I can’t hide my fascination with the little corner of the design world known as pixel art. Ever since I bought a hoodie emblazoned with a 10-pixel figure from an 80s arcade game, the irresistible pull of the squared art form in its newly-commercialized iteration has pulled me in again and again. It’s a purposefully constricted style that, for me, never seems to lose its appeal.
With that in mind, here’s the first of a monthly post looking at my favourite examples of found pixel art over the previous month. We’ll keep it simple on our first go around, with these three great highlights.
Agnieszka Bartosiewicz’s Customizable Sideboard
Core77 showed us this wonderful sideboard from the aforementioned Polish designer, in which a series of holes lets you insert coloured felt pieces to create your own designs. The mind reels. 3500 holes! Get yourself some video game maps and re-create the hell out of them.
This is the kind of thing I can never have in my place, for should I find myself with an urgent deadline, essay, or what have you, I could be found reconstructing a part of this mere hours before submission time.
Post-It art isn’t the newest thing in the world, but using it to recreate classic 8-bit scenes is a more recent development, not to mention something even the artistically unlucky can try their hand at. Check out this fantastic Megaman illustration to see how.
Easily the most impressive was the UCSC students re-creating a Donkey Kong level using several floors of their school’s engineering building. 14,000 post-it notes later…
A Nintendo Console Inside a Nintendo Cartridge
Alright, this isn’t pixel art per se, but since the NES was the source of so much wonderful pixel art over its lifetime, and drives most of the examples here, let’s show this one off anyway. A ream of tech blogs picked up on the fact that a resourceful designer managed to modify an old NES cartridge using a custom screen and various other parts to make a functioning NES-within-a-NES. I love it.
That’s it for our first outing–the next roundup comes in August, with the best in pixel and game-inspired art from every corner of theinternet. If you’ve got a must-have inclusion, don’t hesitate to send it in!