Dither and artifact pictures

General Translation (GT) builds the full stack for localization: i18n libraries, context-aware translation APIs, a CDN that serves translations and Locadex, its AI agent (BRAND.md sections 1 and 9). Its product monorepo is gt-cloud (github.com/generaltranslation/gt-cloud): apps/landing serves generaltranslation.com and apps/dashboard holds the sign-in and onboarding pages, a form plate on the left over a dithered field on the right. Prototemplate (github.com/Kevin-Liu-01/Prototemplate) is Kevin Liu's hub for GT design work: the brand deck, the docs, and the plate port, a copy of the dashboard's sign-in and onboarding gallery under src/components/plate, served at /d/production/{signin,onboarding,consent,device,cli}.

GT draws texture with one device: an ordered Bayer dither that prints whole square cells in one ink. The same screen runs the procedural fields on the landing, the dashboard and Prototemplate, and the artifact pictures, which are photographs and scans of objects screened at 1 CSS px cells to the Blue Marble standard. This skill holds the rules, the engines, the commands and the review standard for both.

Paths are relative to a Prototemplate checkout ($PROTOTEMPLATE) unless they start with $GT_CLOUD, a gt-cloud checkout. Engine detail is in references/engines.md; the picture roster, the per-surface constants and the full lint list are in references/pictures.md.

1. The language

• A tone ramp is drawn as ordered dither. Density never comes from an alpha veil (DESIGN.md section 7), and texture is only ordered dither (BRAND.md section 3).
• Error diffusion (Floyd-Steinberg) is out. Its output is serial, it reads as noise, and it shimmers when animated. A Bayer matrix is a fixed threshold map, so every cell is decided alone and the repeating cell structure reads as print halftone (src/lib/dither.ts, module header).
• The house screens:

| screen | values | where | | --- | --- | --- | | 4x4 | rows 0 8 2 10, 12 4 14 6, 3 11 1 9, 15 7 13 5 | bayer4 in src/lib/studio-field.ts, preset 01 and most of the family | | 8x8 | BAYER_8, built by M(2n) = [[4M, 4M+2], [4M+3, 4M+1]] | src/lib/dither.ts, the cutter, the deck engine, presets 02, 10 and bayerSphere | | 2x2 | four thresholds | preset 07 bayer-chunk only |

• The 8x8 matrix is an exact permutation of 0 to 63. A constant tone k/64 lights exactly k cells in every tile, so the screen has 65 tonally linear levels. A cell is lit when its tone is over (m + 0.5) / 64.
• Coverage tiers nest by construction. A tier lights the cells whose threshold is under its tone, so every tier's lit cells are a subset of the next tier's. Regions filled with different tiers compose an exact ramp, and an opaque glint ink drawn over a lower tier never brightens a doubled cell (DitheredMark, DESIGN.md section 6; see gt-diagrams references/isometric.md).
• Cells are square screen pixels.
• Canvas engines write one buffer pixel per cell and CSS upscales the buffer with image-rendering: pixelated (applyStyles in ditherToCanvas). The CPU engine never renders at devicePixelRatio: a retina cell is subpixel and the screen collapses into flat gray.
• SVG dithers carry shape-rendering: crispEdges.
• A transform that would foreshorten the cells (an iso plane seat) goes inside the alpha mask, so the cells stay square. A rotated window is a pre-rotated clip path swept by pure horizontal translate, because GSAP's transform origin makes rotate() windows fragile (DESIGN.md section 6).
• Scale is the design control. scale is the CSS px width of one cell, and eight times it is the grain the eye reads. The artifact pictures use 1 for fidelity, and the sign-in globe and the deck's ramp use 2. At 3 and 4 the screen reads as halftone, and 3 is the default for a full-bleed procedural field. At 8 or more it reads as pixel art. Each number belongs to its medium: the 1 CSS px of the artifact pictures holds on the web; films use 3 px cells everywhere (Kevin, 2026-10-08: "currently all dithers are a lil TOO dithered"), and a film never re-measures a coarser screen from a reference image; the partnership globe stills use 6 px cells so they read at a small size (gt-graphics).
• A dissolve multiplies the field's tone (rampField in src/components/plate/brand/FieldStack.tsx), so the dither drops whole cells across the ramp. A fading CSS mask over a picture prints its cells at partial alpha, so picture layers take a hard cut at the plate's edge and do their dissolve in the field.
• Alpha on a dither layer is limited to its fixed opacity (0.62 and 0.7 for pictures, 0.55 for the hero's field) and to the measured masks that quiet a procedural field behind a plate (section 3). A picture layer never fades by mask.
• One grid per transition (TRANSITION_RULES in src/app/craft/libraries.ts): both states at the same cells and one cell size, the Bayer tile keeping its phase, the tone and the ink mixed on one smoothstep, and reduced motion drawing the end state once. Alpha fades, wipes, moving masks and entrance animation are refused; a resolve takes 350 ms and a step 150 ms (Kevin, 2026-09-29: "make the dither transitions 2x faster"). The full list is in references/engines.md ("One grid per transition").
• On a dithered cover or deck opener, the dither shades one large hard-edged form at sheet scale on a quiet ground, with the plate area solid ink or paper. Round ten replaced two openers whose dither was the subject: a 7.3x blow-up that read as a checker and a band of mid-tone with no edge (deck/shots/OPENERS.md).

