Textures
The grain law as composable overlays: Dither (ordered Bayer), Noise (film grain), Halftone, Scanlines, plus GrainField (the brand surface) and Textured (the default stack). Nothing in Echo is ever a flat fill — and a dither or grain pass is the cure for the banding that large soft gradients show on the dark chassis. All tiles are generated as inline SVG data-URIs, so there are no asset files to copy. Every overlay is aria-hidden and pointer-events: none.
Feel Print and screen grain — dither, noise, halftone, scanlines — laid over a surface so it reads as a made object.
Preview
Or let the agent fetch it: get_component("textures") on the Echo MCP server.
Installation
First time? Run npx echo-ui-cli init once — it sets the project up, and add refuses to run before it.
At a glance
- Version
- 0.3.0
- Weight
- 1.3 KB · 599 B of CSS (minified and gzipped; React not counted)
- Reduced motion
- Nothing moves: every texture is static.
Usage
import { Panel } from "@/echo/panel";
import { Textured } from "@/echo/textures";
<Textured>
<Panel>Settings</Panel>
</Textured>Composition
Textured Dither Noise Halftone Scanlines GrainField
Examples
De-band a gradient
The overlay fills the nearest positioned ancestor, so give it one.
<div style={{ position: "relative" }}><Hero /><Dither opacity={0.18} /></div>Product whisper
A panel gets grain, not a full treatment.
<Textured dither={false}><Panel>Settings</Panel></Textured>Brand field
The marketing surface; blooms in whatever the seed accent is.
<GrainField tone="accent" style={{ minHeight: 320 }}><h1>Echo UI</h1></GrainField>Screen register
Scanlines over a screen Panel, never over plastic.
<Panel variant="screen"><Readout /><Scanlines gap={3} /></Panel>Accessibility
- Every overlay is decorative:
aria-hiddenandpointer-events: none, so it never reaches the accessibility tree or catches a click. - Texture sits over content at low opacity. Check that text under it still meets contrast — the theme's guarantee is for the roles, not for what you lay on top of them.
Tested against WCAG 2.2 AA on every release:
axe— No axe violations, in the component's own gallery and on its page.keyboard— Every action is reachable and operable from the keyboard alone.focus-visible— Focus is visible on every focusable part, in normal and forced-colors mode.forced-colors— State stays visible when the look's colours are replaced by the system's.target-size— Every target's real hit area is at least 24×24px, at every density.reflow— Content reflows into 320px and survives a doubled text size.
Not covered: screen-reader: not yet verified by a person. Everything above is a machine check; a person has not yet driven this component with a screen reader.
Motion & sound
- Reduced motion
- Nothing moves: every texture is static.
Props
| Prop | Type | Default |
|---|---|---|
ditherTextured only: include the dither layer. Default true. | boolean | |
noiseTextured only: include the noise layer. Default true. | boolean | |
opacityLayer opacity; each texture ships its usual weight. | number | |
blendCSS mix-blend-mode against the surface below (overlay, soft-light, multiply). | string | |
fixedPin to the viewport instead of the positioned ancestor. | boolean | false |
toneDither only — dark ink deepens the surface, light ink lifts it. | "dark" | "light" | |
scaleDither only — tile scale multiplier; 1 = a 16px tile. | number | |
grainNoise only — fine for surfaces, coarse for fields. | "fine" | "coarse" | |
sizeNoise only — tile size in px; larger reads softer. | number | |
cellHalftone only — dot pitch in px. | number | |
gapScanlines only — line pitch in px. | number |
Anti-patterns
- Never stack every texture at once — one structural texture (dither OR halftone) plus grain is the ceiling; more reads as a filter, not a material.
- Never put Scanlines or Halftone on a raised plastic surface — those are screen and print registers; plastic gets Noise.
- Never raise Noise above ~0.08 on a product surface; the loud grain (0.3+) belongs to GrainField and marketing only.
- Never give an overlay a positioned ancestor it does not have — an absolutely-filling texture with no relative parent escapes to the page. Textured and GrainField provide their own; bare overlays do not.
- Never animate a texture's opacity to signal state — texture is material, not feedback. Use StatusDot or Progress.
