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Shibuya Pixel Art Contest 2024

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 16:42:00 +0000

For June and July of 2024 the Shibuya Pixel Art Contest has been running, a welcome return after it not happening in 2023. Entries are open all over the world, but can only be submitted to Twitter using the hashtag #shibuyapixelart2024. You have to include a name for the artwork and its original pixel dimensions (though it’s OK to rescale small artwork so it can be seen more easily). There are special categories for 16×16px and 32×32px artwork, and then a category for anything bigger up to the maximum of 512×512px. Full rules at pixel-art.jp/contesten and there’s still time to enter! Selected works will go on display around the Shibuya district of Tokyo in August and September.

For my entries I thought it would be cool to use different, unexpected software to produce my artwork.

PICO-8

These three entries are based on graphics I created for a game I started making when my wife was pregnant with our first child. We were house bound for a while, waiting for the birth, and I drew these cards using PICO-8 for a game which remains unfinished. At least I finished the graphics!

16×16px = 「花見」hanami card, (link)
32×32px = 「花見酒」hanami-sake yaku, (link)
128×128px = 「花札」hanafuda koi-koi game layout, (link)

The smaller cards shown in the full game layout are just the regular sized cards downscaled to 8×11px in code using nearest neighbour resizing. For all cards the border is drawn seperately. One or the other size of card are most likely the smallest Hanafuda ever pixelled!?

Rorschach for Playdate

This entry was created with Rorschach a creative toy/game I made for the Playdate handheld gaming system. This piece was created by moving the “pen” using the accelerometer and relying on the dynamic ink colour which is relative to the movement. It’s a fullscreen grab at 400×240px, titled 「キクぞく」”Kikuzoku” or “Chrysanthemum”.

It would be tremendously complicated and time-consuming to create artwork like this pixel-by-pixel, or even with dither brushes, unless you had some sort of pressure sensitive stylus. But Rorschach and the Playdate accelerometer makes light work of it.

The final image was my 12th attempt at getting a convincing flower! With many of my earlier attempts I was slow to hide the cursor and beautiful flowers were ruined by rogue strokes of ink after I’d technically finished. Perhaps I should have added the ability to record/playback or some sort of undo to the app. (link)

Deneba artWORKS for Classic Macintosh

I thought it would be fun to use my favourite classic Macintosh drawing app—Deneba artWORKS—to create pixel art using vector shapes, its bundled external tools (plugins), and the infinite fills best known from their appearance in MacPaint. There are only 20 objects in this drawing, which is 200×300px in size and titled 「黄金比」 or “the golden ratio”. (link)

Spiral: flower heads (2)
Resistor: hairs (3)
Bezier: stems, branch, leaves (5)
Arc: shoots, stems, midrib (7)
Round rect: planter (2)
Polygon: planter inner shadow (1)

Plus

Calligraphic pen nibs to get variable line thickness
Infinite fills to get dithered patterns and textures

Bonus!

I was having too much fun with dither patterns, so I drew one more piece just for kicks. This one is called 「生け花」”Ikebana” (“flower arranging”) and was exported at 200% because I miscalculated my document size at the beginning. I drew the shears and then transformed them with Free Rotate and Scale. There was minor pixel touch-up after export, and the final thing measures 400×512px. Otherwise I used the same techniques as above. (link)

Extras Bonus!

And I did one more just before the deadline. This is titled 「ラペルピン」”lapel pin” and is 512×512px and was created using the same vectors and fills technique. I decided to work in Canvas 3.0 rather than artWORKS, simply because it has a way of locking objects. The only new thing I did here is that I created two diagonal line fill patterns of my own for the collars. (link)

And here’s a screenshot of my working area, Macintosh System 7.5.5 running in 1-bit colour at 1025x768 in the BasiliskII emulator. This time I created it on my MacBook Pro with external Magic Trackpad, but sometimes I use my iPad Pro with Apple Pencil.

