Pixel by Pixel…Or how I spent my last 2 weeks designing a few icons

Sholom Sandalow, Wednesday, May 7, 2008 @ 9:05 pm

"Our product is shipping globally, and we're not going to customize each device to the language of it's destination country. So we need you to design a set of icons that will be used in place of textual messages."

Challenging, but simple enough, right? Immerse yourself in the product, do some user research, brainstorm designs that are meaningful, descriptive and culture neutral, and there you go. Oh, and one more thing...the device's display is 128 x 64 pixels with 1 bit color depth.

Such was the nature of the project I recently worked on, and it was a challenge of a very different kind then I had faced in a while. With either greater resolution or more color depth, It's relatively easy to depict pretty much anything with a high degree of recognizability. Shading, perspective, non-linear surfaces are all time consuming but doable with one or the other. Yet with only 2 colors and not many more pixels at your disposal, your so much more limited in what you can do. Take a look at some early GUI icons to see what I mean...

Since I couldn't use more than 2 colors, I couldn't anti-alias, so I was basically confined to horizontal, vertical and 45 degree diagonal lines. Forget about perspective. Since true perspective doesn't involve straight lines, depicting a product from an angle on such a small scale is out of the question. And shading--which is essential in illustrating that a surface displayed head on is curved--is just a matter of starting on the darker side with a high frequency of black, and then lessening the frequency as you move to the 'lit' side of the surface (Take a magnifying glass to a newspaper add to see what I mean). Again, not an option here due to the small screen size, there just want enough room to do that. I felt a lot like a writer being asked to weigh in on a complicated subject using 50 words or less. They say brevity is the soul of wit. I had to be clear and concise if I had any chance of success.

At 128 x 64, every pixel matters. And at 1 bit color depth, rotating, scaling or otherwise transforming anything in Photoshop is useless because the software automatically anti-aliases, creating shades of grey that were forbidden. So I had to design pixel by pixel--make a 1 x 1 selection, put my hands on the keyboard cursors and get to work. See Wikipedia's entry on Pixel Art for a good reference.

As it turns out, I was more at home on this project than i though I would be when found out the requirements. You see back when I was a kid, the first computer graphics program I ever used was on my father's DOS machine. The program itself wouldn't fit on the computer's hard drive, so it had to be loaded via floppy disk--the old 5 1/4" ones. The computer didn't have a mouse, so almost everything I created had to be tediously drawn pixel by pixel using the cursor keys. It took me months working 2-3 hours a night, but I created some pretty good stuff. In particular, I remember drawing a hockey rink, with players, stands and all, which I'm pretty proud of. Using Photoshop/Illustrator now, with the capabilities so far advanced over what I had to work with at that time, It's hard to see how I did what I did, or for that matter why I spent months doing it. But there's something about taking time to do something right, struggling through the frustration that comes with the absence of 'Undo', picking yourself back up after making a mistake that renders 10 hours of work useless. Creating art is a sprint. Back then it was a marathon.

So I forgot about my mouse, left the color picker behind, and zoomed in at 1600%. I soon found the hang of it again, and I got in the groove I remembered from way back. After a lot more time than I though it would take, I had a set of icons that worked...and that's the key. And in the end, I feel a little more satisfaction than I would have if I was allowed to let Photoshop do it's magic.

user experience design

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