blacklog

I found this cute low-res depiction of a spermatozoon in the tiny icon factory the other day. It seems to be a calm, pensive specimen that will probably never win the race to fertilize an ovum.

Along with many other icons in the tiny icon factory, this image reminds me of the Rorschach inkblot test, created by the Swiss Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach in 1921. The image might not really represent anything other than itself, but we still manage to see other things in it.

When I looked at this icon for the first time, I also had access to the name it was given: sperm. With the help of this name, I can immediately see the cute little spermatozoon curling upwards like a seahorse, but if I stare long enough I wonder whether I see nothing at all. Do I actually believe that the 1×2 pixel rectangle hanging from the top right corner of its head is actually an eye?

Yes I do.

Somebody recently made the icon number 200000 in the Tiny Icon Factory. It’s the letter . Very close to it is icon number 199996. It is a skull. The following are icons number 199996 and 500:

On other things, this is icon number 131313, a very realistic depiction of pong.

Superscript from France has created a nice online wallpaper editor and repository. The tiling of the motifs is implemented in the simplest way, repeating them over a square grid. I wish they implemented something like rotations of reflections to create more complex patterns, or even symmetries that are not square, like triangular or hexagonal, but that would complicate things a lot, and sometimes it is better to have something that is somehow limited, instead not having anything at all, other than the idea of something really powerful that was never made. As limited as they might be, the expressive potential of tools like this one is nearly infinite. I also wish they rendered white as transparent so we could have different colored wallpapers just by changing the background color of the body tag, and I wish the drawing interface was more fluid, perhaps a bit more like the one we made for Tiny, that understands strokes rather than clicks.

Superscript’s wallpaper application looks like a natural sibling of the Tiny Icon Factory, and a good resource to decorate the backgrounds of your webpages. This is one of the 888 motifs already available there (you can also make your own of course, and I’m sure by the time you read this there will be at least 900):

you gotta love those normals!

I built a qbert style staircase with 2700 icons from the tiny icon factory. The icons are good building blocks to experiment with potential strategies to build virtual architectures for populating the e15 environment in the future. Complex shapes are also good to test different illumination models. Lights, materials and all that. We want to have a good control over all these resources to use them as tools to paint different subsets of large collections of data in interesting ways. The icons, for example, have names, and these names can be used to define the material of each icon. This would help to sort them visually.

All the icons in the following illustration are painted the same way, with a slightly tealish ambient color, a redish diffuse and a white and subtle specular (and infinitely faraway parallel light rays), but I could think of changing the material of all the Popeyes to spinach green, and then it would be easy to spot where the Popeyes are in the qbert staircase.

Read about oGFx and visit Tiny.