Digressions on pixel art icons
I'm playing an game from 2013 era called eMush1 and also maintaining its wiki. I'm sometimes creating new visual assets for special events. This has made me fall in love again with pixel art icons.
In the old days, we used to click on finely crafted sets of icons, customized for 16x16, and larger sizes. It was expensive to use too many colors so they all respected a smaller palette. Yet, their diversity was stricking, all trying their best to convey the meaning of the button. I'm really a fan of Windows 98 ones, for instance.2
⏴Windows98's icon for computer, grabbed from win98icons.alexmeub.com
Those icons had so much of an human touch that the new default material vectorized ones have. Don't get me wrong, I do like the simplicity, and often accessibility of material icons. It's less visual noise. It's also less colors. Even emojis, have now such a soul-less vibe that we cannot explain. And when they did, they got removed in later versions.3 Almost none are pixel art anymore.
Now, contributing to the game, I miss them dearly. I opened back Aseprite and had so much fun designing 16x16 little pictures. Look, that's a banana: 
It's actually not really easy to create icons that work. Even a simple cube 
can be a headache. Pixel artists rock!
Vector and painterly icons are nice too, but on a computer, pixel does feel even more suited. Maybe i'm simply nostalgic of retro pixel art.4 I do have a special interest in ASCII characters as well.5 And I miss my flip phone.
I think this is also the kind of thing bearblog readers would be interested in. I've seen many of y'all with pixel art badges. Pixel art is very light, only a few bytes or kilobytes. Tiny internet needs tiny icons.
eMush is a free online game, cooperative, slow-paced and open-source! It's the revival of Motion Twin's original Mush game.↩
Alex Meub here speak of them better them me, and even built a small app to view the full set.↩
Android removed the cute blob emojis since version 8.0, what a steal! If you're curious of older design, I enjoy browsing emojipedia. This also shows that surprisingly, Microsoft reverted to cuter opinionated designs, but lot of other vendors switched to vector. From a technical point of view, it makes sense, but it's a bit heartbreaking.↩
I was stunned by the pixel art of Zelda "Minish Cap" GBA game as a kid (and adult now). I miss this style dearly. Maybe that's also why I was so hyped by Witchbrook game.↩
Nerdy website alert! I think I visit it once a week.↩