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Guidelines and Tutorial

All icon design done for The Dead Pixel Society exhibitions adheres to the below standards. Broadly: freehand-drawn, 256 colors, pixel-by-pixel, on a 32 x 32 canvas.

Staying true to early desktop icon dimensions, create your art on a 32×32 pixel canvas. 72 pixels per inch will do nicely as well.

Limit colors to the 256 Mac OS palette. Download the DPS color picker image below or choose the “MAC OS” swatches within Photoshop.

Enlarge to 960px square, with resampling set to Nearest Neighbor. Export your image with the lossless PNG format and you’re done!

Our Approach

Speed painting videos from our own Mathew Halpern and Ian Harrington show the method behind our madness. Pull up a chair, and prep your pixels: it's time to throw down.