Emigre typography and graphic design magazine (1984–2005)

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 24 May 2024 20:19:00 +0000

Emigre magazine was a highly influential graphic design publication. It was known for its innovative and experimental approach to typography and graphic design, pushing the boundaries of traditional design norms—for better or worse. The magazine was published from 1984 (year of the Macintosh launch) until 2005, and during its run it played a critical role in shaping the discourse around digital design and typography. It was founded by Rudy VanderLans and his wife Zuzana Licko.

Tell me about it

Emigre is notable for many reasons, and if you’re interested in 80s and 90s design there will surely be something in there for you. I first heard about Emigre when I started work at London graphic design agency Form in 1998, so about three quarters through the run.

Some features that stand out for me personally are:

Early bitmap fonts (1984) and emoji-like pictograms (1986) created by Zuzana Licko
Early 1-bit Macintosh art by John Hersey (1985) and many other lovely period details
Designs by such luminaries as Neville Brody, Erik Spiekermann, and many more
Articles on people like font designer Aldo Novarese
Issues dedicated to the record label 4AD (1988) and The Designers Republic (1994)

Online archives

I recently wanted to read some of the issues again and found a couple of online archives:

Letterform Archive: Emigre Collection (browsable magazines, simplified cross references)
University of Minnesota: Emigre Magazine Index (only comprehensive cross references)

Digital versions

If you want to take the magazine with you today it’s available in the Emigre Fonts app for iPad/iPhone, which allows you to download the issues for offline reading.

If you can’t use, or would rather not use, the official app I’ve converted the issues to CBZ files. Read those with Panels, Simple Comic, CDisplayEx, or another comic reader app of your choice.

Emigre (magazine) at Wikipedia
Emigre entry at Type Design Information Page
Type ‘90 HyperCard Video video of a HyperCard Stack
Designing the Emigre Magazine Index, Jessica Barness, 2016
Merz to Emigre and Beyond Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century
Verbum “The Journal of Personal Computer-Aesthetics”, Michael Gosney, 1986–

Emoji history: the missing years

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 10 May 2024 20:00:00 +0000

During my research into vintage Japanese drawing software, I came across some devices that had built in sketch or handwritten memo functions. I bought a couple of them to see if they did anything cool or interesting. These sorts of devices are pre-internet, so there’s not much about them online, and they can’t be emulated, so the only way to find out what they do is to get first hand experience by reading the manual or, better, using one yourself. It’s difficult to find these devices in working condition, as most of them have screen polarisers that have gone bad over time, but if you’re lucky you can find one.

1994

One such device I bought was the Sharp PI-4000, from 1994. This is a pocket computer that rolled out of Sharp’s involvement in the development and manufacturing of Apple’s Newton MessagePad. In 1993 Sharp did their own licenced version of the Apple Newton MessagePad H1000, the Expert Pad PI-7000, but just like Apple’s device it wasn’t as successful as they’d hoped. But before that, in 1992, they’d made a device called the PV-F1 which was the first touchscreen-only PDA. After the Expert Pad failure, Sharp took another attempt at the concept and came up with the PI-3000 in 1993. This solved all the problems with the PV-F1, most notably size and cost. The device I have, the PI-4000, was released a year later and features higher memory capacity. The PI-3000/4000 devices could transfer data via infrared, connect to a modem to send faxes, and by the PI-5000 in 1995 could connect to cell phones to send emails. They all use a simplified—but still quite complicated—version of the multi-window operating system that had been developed for the PV-F1.

