Halftone. A demo website by ModulatoDarkroom
SpecimenHalftone

Type & Color

Four type styles and two surfaces. Everything on this site is built from what is on this page — the values below are read from the live stylesheet, so they cannot drift from what you are looking at.

Typography

Franklin Gothic sets the titles and the small copy; Adobe Garamond sets every line of prose. Display is the Title style scaled with the viewport, not a size of its own — so the system is really two faces, four steps.

Title — display

Chapter openers and the index claim. The Title style, scaled fluidly with the viewport rather than set at a size of its own.

Family
Size
Weight
Leading
Tracking
Scale
clamp(44px, 9vw, 90px)

Size above is measured at this window width — resize and it moves.

Four Screens

Title

Section headings, numerals, pull quotes. The style at its base size.

Family
Size
Weight
Leading
Tracking

The Binary Press

Body — large

Ledes and opening paragraphs: the step between a title and running prose. Tighter leading, since the lines are longer.

Family
Size
Weight
Leading
Tracking

The trick is not tonal. It is spatial: break the image into dots of varying size.

Body

All running prose. Measure does the work that a second size would.

Family
Size
Weight
Leading
Tracking

A printing press is a binary device. It carries one film of ink at one density.

Small

Captions, figure refs, running heads, metadata, footnotes, nav.

Family
Size
Weight
Leading
Tracking

Fig. 3 · 1904 · The Half-Tone Process, Iliffe & Sons

Color

Two surfaces: chapters print dark on paper, the index and the darkroom invert. The four plate colors appear only where CMYK is the subject — they are an argument, not decoration.

Paper surface
  • PaperPage surface
  • InkBody text
  • MutedCaptions, metadata
  • RuleHairlines, borders
Inverted surface
  • PaperPage surface
  • InkBody text
  • MutedCaptions, metadata
  • RuleHairlines, borders
The four plates
  • CyanScreen angle 15°
  • MagentaScreen angle 75°
  • YellowScreen angle
  • BlackScreen angle 45°

Grid

Twelve columns, a 20px gutter, 32px margins — six columns on a phone. The rhythm of every page comes from which columns a block occupies.

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