2. The engines

• createDitherLoop(canvas, fn, opts) returns render, start, stop, setField, setOptions and destroy. Defaults: scale 3, fps 30, pauseOffscreen true, gamma 1, bias 0.
• createStudioField returns setParams, pause, resume, renderStatic and destroy, or null when WebGL is unavailable. The canvas then stays transparent and the parent's own ground shows.
• The studio family is ten presets on an ink ground in the blue family (#2f5ce0, #5f86f2, #9db9ff, #cfe0ff), white only in 10: 01 bayer-flow (the Glyphfield original), 02 bayer-8x8 (the default and the hero's material), then contour, radial, sweep, waves, chunk (the 2x2), pulse, ink and hot, with bayerSphere outside the roster (the report card globe). What each moves is in references/engines.md ("The studio family").
• Every engine follows the lifecycle in DESIGN.md section 11: mount lazily behind an IntersectionObserver, pause offscreen and on a hidden tab, draw exactly one still under prefers-reduced-motion, release everything the instance owns in destroy(), and re-resolve ink on a data-theme flip. The studio field draws one ink set in both themes and leaves the light theme to the page's CSS filter (section 3).
• The studio field holds exactly one WebGL context per session for every subscriber, blitting into each subscriber's 2D canvas. Per-component contexts exhausted the browser's budget of about 16 and went black, so destroy() keeps the shared context by design. Switch a preset by remounting a keyed canvas (src/components/shared/HeroFieldSwitcher.tsx).
• The studio field has four copies with identical shaders and presets, two here and two in gt-cloud (the landing's on main and packages/ui's on PR #4977, listed in references/engines.md with the gotchas). Change a preset in every copy in the same round, or the app's material drifts from the hero's.

3. Material on product surfaces

• The landing hero's field is the one material on the dashboard and the auth pages. Kevin, 2026-09-25: "they should be as tasteful as our dither shader in hero of landing". It is preset 02 bayer-8x8 drawn by createStudioField.
• The hero mounts it in shared/HeroField.tsx on canvas.tc-hero-field.tch-field, and three files under $GT_CLOUD/apps/landing/src/components/landing/ set its composite:
• shell/engine.css: absolute, full bleed, mix-blend-mode: screen, inside an isolated dark cell;
• home/sections/hero-terminal.css: opacity 0.55 and a seven-stop horizontal mask, 0.72 at the edges to 0.12 in the centre behind the window;
• home/v0-pages.css, light theme: filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg) brightness(1.07) saturate(1.15), so the clouds print pale blue on paper.
• In the app the field mounts through FieldGround (ground for page grounds, band inside a block) and DitherBand (an empty state with its copy on a paper plate in the lower left). They live in $GT_CLOUD/apps/dashboard/src/components/brand/ on PR #4977 and in src/components/plate/brand/. The composite is the hero's, measured:
• .brand-field-host is isolation: isolate, pointer-events: none;
• .brand-field is opacity 0.55;
• ground masks the field to nothing left of --plate-edge, then ramps to full over 600 px; under md it is a faint top band gone by mid-page;
• band ramps from 0.12 to full across the block;
• the light theme uses the hero's filter, because a screen blend is inert in an isolated host with a transparent backdrop.
• Measure the hero's composite before inventing a new one. Never draw the material as a pattern, a border, a boxed plate or a heavier form. Kevin judged the horizon ring at page scale too heavy, and it was deleted.
• Glyph rain (glyph-field) keeps its glyphs as anti-aliased type at the page's pixel ratio. Its depth is glyph size and a quantized alpha ramp, and every tier is solid ink (TIER_COVER [1, 1, 1] in src/lib/glyph-field.ts and $GT_CLOUD/packages/ui/src/lib/glyph-field.ts), because a dither pattern on moving glyphs shimmers with every step. Kevin removed the rain's far-tier dither for that reason (commit b59f7d4, 2026-08-06: "the dither is making it flicker every time it moves"). A later pass that redrew the rain as enlarged two-tone pixel type was reverted on his word (2026-09-28: "make the glyphs look like how they did before, and dont make them dithered").
• On gt-cloud main the sign-in page draws the blue globe alone on the CPU loop at GLOBE_SCALE 2 (the rain left it on 2026-09-29), and the onboarding, consent, device and CLI pages draw artifact pictures at PICTURE_SCALE 1 ($GT_CLOUD/apps/dashboard/src/components/brand/FieldStack.tsx). The dashboard field's file map is gt-cloud's artifact-pictures skill (PR #5133).
• A field is decoration: aria-hidden, no pointer capture, and a readable page without WebGL.

