Design Nomenclature / Surface & Material
Matte
Also called matt, flat, matte finish, dead flat
This entry has not been translated yet and is shown in English.
A surface that returns light almost entirely by diffuse scattering, so no image of the environment survives and brightness holds roughly steady as you move. Achieved by micro-roughening — blasting, flatting agents, a coarse sheet. Under 10 gloss units at 60° by common convention, though nobody agrees on the cut.
In practice
On a reading surface it is a glare decision before it is an aesthetic one: matte trades black depth for the absence of a reflected lamp in the page.
Not to be confused with
- SatinThe middle of the gloss ladder: enough specular return to catch a soft highlight, too much scatter to reflect a legible image. The paint trade's rungs — flat, eggshell, satin, semi-gloss, gloss — are marketing names over a continuous gloss-unit scale, and they do not align between manufacturers.
- GlossThe degree to which a surface reflects specularly rather than diffusely — and, unusually for this vocabulary, an actually measured quantity: a gloss meter reads gloss units at a fixed angle, 60° by default, 20° for high gloss, 85° for near-matte. High gloss returns a legible image of the room.
- LusterThe character of a surface's reflected light rather than its quantity. Mineralogy names the kinds — vitreous, metallic, waxy, resinous, greasy, silky, adamantine, dull — and they are not points on one scale. Two surfaces can meter identical gloss and read as entirely different materials, because luster folds in transparency, subsurface scattering, and structure.