Make a print shop listing for a fictional print, "Heron at First Light" by Ferrous Press, on a warm grey page (#e4ddd0). A cream card (#f7f1e6) holds a 4 by 5 print up to 470px tall and the details: a red-orange (#d0573f) label, the serif title, "Four-colour halftone on 300gsm cotton rag, A3", "£45", "14 of 40 left", an outlined "Colour proof" toggle and a "Reserve a print" button that becomes "Reserved, no. 27 of 40". Paint the artwork on a hidden canvas: a peach sunrise, a pale sun, three hill layers (#d97b7f, #9c5578, #55406f), a blue lake with gold glints, reeds and a heron on one leg. Show it as a halftone effect: on a grid rotated 45 degrees, every 7px, draw a dot of navy ink (#1d2340) whose radius is 0.6 times the cell times the square root of how dark the art is there. Around the pointer, a 100px lens grows those dots to full size and blends them to the art colour, and the clean art fades in at the centre through a radial mask. On touch, drag the lens; when idle it drifts over the print. The Colour proof button grows the lens over the whole print, and Escape turns it off. Reduced motion parks the lens still.
Written by Informeek Studio to recreate this design. Prompts are not deterministic: running it again gives a similar result, not an identical one.
Use it in three steps
- Copy the prompt with the button above.
- Paste it into your tool, such as v0, Lovable, Bolt or Claude.
- Make it yours by painting your own artwork and choosing a single ink colour for the dots.
About this halftone effect
This halftone effect shows a print the way a printer sees it before the colour goes down. The sunrise artwork is turned into a grid of navy dots set at 45 degrees, each dot larger where the picture is darker, so the heron, the hills and the glinting lake all appear from nothing but circles on cream paper. Move over it and a soft lens swells the dots into colour, with the clean artwork showing through in the middle.
The art is painted once on a hidden canvas and sampled for every dot, so changing the picture changes the halftone automatically. The dots are drawn as one path per frame, which keeps a few thousand of them smooth on a phone. When nobody is pointing, the lens wanders across the print on its own, and the Colour proof button opens it over the whole sheet.
Why the prompt works
- It gives the halftone maths, cell size, grid angle and the square root rule for dot size.
- It describes the lens in pixels and easing, so the reveal feels soft rather than a hard circle.
- It paints the artwork from shapes with exact colours, so no image is needed.
- It ties the effect to a sale, with an edition count and a reserve button.
Where to use it
Print shops, poster sales, album artwork and editorial covers. It works best on bold pictures with clear dark shapes, which read well as dots.
The prompt is shared under CC BY 4.0. Reuse it freely, including commercially, with a credit linking back to this page.
