PLATE PROOFthis card needs WebGL 2 to print.
the artwork is generated, so there is nothing flat to fall back to yet — a pinned base
image is step §7.5.
PLATE PROOF
THE 33 · STEP 1 · DISPOSABLE
what this is
Press and drag the card. The stock dishes under your thumb and rings when you let go, the
plates part as it turns, and the die edge walks its hue. Keep handling it and the sheet
advances — a new impression, new registration, new ink.
It is a real material: paper fibre, ink standing proud of the stock with its halftone
dots as beads, a spot varnish on the window against bare trim, and a die edge that is
metal — no diffuse at all, and the grating is its reflectance rather than a tint
laid over the top. Three sources are drawn from all 211 cards in the deck.
BASE · no changes applied
THE FORGE · WHAT IS ON THE PLATES
THE CARD — printed at card size
GROUND — zoomed to a field, behind everything
MID — mirrored, another scale
WASH — zoomed past ground, a colour field
STRIP — tiled small, turned off the sheet's axis
INSET — a tight crop, held in one region
HOW MANY CARDS ARE ON IT
why three, and why those roles
Every card here is a composition made out of the deck, printed four
times with the plates slightly wrong. The three sources are the picture; the seed decides
the masks, the registration and the stock. Choosing a plate is a physical act
— the press takes it and the sheet prints again, so the card draws itself back on.
set from committed outlines — no font ships and none is
named. 68 glyphs: A–Z, 0–9 and punctuation; anything else is quietly dropped.
framed
Frameless takes the trim away and the composition runs to
the die edge — a full bleed, a real thing a press does and a different
kind of card. It takes the border sorts with it: sorts are set INTO the trim, so a
frameless card with a ruled border still on it is a border round nothing. The name stays —
that is the card's title, not its frame. ⚠ The trim is what makes the artwork read as a
window; bleeding to all four edges is what turned the first proof into wallpaper.
That is why it is an option and not the default.
why the border changes
A printer sets a rule from repeated pieces of TYPE — border sorts, out of
the same fount as the name. Rarity picks the family, the seed picks the frame,
so no two cards share a border and you can read the tier off the edge.
THE BUILD · WHAT KIND OF CARD THIS IS
each element sits at its own depth through the card's
thickness and slides along its own bearing. At 0 they are
coplanar and the card is a flat print. ⚠ Depth on its own is a magnification about the
centre — which is exactly what a zoom is — so the elements also separate
laterally, or the stack would only ever be visible with the card tilted.
the halftone stipple — each plate broken into dots on its
own screen angle. At 0 the ink is laid in continuous tone and the artwork
is seen directly instead of through a screen. Everything else survives: the plates, their
registrations, the film weights, the roller band. It is still a separation and still a
print, just not a screened one. ⚠ The dot relief goes with it — beads of ink
standing proud are the stipple in three dimensions.
eight named press failures — the plates landing together, the roller
starving, the sheet slurring under the blanket. Each is a real thing a press
does, which is why the card reads as a print rather than as an effect. Leave it
on seeded and the card picks its own.
WHAT IS DRAWN
small drawings struck into the print — a boiling line,
redrawn from scratch every frame the way hand-drawn animation is, so it crawls instead of
tweening. ASCII kinds are set from the card's own committed fount, so no
font ships and none is named. ⚑ They go in as ink, before the plate
separation — so they take the halftone, the registration error and the press damage like
every other mark, instead of sitting on top as a sticker. They ride the figure's plane, so
they have the same depth as the layer they sit on. Where they land is the seed's.
⚠ They run on the press's own clock: stopped press, stopped loop.
the composition is set in THE FORGE above — deck cards
in role order. Ground is zoomed to a field, mid is
mirrored at another scale, figure sits near card size and is the subject.
At six you also get wash (zoomed past ground, a colour field),
strip (tiled small and turned off the sheet's axis) and
inset (a tight crop held in one region). ⚠ Pictures of the same size
average into one — the roles are what make it a collage instead of a blend,
which is why the three extra ones take scales the first three do not.
⛔ this is the wrong kind of misregistration, on purpose.
A press shifts each plate by ONE CONSTANT VECTOR — the paper went through askew. Radial
error grows from the centre outward, which is a LENS artefact, not a printing one. It is
exposed because the acceptance test needs a control that fails; leave it at 0 for a card
that is honestly printed.
the other two market dials. Price drives the foil die edge
and depth drives how far the stack travels. Each card wears them differently — the
temperament is part of its seed, so the same reading lands differently on every card.
the environment the metal reflects. ⛔ the artwork never sees
it — only the foil does. An environment on the art plate lands as a milky ambient
wash, which is a measured failure this renderer is built to avoid. Switch it off and the
foil should die while the print stays byte-identical.
THE PRESS · HOW BADLY IT PRINTED
at 0 the sheet takes a clean pull — even ink across every
plate, no roller band, no dry patch, and the press failure sitting still at its own
identity. That is the raw card. Turn it up and the impression prints with the character it
actually drew. ⚠ This is separate from burn (damage the market did) and
registration (the paper going through askew) — both have their own dials
and always did.
reading the chain…
maxTotalSupply − totalSupply, read over a public RPC.
more burned ⇒ more damaged — the screen coarsens, the roller starves,
the stock opens. read-only, never a wallet; blocked, the slider is yours.
the four crop targets at the corners and the
colour bar down the trim. ⚠ These are not the registration dial and
turning that to 0 was never going to remove them — they are marks a printer strikes on a
check sheet, and on a finished card they read as damage. Off is the default; the
window hairline and the border sorts are the card's frame and always stay.
the card is separated into inks, and each one is laid down at its own
registration on its own screen angle. Six adds orange and green — and
they are an ink split, not two more layers: orange takes the part magenta
and yellow were both carrying, green the part cyan and yellow shared, and that load comes
OFF the process inks. So the card does not go darker, it reaches further — measured, luma
91.06 → 91.22. Two more screens also means the plates beat harder, which
is most of what the eye reads as printed.
take it to 0 and the card prints in perfect register.
that is the control the acceptance test uses — the offsets have to be one constant vector
per plate, not a radius.
a GIF is one full press cycle, looping — the same card, the same
seed, every time. once it lands, right-click it (or long-press) and save;
the button is there for people who look for a button.
move the light, not the card. a material answers a light —
the coated window flashes, the bare trim does not, and the foil edge walks its hue. Shading
painted onto a texture cannot do any of that.
a pull is one impression. nothing here runs on a clock —
left alone the card is a card on a table.
THE HUNDRED · SAVE AND NUMBER
1–33 · a hero
every setting on this page is saved with the number —
all six plates, the separation, the words, the frame, the seed, the layers, the motion,
the registration and the dials. A saved card reprints exactly, because
the press is deterministic and the record is complete.
filled numbers are lit. Click one to load it back and it
reprints exactly as saved. ⚠ This is stored in this browser only — there
is no server. Export the set to keep it.
⛔ the JSON is the real artifact, not the browser store.
Clearing site data loses the deck; the file does not. Export it, commit it, and the whole
set rebuilds anywhere.
—
Made from three of the artist's own cards, chosen by the seed. The name is set
from outlines built at build time — no font ships and none is named, so it
renders the same on a machine with none installed.