Changelog
- Every item needs
echo-ui-core0.3.0 (all components). The drawn device, readability past AA and the design tests live in core, and the components that use them are built against it, so each item now declaresecho-ui-core >=0.3.0 <0.4.0. Update core with the items:npm install echo-ui-core@^0.3.0(or your package manager's), thennpx echo-ui-cli update. An item whose files didn't change is the same code under a new version; the 0.2.0 files stay published. - The light device (
echo-ui-core,echo-ui-cli). Echo can be light: a pale chassis makes a device molded in light plastic, like a white calculator or a cream radio, and a dark one makes the device Echo has always been. There's no setting and no mode to switch; the chassis decides (devicePolarity, andvalues.polarityon the theme). On a light device the page is light: its ground, the well, is the body barely set in. Caps get their own ladder, a step lighter than the body with a lit rim that stops short of white, so they keep their bevel; undersides and seams are shaded darker; dim text moves toward the ground by the same step as on a dark device, and reads about 6:1 on it. Screens are paper glass printed in ink, because a glow on a pale body is a smudge. What's lit (an LED, the current rail) is still the accent, held to 3:1 on every ground, so on is brighter than off; the text it prints (a readout, a count, a current tab) and the focus ring are the accent's ink, a step deeper and held to AA, in the newaccent-inkrole. The primary cap is the same cap as a dark device's, the accent with a light label: its label is the newprimary-cap-inkrole, and progress cells, loader dots and a meter's fill, the same plastic, read 3:1 on the page. A neutral cap or a slider that fills with it under its own dark label fills with the newpour-*roles, the accent's pale stops. Shadows are drawn at half their weight, in a deep colour of the body's own hue (--echo-cast-ink) instead of black. Every guarantee holds as it does on a dark device, and the contrast sweep now runs on light bodies too. A dark seed makes exactly the theme it did before, and the new roles equal the ones they stand for there. The components that mixed a recess toward black, painted paper in the text colour or lit a pillow of light with it read the theme's new--echo-shade-ink,--echo-paper-stockand--echo-paper-inkinstead, with the old value as the fallback, and a reflective screen reads--echo-screen-*; the components that print a lit label read--echo-primary-cap-inkand--echo-accent-inkthe same way; every rail is drawn in the glow, and every focus ring, theringrecipes included, in the ink.style usewears a light style now, andstyle checksays which device a style makes. A dark screen tint on a light body is still refused: one text colour can't serve both, and the theme says so. - Comments only, no behaviour change. Comments in the component source used to cite documents, milestones and ticket numbers from Echo's own planning, none of which exist in your project. The citations are gone and the sentences around them stay. Where a comment was only a citation, it now says what it meant. Three development warnings (
HardwareButton'sengraved/captionchecks andStatusDot's missing-label check) also dropped the ticket code at the end of the message.echo-ui diffwill show changes in most items; none of them are to code. - An item's version is now a function of declared data, not of how the changelog is formatted. The version an item ships under is published once and never rewritten, and it used to be inferred from prose: a regex for a bolded "Breaking" run across the whole unreleased section, and attribution by "does a bullet mention this name in backticks". One breaking entry therefore moved every item that changed that cycle, and an entry explaining that "
MenuandSheetare unchanged here" filed itself as a change to Menu and Sheet — which it really had. - The agent brief says Echo has not shipped.
llms.txtand the MCP server's instructions led withnpx echo-ui-cli init, and that name on npm is a reserved stub with no executable — so a model following the brief wrote an install step that fails with npx's own error. The brief now opens with the caveat, and the docs carry it on every surface that shows a command. One switch (CLI_RELEASED) silences all of them at launch, and a test refuses to let one move without the others. Affectsall componentsonly in what the brief says about installing them; no item's props, CSS or rendered semantics change. - Echo's home is
echo-ui.com. The registry, the docs and the packages all move to it fromecho.nawwara.studio. Nothing was published under the old host, so noecho.jsonanywhere points at it and there is nothing to migrate — this is the last release where that is true. - Weights, line heights, letter-spacing, z-index, border widths and icon sizes come from the theme scales in
all components, with the old value as a fallback, so components keep working withecho-ui-core@0.0.1. Strays moved to the nearest step: most by under a pixel; HardwareButton icons are 14/16/20px (were 15/17/19). - Content now reflows into a 320px screen (400% zoom) and survives a doubled browser text size (WCAG 1.4.10, 1.4.4), across
all components.Select's 180px floor,NumberField's readout,SegmentedandStepsas flex items,EmptyState's grid columns, andAvatar's fixed-pixel disc all gave way;Panelcounts its padding inside a width you set (box-sizing: border-box), so a<Panel style={{ width: 220 }}>is now 220px wide overall rather than 260px.