February 14, 2026
Drama in the dot matrix
Shades of Halftone
Dots go viral: designers swoon, color nerds nitpick, and one guy asks to remove them
TLDR: A stylish deep dive makes halftone dots cool again, turning shader math into art. The community cheers the design, debates color accuracy and attribution, and memes the best comment—someone wanting to “remove the dots”—as the eternal client request, highlighting the clash between aesthetics and precision that shapes digital design today.
Halftone is having a moment, and the crowd is divided between swooning over the vibes and nitpicking the ink math. The article breaks down the classic dot pattern used to fake shading—think comic-book dots—then shows wild twists: splatters, overlapping grids, moiré magic, even animated dots. It’s techy under the hood, but presented like a playful art class, and the community is here for it.
The hype train left the station fast. Fans raved about the site’s gorgeous transitions—one commenter called the homepage-to-about move “:chefskiss:” and compared the style to another beloved designer’s work, sparking a friendly “inspiration” whisper. Then came the plot twist: a color specialist popped in to clarify a credit, saying the RGB-to-CMYK (screen to print colors) snippet attributed to him wasn’t his original and that a real color system is best. Cue the eternal showdown: vibes-first designers vs. precision purists. Meanwhile, a veteran dev resurfaced a 2011 halftone app with real paper textures and ink bleed—and dropped the line of the thread: users kept asking “how do I remove the dots?” The comments instantly turned it into a meme about clients wanting the style without the style.
Between the love for the art, the nitty-gritty color debate, and the meme-worthy irony, one thing’s clear: halftone isn’t just back—it’s the main character.
Key Points
- •Halftone is presented as a shader-based post-processing effect that simulates tonal gradients with dot grids.
- •The article explains the optical principle: at small scales, the eye averages the dot pattern, producing smooth tones.
- •Implementation begins by drawing a circle in a fragment shader using UV coordinates, distance fields, and masking.
- •A tiled grid of dots is formed in GLSL using functions like fract, enabling distribution and scaling of dots.
- •Multiple creative variants are explored, including ink splatters, angled overlapping grids, color blending, grid-breaking, and animation applied to images, video, and 3D scenes.