4. Glyphfield, the source of new material

New material starts in Glyphfield, Kevin's open-source studio (glyphfield.com/studio, MIT), from which the studio field was ported. What ships is material code or exported assets, never an editor iframe, a local checkout or a generation request per page view; the shader holds texture and motion while masks, fades and theme blending stay in the page's CSS; and copied code keeps its source, revision, settings and licence notices. The full rules and the agent API are in references/glyphfield.md.

5. Artifact pictures

An artifact picture is a photograph or scan of an object, artwork or place, screened through the house dither. They appear on the plate port's field (src/components/plate), the brand deck's mood slides (deck/), the transition demo on /docs (src/app/craft) and gt-cloud's dashboard sign-in and onboarding field. Procedural fields (the sign-in globe, the ramp), marks, glyph fields, the deck's shader openers and blog covers are not artifact pictures.

Choosing a picture:

• No plain English prose. Dictionary entries, book pages, documents, signs and captions read as copy and distract from the form beside them. Kevin, 2026-10-05: "the dictionaries are plain english and distracting instead of artistic or design meaningful".
• Writing is welcome when it is the artistic or design subject: carved inscriptions (the Rosetta Stone), calligraphy, manuscripts in other scripts or old hands (Devanagari, the gloss), signs pressed in clay (the tablet), and lettering engraved on a historical chart or instrument (the cable chart, the compass rose).
• The picture applies to the page it sits on. On the dashboard Kevin cut the Great Wave ("does not really make sense here") and asked for human, cultural and language objects such as Karahisari's calligraphy and a Devanagari manuscript (2026-09-29).
• The source is the original scan or photograph, and the credit is shown with the picture. Choose in licence order: public domain or CC0 first (Wikimedia Commons public domain files, the Met, the Smithsonian, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Rijksmuseum, the Library of Congress), then CC BY, then CC BY-SA only when nothing else shows the subject. Never a non-commercial (NC) or no-derivatives (ND) licence, and never the British Museum's own collection images. Pin every source by sha256.
• Subjects exclude flags, emblems and coats of arms, maps with borders, captions that state sovereignty, private people and replicas (a cast or a reprint of the object); the original object or document is shown.
• On the dashboard and the plate port, the caption card has a title in title case, a note of at most 90 characters (NOTE_MAX_CHARS) that states one fact about the object, and the credit in italic (Kevin, 2026-10-01). Kevin asked for notes of two lines at most, and the note never mentions the company (2026-09-30: "dont write the corny stuff about gt relating").
• On the deck, a mood slide's plate has the title at 44px, one or two sentences on why the picture is in the deck (these may name GT), and the credit in titanium at 15px (deck/shots/OPENERS.md). The gt-deck skill owns that format.

The tone grid (scripts/media/mood-tone/standard.json under tone and file):

• Fixed for every picture: no blur, gamma 1.2, an autocontrast that clips 0.5 percent at each tail (over the frame, or over the subject mask for a masked object), an 8-bit gray JPEG at quality 82, or 75 when 82 is over the cap.
• Chosen per picture in the recipe: the crop, the channel (red or gray), the polarity (invert puts the subject lit on a black ground) and the kind.
• Solved per picture by the cutter: the black and white points.
• A scene lands on the Blue Marble's mean tone 0.361 and standard deviation 0.342 over the region of the grid that is shown.
• marks (writing, engraving, lines on a plain ground) put the ground at black with an Otsu threshold and the 90th percentile of the marks at white.
• The solver returns levels 80 and 230 for the plate's earth, which is the earth's own recipe, so the earth is the reference.
• Sizes: a cover is 1600 by 900, one grid cell per CSS px at a 1440 by 900 view; a disc is 2400 by 1350. The cap is 573440 bytes.

