Silver color, but in 1bit

The plate at the top of this site has exactly two colors: a light gray and a dark gray. Nothing in between. Still, it reads as brushed metal, and it seems to catch the light as you move. The trick is in how the two colors are mixed.

One bit, one hard edge

Give every pixel a brightness from 0 to 1. With one bit you can only say yes or no: brighter than half, light; otherwise, dark. A smooth gradient collapses into a single hard line.

A threshold for every pixel

Dithering breaks that line up. In place of one shared cutoff, each pixel in a small 8 × 8 tile gets its own, spread evenly from low to high. Near the dark end only a few pixels pass. Near the light end almost all of them do. Step back, and your eye blends the dots into a gradient again.

Clear the check box to see the hard edge come back.

Where the shine comes from

The plate's brightness is two things added together: a soft fade from top to bottom, and one narrow diagonal band of light. The band follows your pointer across the window.

The dots never move. They stay locked to the pixel grid, and the light passes through them, the way a reflection slides across a real metal surface. To me, that is the moment it stops looking like a pattern and starts looking like silver.