I design Framer websites for B2B brands for a living... then a video player challenge showed up and I lost all self-control 😮‍💨

Most players on the web look the same: a black box, a thin bar, a play icon you've seen a thousand times. And when a team asks "can the player feel like OUR brand?", the answer is usually "sure, we'll change the colour".

So for the Video.js Skins Design Challenge I built Afterglow 98. A late-90s player window that drives a 3D computer sitting in a dark room. Press play and the camera pushes into the tube while the window tucks away (move the mouse and it comes back). View flips between the screen and the whole room 📺

The look was the fun part. The real work was making it behave like a proper player: Space or K plays, the arrows seek and change volume, F goes full screen, C turns on captions. Chapters, hover thumbnails, a phone layout, and calmer motion for anyone whose device asks for less of it.

To be fair, nobody needs a CRT in their player (I'm aware 🤡). But a skin is the first thing people feel before the first frame... and a grey box never made anyone feel much.

It streams from Mux and it's live on my site's lab page, so you can play it right now 👇

Which one would you ship on your own website, the safe skin or the weird one? 👀

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Framer design partner for B2B brands and AI startups. DM "site" if yours is next.

#framer #videojs #mux #webdesign