Colophon
- Engine
A single WebGL2 fragment shader. Field, then ramp, then post. Colour is interpolated in OKLab and dithered before it is quantised to eight bits, which is what keeps the output free of banding.
- Display type
Redaction by Jeremy Mickel (MCKL), drawn for Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts' project at MoMA PS1 and released under the SIL Open Font License. It ships in seven optical grades, from clean to nearly illegible; the grain control moves between them.
- 00Light has no edges
- 01Light has no edges
- 02Light has no edges
- 03Light has no edges
- 04Light has no edges
- 05Light has no edges
- 06Light has no edges
- Interface type
Geist Sans and Geist Mono, self-hosted.
- Colour
The interface has no chromatic accent at all. Every hue you see belongs to a gradient.
- Where
Created in the French Alps. Ether is built by PROJECT 1804, a brand direction studio, and the engine is written and rendered in one place rather than assembled from services.
- Name
The luminiferous ether was the medium light was supposed to travel through. Michelson and Morley went looking for it in 1887 and found nothing. The name outlived the thing.
- Licence
The five standalone tools give you CC0: commercial use, modification, no attribution. Universes and generated photography are licensed by plan — see the licence page. The site’s own code and type carry their own licences.
- Privacy
The tools need no account: presets live in the address bar, so a link is the whole file and nothing reaches a server. An account is optional, and the only cookie is the session it needs. We count seven product events — generated, saved, exported and the like — with no session recording, no profile and no advertising network; Do Not Track switches even that off. Error reports strip the address hash, because your work is in it. Typefaces are served from our own domain, so no font service ever sees your address.
- Photographs
Images you drop into the grader or the palette tool are read by your own GPU and never uploaded. Nothing leaves the browser, so there is nothing for us to keep.