Radial menu
A corner trigger that fans its destinations along a quarter circle. Everything below is live — the links go where they say they go.
Designer and engineer. I build small, quiet interfaces and care about the parts nobody is meant to notice.
Why a corner
A menu that opens from the middle of a page has to decide which way to go every time. Anchored to a corner it always has the same 90° of room, so the fan is identical on every open — which is what makes “projects is the second one up” actually stick.
The geometry is one formula, not four placed buttons: items are spread evenly from due left to due up at a fixed radius. Change the radius or add a fifth item and the arc re-spaces itself.
The motion
Items leave from under the trigger at half scale behind a 6px blur and travel outward on a 34ms stagger — the blur is doing most of the work, the travel just gives it a direction. Closing runs the arc backwards and faster, so putting the menu away never feels slower than opening it.
Nothing animates from scale(0). Things in the real world don’t appear out of nothing, and half scale reads as “it was already there” rather than “it was just invented”.
Keyboard and away
Opening moves focus to the first item, so the arrow keys work without a Tab first. Arrows walk the arc, Escape puts it away, Tab hands focus back to the trigger. The page behind goes soft under a blurred scrim while the menu is out, and clicking it closes.