ShaderField

The live brand field: a WebGL domain-warped fbm gradient sampled from the accent ramp, blooming toward the cursor, with animated grain and TPDF debanding. Reads the accent ramp from the CSS it sits in (or from a pinned theme mirror), so it relights with the seed like every other surface. Reduced motion draws one static frame; no WebGL falls back to the wrapper's CSS gradient; the GL context is released on unmount.

Feel A slow, glowing field in the accent colour that leans toward the cursor — ambient, never busy.

Or let the agent fetch it: get_component("shader-field") on the Echo MCP server.

Installation

npx echo-ui-cli add shader-field

First time? Run npx echo-ui-cli init once — it sets the project up, and add refuses to run before it.

At a glance

Version: 0.3.0
Weight: 2.9 KB · 11.3 KB with what it imports · 168 B of CSS (minified and gzipped; React not counted)
Keyboard: Without WebGL it draws a CSS gradient instead, so the space it occupies never goes blank.
Reduced motion: It draws one still frame and stops: no animation loop, no cursor tracking.

Usage

tsx

import { ShaderField } from "@/echo/shader-field";

<div style={{ height: 420 }}>
  <ShaderField />
</div>

Composition

ShaderField

Examples

Hero background

Decorative by default — give the wrapper a size.

tsx

<div style={{ height: 420 }}><ShaderField /></div>

Themed

Pass a seeded theme mirror and the field follows the accent.

tsx

const theme = createEchoTheme({ accent: "#F2674E" }).values;
<ShaderField theme={theme} />

Accessibility

Decorative by default (aria-hidden). Pass label only when the field carries meaning, and it becomes role="img" with that name.
Without WebGL it draws a CSS gradient instead, so the space it occupies never goes blank.

Tested against WCAG 2.2 AA on every release:

axe — No axe violations, in the component's own gallery and on its page.
keyboard — Every action is reachable and operable from the keyboard alone.
focus-visible — Focus is visible on every focusable part, in normal and forced-colors mode.
forced-colors — State stays visible when the look's colours are replaced by the system's.
target-size — Every target's real hit area is at least 24×24px, at every density.
reflow — Content reflows into 320px and survives a doubled text size.

Not covered: screen-reader: not yet verified by a person. Everything above is a machine check; a person has not yet driven this component with a screen reader.

Motion & sound

Reduced motion: It draws one still frame and stops: no animation loop, no cursor tracking.

Props

ShaderField props
Prop	Type	Default
`theme`EchoTheme mirror (createEchoTheme().values) that pins the field colours. Omit it and the field follows the --echo-accent-* variables in scope, re-reading them when the page is reseeded.	`unknown`
`label`Accessible name. Omit and the field is decorative (aria-hidden) — right for a background.	`string`

Anti-patterns

Never put readable body text directly on the field — it moves and its contrast is not guaranteed. Put text on a Panel over it, or use GrainField, which carries an edge-darkening pass for exactly this.
Never mount more than one or two ShaderFields on a page — each holds a live WebGL context and a rAF loop; browsers cap contexts, and a grid of them will drop frames on integrated GPUs.
Never give it a label unless it genuinely carries meaning; a named background is noise in the a11y tree.
Never reach for it as a page background behind an app — it is the marketing field. Product surfaces are the chassis plus a whisper of Noise.

Changelog

v0.3.0 · 2026-10-12 · ChangedEvery item needs echo-ui-core 0.3.0 (all components). The drawn device, readability past AA and the design tests live in core, and the components that use them are built against it, so each item now declares echo-ui-core >=0.3.0 <0.4.0. Update core with the items: npm install echo-ui-core@^0.3.0 (or your package manager's), then npx echo-ui-cli update. An item whose files didn't change is the same code under a new version; the 0.2.0 files stay published.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedComments only, no behaviour change. Comments in the component source used to cite documents, milestones and ticket numbers from Echo's own planning, none of which exist in your project. The citations are gone and the sentences around them stay. Where a comment was only a citation, it now says what it meant. Three development warnings (HardwareButton's engraved/caption checks and StatusDot's missing-label check) also dropped the ticket code at the end of the message. echo-ui diff will show changes in most items; none of them are to code.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedAn item's version is now a function of declared data, not of how the changelog is formatted. The version an item ships under is published once and never rewritten, and it used to be inferred from prose: a regex for a bolded "Breaking" run across the whole unreleased section, and attribution by "does a bullet mention this name in backticks". One breaking entry therefore moved every item that changed that cycle, and an entry explaining that "Menu and Sheet are unchanged here" filed itself as a change to Menu and Sheet — which it really had.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedThe agent brief says Echo has not shipped. llms.txt and the MCP server's instructions led with npx echo-ui-cli init, and that name on npm is a reserved stub with no executable — so a model following the brief wrote an install step that fails with npx's own error. The brief now opens with the caveat, and the docs carry it on every surface that shows a command. One switch (CLI_RELEASED) silences all of them at launch, and a test refuses to let one move without the others. Affects all components only in what the brief says about installing them; no item's props, CSS or rendered semantics change.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedEcho's home is echo-ui.com. The registry, the docs and the packages all move to it from echo.nawwara.studio. Nothing was published under the old host, so no echo.json anywhere points at it and there is nothing to migrate — this is the last release where that is true.
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · ChangedWeights, line heights, letter-spacing, z-index, border widths and icon sizes come from the theme scales in all components, with the old value as a fallback, so components keep working with echo-ui-core@0.0.1. Strays moved to the nearest step: most by under a pixel; HardwareButton icons are 14/16/20px (were 15/17/19).
v0.2.0 · 2026-10-04 · FixedContent now reflows into a 320px screen (400% zoom) and survives a doubled browser text size (WCAG 1.4.10, 1.4.4), across all components. Select's 180px floor, NumberField's readout, Segmented and Steps as flex items, EmptyState's grid columns, and Avatar's fixed-pixel disc all gave way; Panel counts its padding inside a width you set (box-sizing: border-box), so a <Panel style={{ width: 220 }}> is now 220px wide overall rather than 260px.

Preview