So I was trying out the PI-4000, the memo function is pretty cool allowing you to draw in different dither shades and pen widths, and use stamps to add symbols to your memo. These are mostly map-related things like road and rail junctions, buildings, and train stations. Pretty cool. Then I tried typing some messages on the device and as I explored the myriad of keyboard input mechanisms I came across something rather familiar (sorry about the awful photo—it’s the best I could do, honest—the screen is very reflective and the pixels are so far from the backing they cast individual shadows!):

At this point, I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing because I was under the impression that the first emoji were created by an anonymous designer at SoftBank in 1997, and the most famous emoji were created by Shigetaka Kurita at NTT DoCoMo in 1999. But the Sharp PI-4000 in my hands was released in 1994, and it was chock full of recognisable emoji. Then down the rabbit hole I fell. 🕳️🐇

1990

A little more reading, and a tip from my friend @chamekan on Twitter, unearthed the fact that the NEC PI-ET1 in 1990 also contained emoji¹. I also found a collector who owned a device, and we’ll hear more from them later on. The device is literally the coolest thing you’ve ever seen. With system software written by video game developer Hudson Soft its character set features emoji that can be typed inline, and it also features a “montage function” that allows you to create faces for each of your contacts—15 years later we’d see something similar in Mii on Nintendo Wii in 2006. The emoji on this device are a lot less well designed, in my humble opinion, than those on the Sharp devices.

A word about word processors

By now I was in contact with Keith at Emojipedia, who mentioned that he remembered a Sharp device with emoji, a word processor. I found one in the Sharp WD-A521, from November 1990, which featured higher resolution versions of the emoji designs found on my Sharp PI-4000.

There’s also the Panasonic FW-U1S50 from 1990, which contains 110 famiiar emoji under a section called “illustrations”, and also contains another 99 “audio/visual” symbols some of which coincide with modern emoji.

Perhaps there are other word processors from around that time that also contain emoji? I understand from my friend Izumi Okano that Japanese software developer Enzan-Hoshigumi, most famous for their Macintosh software and clipart, had created pictograms for one of the Canoword word processors around 1986. So at this point I’m thinking, why would the emoji on a word processor be ignored on the timeline of emoji history? Was there anything else being ignored?

Before cell phones became prevalent there were pagers, or beepers, in Japan these were known as Pocket Bell. Initially they would only beep and show a number, and people would use “beeper slang” to form words by using numbers whose pronunciation was similar to words and syllables. Necessity is the mother of invention! Eventually pagers would be able to send and receive text. It was perhaps only natural that emoji find a home on these devices, with the most notable being the heart ❤️ emoji. But the date of this transition is 1995, which is earlier than the SoftBank emoji from 1997 but later than my Sharp PI-4000 device.

A note about beepers

As an aside, it’s interesting to understand how emoji were typed on pagers/beepers. They weren’t selected using a picker, which would have required cycling through a huge range of characters, but rather typed in numeric digits which narrows the cycling down to far less characters.

The numeric code: 21 91 15 24 12 23 78
…would map to: カラオケイク？
…which means: KARAOKE?

Wild. Typing text this way must have felt like programming machine code directly in hexadecimal!

What makes it emoji?

I was chatting to a fellow designer, who has designed many emoji in his career, discussing the earlier emoji I had found in my 1994 device. They asked me to confirm that I could type emoji inline with text, giving me the example W😲W, which was his criteria for the symbols to qualify as emoji. If I couldn’t do that, he suggested we could only consider the symbols as icons.

So if I can type them inline amongst text on my device from 1994 that was capable of connecting to other devices and sending messages, then surely they should be considered the first emoji? Why do we, currently, only count emoji as emoji if they’re on a mobile phone? I’m also wondering when these emoji might have been designed. Were they created in 1994 for the PI-4000, in 1993 for the PI-3000, or earlier for another device?

1988

So I kept looking. I was aware of another line of Sharp devices, electronic organisers, known as the Bware range in Japan and Wizard in the USA. These were pretty popular at the time, so much so that the USA device even got it’s own episode of Seinfeld in 1998. I’d come back into contact with these devices just last year as they had the interesting capability of being able to play video games stored on solid-state application “IC” cards. You can play a version of Tetris by BPS that is quite different to the Game Boy version, and both were released in 1989. You can also play versions of Sokoban by Thinking Rabbit, and Fortress by SSI/Victor, amongst others.

