A Field Guide to Dither

A one-bit display can show black or white. To suggest grey, the Macintosh drew patterns of alternating pixels. Four patterns do most of the work on this site.

• 50% checker. Alternating pixels. This is the desktop background.
• 25% and 75%. Sparser and denser versions used for disabled text and scrollbar tracks.
• Racing stripes. Horizontal lines in the active window’s title bar.
• Dots. A single row of alternating pixels for menu separators.

Each one is a tiny SVG tile, a few bytes long, repeated with crisp edges.