# Dithering & Halftone

**Track:** Advanced Generative Art — Advanced Creative Coding — proposed (50)
**Framework / surface:** p5.js
**Level:** Medium
**Prerequisites:** Images & Pixels as Arrays

**In one line:** Error diffusion, ordered/Bayer dither, rotated halftone screens.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Dithering trades spatial resolution for tonal depth, scattering a limited palette so the eye blends it into continuous tone. Floyd–Steinberg error diffusion (Robert Floyd and Louis Steinberg, 1976) pushes each pixel's quantization error to its neighbors, producing the characteristic organic grain; ordered dithering uses a fixed Bayer matrix, after Bryce Bayer, for a regular, screen-printed crosshatch. Rotated halftone screens—dots swelling with darkness, angled per channel—are the language of offset litho and comic-book Ben-Day. The aesthetic is unapologetically reproductive: risograph, newsprint, 1-bit Macintosh. Constraint becomes signature, the artifact of cheap printing reclaimed as deliberate texture.