Pro theme · Ambient New Tab for Chrome
Six layers of cut-card Costa Rican plants with paper shadows and light shafts, and dozens of little gouache ladybugs crawling the leaf edges and buzzing between the layers.
Free to install. Ladybug Jungle unlocks with Pro: $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, cancel anytime, or $59 once for Pro Forever.
Ladybug Jungle is a shadow-box diorama of a rainforest floor cut from coloured card. Six bands of paper plants stand one behind another, from dark palm crowns at the back to a holed monstera leaf in front, with buttress-rooted trunks, lianas, bamboo, tree ferns, heliconia, bird of paradise and red ginger in between. Every paper part casts a soft shadow on the ones beneath it.
About seventy tiny painted ladybugs live on the leaves, and the light follows your clock from dawn to night.
It is painted on a 2-D canvas. Each paper layer is cut and shaded once into its own image, the ladybugs are painted once into sprites per colour, pose and size, and each frame these are stacked, lit for the hour and sent to the graphics card.
Ambient New Tab is free to install, with five free themes. Ladybug Jungle is a Pro theme. Pro is $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, cancel anytime, or $59 once for Pro Forever, and it unlocks every Pro theme, music sync, and every new theme as we release it. You can preview Ladybug Jungle full screen before you buy: open the Themes panel and rest your mouse on it. Changed your mind? 14-day refund, no questions.
Ladybug Jungle follows the sun where you live and turns to night after sunset. You can also pin day or night in the Themes panel.
About seventy on a 16:9 screen, fewer in a narrow window and more on a very wide one. Around four in ten are flying when the tab opens. They live on the five layers that have leaves, weighted by how much leaf edge each offers.
It is a Pro theme. Pro is $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, cancel anytime, or $59 once for Pro Forever. It unlocks every Pro theme, music sync, and every new theme as it is released.
The light is blended between fixed times on your clock: night until five, a peach dawn around twenty past six, green midday, an orange sunset just after six in the evening, violet dusk and night by nine. The sun crosses left to right and the moon right to left, so shadows move too.
They slow down rather than stop. At full night crawlers walk at about a third of their daytime speed and wait roughly three times as long before taking off. A click still sends nearby bugs up, and music kicks still launch a few.
No. It's a desktop browser extension for Chrome on Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. If you're reading this on a phone, send yourself the link.