The screen (standard.json under screen):

• the 8x8 Bayer matrix with threshold (m + 0.5) / 64;
• cells of 1 CSS px, screened live at display size. A pre-screened bitmap that is then scaled never ships;
• tone floor 10: bytes at or under 10 read as 0, above the JPEG ringing on black;
• the loop at gamma 1 and bias 0, because the whole curve is in the grid;
• dark theme: white cells at 0.62 over #070707; light theme: #070707 cells at 0.7 over white.

The windows the lint holds each grid's shown region to:

The constants on each surface, the picture roster and the crop kinds are in references/pictures.md.

6. The cutter

pnpm mood-tone <sources dir> cuts the deck set into deck/shots/tone; --set plate cuts the plate set into public/brand/mood; --preview <dir> writes the 1 px screen previews; --check cuts into a temp folder and fails unless the result is byte-identical. It needs Node 20 or later and Python 3 with Pillow. The cutter is deterministic: never edit a grid or a manifest by hand, a recipe holds no tone numbers (a picture that no crop, channel, polarity, kind or placement puts in its window does not meet the standard), and sources are never committed. Each person keeps a sources directory outside the repository, because a museum can change the bytes it serves and the wrapper refuses them. The full commands, gt-cloud's copy and the contract are in references/cutter.md.

7. Adding or removing a picture

Choose the object against section 5 and confirm its licence; add the source's URL and sha256 and its README row; add a recipe (a plate recipe goes into both repositories); preview and adjust until the stats meet the window; show it on a deck slide or a plate registry entry in both repositories; run the lint in both; and commit the grid, the manifest, the recipe, the README row and the entry together, saying so when textLines is above 0. Removing a picture deletes its recipe, grid and entry in both repositories. The numbered steps are in references/cutter.md.

8. The lint

Prototemplate's lint fails when a grid, its manifest entry, the registry or a slide disagree, when a grid or its stats are off the standard, when a credit is missing, when a retired name appears, when a screen constant is off on any surface, and when standard.json differs from its pin. gt-cloud's applies the same rules to its one manifest and registry, and also reads scene 1's makeLoop call. The full list, and what the lint cannot see, are in references/pictures.md.

9. Changing the standard

standard.json and mood_tone.py are byte-identical in Prototemplate and gt-cloud, and STANDARD_SHA256 pins them in both lints. A change edits both repositories in one round and recuts every grid. The steps and the current pin are in references/pictures.md under "Changing the standard".

10. Retired names

dictionary, johnson, oed-volumes, oxford and oed never return as picture names, files, registry keys, mood-{name} tokens or string literals in picture code. They are listed in standard.json under writing.retired; references/pictures.md under "Retired names" says what each was and why it went.

Review checklist

• Every density ramp is dither. No alpha veil carries tone, and a picture's dissolve is in the field.
• Cells are square and crisp at 1x and 2x zoom in both themes: pixelated upscale, crispEdges in SVG, transforms inside the mask.
• A product surface uses the hero's bayer-8x8 field with the hero's measured composite, and nothing heavier. Glyph rain stays solid type.
• The engine pauses offscreen and on a hidden tab, draws one still under reduced motion, cleans up in destroy(), and the page reads without WebGL. A CPU loop re-reads its ink on a theme flip (data-theme in Prototemplate, the .dark class in gt-cloud); the studio field takes the light theme from the page's CSS filter.
• A transition keeps one cell grid, one anchored tile and one smoothstep for tone and ink, and draws the end state under reduced motion.
• A new artifact picture has no plain English prose, applies to its page, has an original source with a license and a sha256 in SOURCES, and a credit shown with it.
• Its grid and manifest were cut by the wrapper, --check passes with the sources, and the page matches preview-{name}.png.
• On the dashboard and the plate port, its caption note is one fact in 90 characters or fewer, with no line about the company.
• node scripts/lint/pictures.mjs passes, and for any plate change gt-cloud's node scripts/check-artifact-pictures.mjs passes on PR #5133's branch (or main once it merges).
• A standard change touched both repositories and both pins in one round.

Related skills

GT: gt-graphics (covers, blog graphics, the Glyphfield headless export), gt-aesthetic, gt-diagrams (DitheredMark, references/isometric.md), gt-deck (mood slides and openers), gt-landing-pages, gt-lints, gt-verify (the browser checks). Wiki: create-graphics, design-engineering-polish. gt-cloud's own skills under .agents/skills: artifact-pictures (PR #5133) maps the dashboard field's files, glyphfield maps Glyphfield and the landing's studio field, and gt-landing lists the landing's shared pieces.

Sources

Dated provenance for every rule is in references/sources.md: DESIGN.md, BRAND.md and docs/ARTIFACT-PICTURES.md, the engines and the cutter, the gt-cloud files, and Kevin's dated directives.