Plate IV

Lab

Lab

Small machines built on the same press as the rest of the site. Bring your own picture or your own words; everything runs in the browser and nothing leaves it.

The plates

eclipse
twin-suns
monolith
crescent
rift
horizon
orbit
spire
death-star
falcon
wave

How the plates work

Each plate is a scalar field over normalised sheet coordinates: given a point, it returns ink density. Because nothing is an image, a plate can be pressed at any size, re-inked when the press run changes, and baked to a static SVG by the same code that draws it here.

The field lives in one file. A build script walks it to bake static SVGs for the pages that only need a fixed picture, and a canvas renderer walks the same field at runtime for the places that react to a pointer or a change of theme. One definition, two renderers, so a plate can never drift between the printed version and the live one.

Everything is drawn as halftone dots rather than continuous tone, which is what keeps the whole thing reading as print. The dot grid is computed once per size and then filled in a single path per pass, because issuing a separate fill for every dot costs far more than the dots themselves. Two passes are drawn on every plate, a black one and an oxide one, and the oxide is deliberately pushed a few pixels out of register. That misregistration is the signature of a real two-colour screen print, and it is the one detail that stops the system looking like a CSS gradient.