Aetherlab Loading

Aetherlab Loading is a set of 20 loading and waiting indicators drawn in the magitech style, where pointed corners and a circuit trace carry arcane colour — fantasy with wiring under it. It contains an eight-frame spinner, a three-frame dot cycle, a loading bar frame with four fill steps, an indeterminate striped bar, two skeleton text lines and a skeleton image block.

The loading screen is the screen a player looks at longest and the one nobody makes art for. It is also the one place where a bar means something different from everywhere else: a resource bar shows a value, a loading bar shows a process, and using the same sprite for both is how a health bar ends up on a loading screen.

The pointed corners come from the shape vocabulary rather than from a fantasy frame, and that is deliberate: this style is the tech half of magitech, not the carved half. Gradients and outlined compositions alternate through the set so a spell panel and an instrument panel can share one screen.

Inside that style this is the Aetherlab reading of it: a dark interface on a lab navy palette with aether cyan accents, built around a single bordered frame, chamfered buttons at 144x36, hollow-cored bars divided into 22 segments, and two-tone icons on a 24px grid. Those measurements are why two families can share an art style without being interchangeable: the style decides how an edge is drawn, the numbers decide what the interface is for.

The spinner ships as eight frames rather than one sprite to rotate. Rotation exists in every engine, but the number of frames does not — and in a pixel style a spinner that rotates smoothly is wrong, it should step. An eight-frame atlas is correct in both cases and works everywhere. The skeleton placeholders are here for the same reason the spinner is: an empty screen while content loads reads as broken, and a grey block that has the shape of the thing arriving reads as waiting.

Every sprite ships as an editable SVG and as transparent PNG at 1x, 2x and 4x, so you can drop the PNGs straight into an engine or open the vector and change a colour. Built to the same measurements as the rest of the Aetherlab family, which means this kit and the Aetherlab panel kit line up without either being resized. A good fit for magitech, alchemy and arcane-science interfaces.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — Free for commercial use. Credit required. Full terms · What this means in practice