24 Examples of Dithered, Halftone, and Other Illusion Patterns Used to Create Surface Gradients

Architects and designers are often looking for ways to make building facades and interior surfaces stand out from the crowd. But sometimes just the smallest change can have the biggest impact once you step back and see the whole picture. By employing an illusionary pattern such as dithering pixels or halftone dots, or by making subtle but intentional changes to the position or orientation of materials, flat surfaces can be transformed into curved, moving forms.

Halftone patterns work by reducing a solid surface of color into dots of decreasing size. As the dots gradually reduce to nothing, they leave nothing behind except a background color. The result is a flat surface with a gradient that mimics the shadows or highlights of a three-dimensional curve. Dithering, meanwhile, is the process of feathering multiple shades of the same color to blend them together. The effect allows designers to, on a large enough scale, create images with depth and curves, while using only a single color. Or even to create the illusion of an intermediary color.

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