Plate IV · Experiment
Misregister
Misregister
Type a word and it is set on two plates, one in ink and one in oxide. Drag either plate off its mark, screen the whole thing into dots, and take the print with you.
Drag a plate
How it works
A two-colour print is two passes through the press, and the second pass never lands exactly where the first did. Printers spend their careers keeping that slip under a hair. This page lets you make it as bad as you like.
Each plate is its own canvas, set in the same display face the site’s headings use, and stacked with a multiply blend so the place where the two inks overlap goes darker, the way real ink does. Dragging moves a plate with a CSS transform, so nothing is redrawn while you pull. The download composites the plates at 1600 pixels wide with the same offsets you left them at, on nothing, cropped to the letters.
With the dot screen on, each plate is punched through a rotated pattern of holes, fifteen degrees for the oxide and forty-five for the ink, which is why the overlap forms a rosette rather than a moiré. The arrow keys nudge the oxide plate a pixel at a time, and shift makes it eight.