Light shade

Use ░ as pale fill in fixed-width text graphics. One copy suggests a faint patch; a run of copies shades a panel, softens an edge, fills an unfinished progress bar, or adds tone to ASCII art and ANSI art. Keep every row in the same monospace font so the cells line up.

Copy it from the palette above for the exact character, then test the whole pattern where it will be read. The dots come from the font, so density and spacing shift between fonts and terminals. A design finished in September 1976 teletext already used this trick: switch character cells into chunky block graphics when no bitmap was available.

Where did block shading come from?

Nobody invented ░ alone. Unicode keeps Block Elements as compatibility characters carried over from terminal and vendor sets, including IBM PC, teletext-style mosaics, and East Asian standards. The job was construction: build borders, fills, and crude pictures from text cells.

So read ░ as partial density, not as a picture. Its neighbors supply the darker steps, and the surrounding characters supply the subject. That is why it still works for fades, empty bar segments, and background texture.