API and the CLI.

Browse Cards

Shipping one commercially

Copying the code is free. Putting it in client work or a paid product is what Pro is for — the licence, not the access.

  • A commercial licence for everything in the catalog
  • Unlimited bundle exports, in Vue, Svelte and Tailwind
  • One payment — no subscription, nothing to renew
Pro — $79 once

7 variations of Spotlight Card

Finished looks, each one a position in the customizer above. Copy any of them, or open it and keep moving the sliders.