The curse of the custom cursor

Picture this: you visit a website and suddenly your trusty arrow cursor has been accompanied by a pulsating purple blob the size of a dinner plate. Congratulations – you’ve just been cursor-jacked.

Every so often, I stumble across a website desperate to be memorable. You know the type: excessive animations, parallax scrolling, disruptive hover effects, retro fonts, and the crowning touch – a custom mouse cursor.

The harm is that the designer turned navigation into a puzzle game nobody asked to play.

Standard cursors aren’t random. That little hand when you hover over a link, the I-beam for text selection, the resize arrows – these are the road signs of the internet. Replacing them with an artistic vision is essentially repainting stop signs as abstract art.

Many users rely on custom cursor settings for accessibility. Operating systems offer for instance increasing the size of the cursor or adapting its colour and outline. When a website forces its aesthetic choices over their accessibility needs, that’s not creative – it’s exclusion.

So let’s look at some of the worst offenders.

The horror show (or maybe the hall of shame)

The Blob monster: A massive circle that follows you everywhere, sometimes with text floating inside. It is extremely intrusive and since multiple studies have shown that mouse cursor position is closely correlated with where users are looking on screen during web browsing, it also hides text and sometimes the entire clickable object. It’s like having someone hold a balloon in front of your face whilst you’re trying to read. Some even pulse and change colour – because apparently balloon-blocking wasn’t annoying enough.

The Comet tail: Your cursor becomes a trailing light show with pencil-drawn lines or squiggly tails following behind. Sounds brilliant until you’re trying to click something and the actual clickable bit is somewhere in the cosmic debris field behind the pretty animation.

The Micromanager: Text-heavy cursors that bark instructions like “SCROLL DOWN,” “CLICK HERE,” or “READ MORE” in bold letters. This is usually code for “our design is so unclear we had to turn your pointer into a flashing beacon.” Often appears as capital letters shouting the message, making sure you can’t miss their desperate pleas for interaction. Pro tip: If you need to tell people to scroll, the better fix is to redesign so scrolling is obvious.

The Shapeshifter: Cursors that morph from circles to squares to arrows to who-knows-what as you move around the page. Your pointer is having an identity crisis, and frankly, so are you as you try to figure out what’s clickable.

None of these are quirky design! Each of them is a UX crime scene and should be handled as such.

The real cost of cursor creativity

A cursor is one of the web’s most universal constants. Break that consistency, and you shatter trust. When you hijack the cursor design, you’re making text literally invisible behind the “helpful” custom cursor, creating cognitive overload and distracting users from the content they came to read, and messing with how cursors have worked since forever.

And for some users this isn’t just an annoyance – it’s just another barrier between them and your content. Some users need predictable, familiar interfaces to focus properly, and a dancing cursor isn’t helping anyone concentrate on your actual content.

If your brand identity depends on a novelty cursor, your brand probably isn’t as strong as you think.

Good design removes friction, it doesn’t add it. So, the coolest thing your cursor can do is get out of the way and let people use your website.