One pixel is one decision

When you draw pixel art, the hard part isn’t drawing more. It’s drawing less.

A 16×16 icon has only 256 cells. One cell for an eye or two, whether the corner of the mouth turns up by one cell or not: all of it shows. At high resolution you can hide behind detail; at low resolution you can’t. Every pixel is a decision.

Writing code feels a lot like this. A function name, a parameter’s default, an error message: each is a tiny dot, but the people using it step on every one. I want everything on this site made that way: not much of it, but every bit thought about.

That’s why the icons here are drawn line by line in characters (# is ink, o is fill, : is a dither dot) and kept in the code, so changing one pixel shows up in the diff. It sounds a little fussy, but the fussiness is half the fun.