Everything Has A Distance

A journal of stereoscopic culture, read front to back — literally. This issue is laid out in depth order: you begin at the plane nearest your face and fall backwards through six planes until the last word rests far behind the glass.

Autumn 2026 Anaglyph edition 72 pages ↓ Skip to the screen plane

PLANE+4NEAR FIELD · EDITOR'S NOTE

Depth is not a decoration. It is a reading instruction — a claim about what you are meant to notice first, and what is merely holding the back of the room.

We built this issue around a single constraint: nothing may float at an arbitrary distance. Every element on this page declares an integer depth between +6 and −6, and its red/cyan separation is computed from that number. The typography you are reading is not styled to look three-dimensional; it is positioned, and the offset is the consequence.

The effect is unforgiving. Anything we placed too far forward became a headache within a paragraph. Anything pushed too far back stopped being read at all. What survived is a hierarchy you can feel in your eye muscles before you have parsed a single word — which is, we think, what hierarchy was always supposed to be.

Pull the separation slider to zero, or press View flat, and the whole argument collapses into a normal web page. That collapse is the point. Read on →

PLANE+2PLATE ONE · STEREO DIAGRAM

Fig. 1 — Convergence geometry. The two base points are the lenses; the apex is the fixation point. Everything nearer than the apex carries crossed disparity and appears to leave the page.

PLANE0THE SCREEN PLANE · ZERO PARALLAX

Zero is where
the words live

Essay — Ines Okonkwo · 2,400 words

At zero disparity the red and cyan channels land on top of each other and the text simply goes white. There is no offset to resolve, no fusing to do, no shimmer at the edges of the letterforms. It is the only plane on this page where reading is effortless — and so it is the plane we gave to the argument itself.

Stereographers call this the window. Historically it was the physical frame of the viewer: a brass-bound Holmes stereoscope with two albumen prints mounted an inch apart, the card sliding along a rail until the two images snapped into one. Anything you wanted the audience to actually study went at the window. Spectacle went in front of it. Context went behind.

The web inherited none of this vocabulary. We have z-index, which is an ordering, not a distance — an integer that says above without ever saying how far above. This issue treats depth as a real quantity, and the layout you are scrolling is the argument for doing so: a document with a measurable front and a measurable back.

Return here whenever a plane becomes hard to read. The window is always at zero.

PLANE−2BEHIND THE GLASS · ISSUE INDEX

PLANE−4FAR FIELD · MEASUREMENTS

Comfort table

Measured on 14 readers wearing standard red/cyan lenses at 60 cm viewing distance. Fatigue reported after ten minutes of continuous reading.
Plane	Offset	Role	Legibility	Fatigue
+6	10.2 px	Masthead only	Low	High
+4	6.8 px	Standfirst, pull quotes	Medium	Medium
+2	3.4 px	Plates and captions	High	Low
0	0.0 px	Body text	Perfect	None
−2	3.4 px	Index, navigation	High	Low
−4	6.8 px	Tables, apparatus	Medium	Medium
−6	10.2 px	Colophon, backdrop	Low	Medium

PLANE−6BACKDROP · SUBSCRIBE

Everything Has A Distance

Zero is where
the words live

The Holmes Rail

Two Reds, One Ghost

Interview: Vic Ambrose

The Depth Budget

Backdrop Studies

Comfort table

Four issues
a year, plus glasses

Zero is where the words live

The Holmes Rail

Two Reds, One Ghost

Interview: Vic Ambrose

The Depth Budget

Backdrop Studies

Comfort table

Four issuesa year, plus glasses

Zero is where
the words live

Four issues
a year, plus glasses