makegames:

Note: This tutorial was created in 2007 for my personal website. Some small tweaks have been made since then, but nothing too significant.

In this 10-step tutorial, I’ll teach you how to create a “sprite”, which is a stand-alone two-dimensional character or object. The term comes from video games, of course.

Creating pixel art is a skill I picked up because I needed graphics for my games. After a lot of practice, I became kinda handy with it, and started to see it more as actual art rather than just a tool. These days, pixel art is quite popular in game development and illustration.

This pixel tutorial was created many years ago to teach people the basic concepts behind pixel art, but I’ve streamlined it a lot since its first incarnation. There are other pixel tutorials around, but I find them to be overly-complicated and too wordy. Pixel art is not a science. You should never have to calculate a vector when doing pixel art.

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layervault:

Over the holiday break, I loaded up On Writing Well by William Zinsser on my new iPad. The book is at once a book about writing great non-fiction and an exercise in meta-writing. Each chapter employs the exact techniques Zinsser is trying to explain.

While reading about writing, it struck me that the modern non-fiction piece is very similar to the design we produce today. Late last September, Allan hammered out “The Flat Design Era” which—by measures of reputable internet statisticians—blew the fuck up. The Tumblr post as received well over 500 notes and reblogs, its fair share of arm-chair developer-as-designer Hacker News comments, and still continues to be a point of contention among many designers. In the post, Allan encourages simplicity and flatness in design as honesty. Rule #6: Good design is honest. But interface design shares a similarity with non-fiction writing: At its core, it is meant to be the vessel for something else.

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