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Blueprint: a video player drawn like an engineering drawing
Every film starts as a plan, so this player starts as one too. Before you press play, the picture is a blueprint: two inks on a drawing grid. Press play and it develops into the film. When it ends, it goes back on the board.
You seek by measuring. Drag across the picture and you draw a dimension line. Its length is time, at the same scale as the timeline. Let go and the film jumps there. Esc cancels, and the arrow keys do the same job.
Chapters are gridlines. Each chapter gets a lettered grid bubble, the way a structural drawing labels its grid. Bubbles are real buttons. The title block names the current sheet, and the stamp shows player state: For review, On hold, Checking, As built.
The timeline is a dimension line with arrowheads and a scale ruler. Played time is the solid object line and buffered time is the dashed hidden line. Playback speed is the drawing scale.
Built to be used. Every control is a labelled button you can reach by keyboard, captions are included, reduced motion and high contrast settings are respected, and the layout folds down to phone width. One CSS variable repaints the redline in your brand colour.
The film is mine too. "The Crossing" is 40 seconds of a bridge going up, from survey to opening night, drawn and scored for this skin and streamed from Mux. Built on Video.js v10 components with Claude.
A blueprint that develops into the film when you press play, great idea.
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Plate is an HTML skin for Video.js 10. It draws the player the way quickflow.dev draws everything else: a numbered head with a status word, the picture framed by corner marks, a chapter index beside it, a ruler for a timeline and text keys underneath. A player is a diagram of a video's time, so I drew it like one.
What it does
Every chapter cue gets a button in the index, with its own frame from Mux's storyboard. Video.js has no chapter navigation control yet, so a small custom element reads the cues from the player store. Below 760px the index turns into a strip that scrolls with the video.
The time slider is a ruler, with a numbered mark where each chapter starts.
The keys are words you can read. Speed, Quality, Captions and Audio open Video.js menus. Space, K, M, the arrows, J and L, 0 to 9, < and >, F, C and I all work from the keyboard, and every control shows a focus ring.
In fullscreen the picture goes edge to edge, the controls fade while it plays, and an Index key opens the chapters as a side panel.
It comes in three themes (Night, Blueprint, Signal), takes your colours, fonts and corners through public custom properties, and speaks seven languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Romanian, Russian and Arabic, right to left included. It follows reduced motion, higher contrast, reduced transparency and forced colors.
The workbench at plate.quickflow.dev lets you try it on your own video, change every property, watch contrast and control names in a live accessibility readout, and download the CSS for your theme.
Plate plays the showreel on quickflow.dev. The code is open source under Apache 2.0.
does the chapter index stay visible in fullscreen or does it tuck away?
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? 👀
Built to be sent.
Framer design partner for B2B brands and AI startups. DM "site" if yours is next.
#framer #videojs #mux #webdesign
Turn Four: Every Frame on the Racing Line
Turn Four turns the replay timeline into a circuit. Drag around the oval to seek, choose one of four sectors, loop a detail, slow it down, or mark a moment to revisit. Warm paper, graphite control surfaces, condensed typography, and signal orange give the interface its motorsports character. Video.js 10 handles the player, with keyboard controls, visible focus, descriptive captions, responsive layouts, and reduced-motion styling. The fictional automotive concept film moves through dusk, daylight, night, and an overhead composition so the controls can be judged against changing images.
racing line replays are weirdly satisfying to watch. is this running on real telemetry?