Shades of Halftone: How to Build Print-Style Shaders for the Modern Web

Halftone is one of those visual tricks that feels both ancient and cutting-edge: a printing-era hack that keeps resurfacing as a design language for modern interfaces. What has changed is not the dot pattern itself, but the tooling and the expectations. Today, halftone is not just a “comic book filter” applied in Photoshop; it is a real-time, programmable post-processing effect you can drive with interaction, motion, and even multi-channel color separation.

If you have ever wanted your product pages, interactive stories, or data visualizations to feel tactile rather than sterile, halftone is a surprisingly practical technique. It gives you texture where flat gradients feel too perfect, and it gives you a controlled way to trade detail for style.

The Core Insight

A good halftone shader is not primarily about drawing circles. It is about aligning three coordinate systems so they agree:

1. The UV space where you sample your input (image, video, or rendered scene).
2. The grid space where your dot “cells” live.
3. The perceptual space where the viewer’s eye integrates high-frequency patterns into smooth tone.

Maxime Heckel’s deep dive on halftone shows how quickly the implementation becomes elegant once you think in terms of distance fields, masks, and quantized sampling.

At the simplest level, you render a circle using a distance field: measure the distance from the current fragment to a cell center and threshold it.

• The distance field gives you a continuous scalar value.
• The thresholding step (using step() or smoothstep()) turns that scalar into a crisp or antialiased edge.

Then you replicate that circle across the screen by tiling UVs.

• fract() repeats a pattern by keeping only the fractional part of a scaled coordinate.
• floor() does the opposite: it “snaps” you to a discrete cell index.

That floor-based snapping is the key that makes halftone feel like halftone rather than a dotted overlay. If every pixel inside a cell samples the same underlying color, the dots become “ink coverage decisions” for that cell, not random speckles.

From there, the first major unlock is using luma to modulate dot size. When dot radius scales with brightness, the pattern carries the tonal structure of the original image. In other words, the dot grid becomes a tone-mapping mechanism.

The second unlock is realizing that the grid is an artistic constraint you can bend.

• Offset every other row and you increase dot density and reduce dead whitespace.
• Replace dots with rings, squares, or “dot-adjacent” shapes to preserve more texture.
• Sample neighboring cells to break out of per-cell clipping (a subtle but important upgrade that enables watercolor-like blobs).

Finally, multichannel halftoning (RGB or CMYK) is not a gimmick. It is a structured way to create richer output without increasing resolution. You are layering multiple grids, rotating them to minimize Moire interference, and recombining them through additive (RGB) or subtractive (CMYK) blending.

Why This Matters

Halftone is a case study in a broader shift: programmable graphics are becoming a mainstream interface tool.

A few years ago, writing GLSL for a product website would have sounded like overkill. Now, shader tooling is packaged into designer-friendly apps and developer-friendly stacks (Three.js, React Three Fiber, WebGPU experiments). That changes what “polish” means.

But there is a more practical reason to care: halftone is a controllable degradation.

In product design, we often fight compression artifacts, scaling artifacts, and banding. Halftone flips the script. You deliberately introduce a structured artifact that:

• hides minor imperfections,
• adds perceived depth,
• and creates a signature look that is consistent across varied source media.

It also helps teams converge faster. Instead of arguing about the perfect photo edit, you can apply a consistent halftone pipeline and make the system do the stylistic work.

There are real trade-offs, though.

• Performance: post-processing passes cost fill-rate, especially on mobile.
• Accessibility: patterned overlays can reduce legibility if used without care.
• Moire and shimmering: animated content can amplify interference patterns.

This is why the best halftone implementations treat it like a first-class rendering effect, with deliberate choices about sampling, antialiasing, and motion.

Key Takeaways

• Halftone is more about sampling strategy than shape drawing. The “snap to cell then sample once” approach is what sells the effect.
• Use smoothstep() (plus fwidth() where appropriate) to avoid jagged edges and temporal shimmer.
• Luma-controlled radius is the simplest way to preserve tonal structure.
• Offsetting rows and sampling neighboring cells expands your design space beyond rigid dot grids.
• CMYK-style halftone is essentially layered grids plus careful blending, but rotation is critical to manage Moire.
• Treat halftone as a UX element. Reserve high-contrast patterns for backgrounds or decorative layers, and add controls to reduce intensity.

Looking Ahead

Two trends make halftone (and shader-driven UI more broadly) worth investing in:

1. Better authoring workflows. Tools that let designers “sketch” shader ideas lower the barrier for teams to adopt real-time graphics.
2. More capable runtime platforms. As browsers improve graphics APIs and performance profiles, effects that used to be desktop-only become acceptable on mobile.

If you want to ship a halftone effect in production, start small:

• Apply it to a hero background image, not body text.
• Add a quality switch (grid size, radius, or effect opacity) tied to device performance.
• Test motion-heavy cases, because halftone that looks great on a static image can shimmer badly on video.

Suggested hero image idea: a side-by-side comparison (original vs halftone) of the same scene, with a close-up crop showing dot structure and a caption explaining “sampling once per cell.”

Sources

• Shades of Halftone – The Blog of Maxime Heckel
  https://blog.maximeheckel.com/posts/shades-of-halftone/

Based on analysis of Shades of Halftone – The Blog of Maxime Heckel (https://blog.maximeheckel.com/posts/shades-of-halftone/)