Thanks to a collector, Akuji, I was able to confirm that the Japanese PA-8500 device, released in 1988, contains emoji² similar in design to those found on my PI-4000 and on the WD-A521. When redrawing these it was obvious that all the Sharp emoji sets are based on the same master design. (I’d love to know more about the Sharp artwork if anybody knows anything.)

And if you need to see the word 絵文字 (emoji) next to these symbols to be satisfied, then look no further than this table column header in the manual of 1988’s Toshiba Rupo JW95F word processor.

How old is an emoji?

At this point we’ve wiped almost a decade off the creation date of emoji, but can we go further? Is there a way to date a set of emoji? In Japanese 絵文字 means emoji — and it turns out that word has its own surprisingly long history, which I’ll come back to at the end of this post.

If we think about the PA line of devices, the PA-8500 was released in 1988, and it’s predecessor the (emoji-less) PA-7000 was released in 1987. So maybe the emoji set was created around this time? We can get closer by looking at a couple of characters present in the emoji that give us a clue to the date of creation. That is indeed the case with the Sharp PI-4000 and WD-A521.

The characters ○金 and ○ビ (maru-kin meaning rich/successful/winner and maru-bi meaning poor/unsuccessful/loser) were invented by the author Kazuhiro Watanabe in 1984 in his book Kinkonkan which was later made into a movie. These were quickly accepted into Japanese vocabulary, winning the 84年の日本流行語 (Japanese Buzzwords Award 1984). And they are right there in the Sharp PI-4000 emoji, represented as characters enclosed in circles. They were in common use throughout Japan’s bubble-era, 1986-1991, but eventually fell out of fashion and are now considered obsolete. It’s interesting to note that they are not featured in either the 1997 SoftBank or 1999 NTT DoCoMo emoji sets.

1986

Around the same time, the day after I published this post, I did a Twitter search and found an image of the November 1987 issue of ラジオの製作 (“Radio Production”) magazine, which featured a full page on a Sanyo SANWORD personal word processor and its emoji table. That sent me hunting for Sanyo manuals.

The earliest I tracked down was the Sanyo SWP-M21 “Sanword mini S”, a budget personal word processor from 1986. It has the usual cast — smiley face, snowman, fleur-de-lis, pointing finger, weather symbols, faces, hand gestures — but the genuinely fun bit is its 外字 editor. Sanyo let users design up to 94 of their own 24×24 dot characters and save them out to floppy. Build-your-own-emoji on a 1986 home appliance. 🎨

The manual shows off the kinds of things you could make: a cat, a turtle, a mushroom, an elephant, a ship, a hand making a peace sign, a heart with an arrow through it, an orca. The accompanying copy brags 「とてもワープロとは思えないような、ユニークな印刷を楽しむことができます」 — “you can enjoy unique printing you’d hardly think a word processor could do.”

Somewhere out there, there were Japanese homes in the late 80s with floppy disks full of personal pictographic vocabulary — family crests, drawings of pets, in-joke symbols between friends. Almost all of those floppies are presumably long gone now. If anyone has one in a drawer, I’d love to see it. 💾

1984

Once you accept that emoji existed in the 1980s, more things come to light. The Ishii Award 「石井賞創作タイプフェイスコンテスト」 was a typeface design contest organised by the community of type designers in 1970. By 1984 it was in its 8th year. Yutaka Satoh of Type-Labo proposed a typeface consisting of emoji. Because they weren’t on screen they were created by arranging dots in various shapes, but they are recognisably emoji.

Coincidentally, I used a hybrid of this sort of approach when I added emoji to my game YOYOZO in September 2023: I plot the emoji as points but define them on a pixel grid.

In Matt Alt’s book “The Secret Lives of Emoji: How Emoticons Conquered the World”, there is a brief mention of ASCII emoticons on the Japanese internet (JUNET) in 1984, and then it fast forwards to 1995 to begin talking about the Pager, missing a decade of emoji usage in the process.

In the Yakumono typeface, created by Yutaka Satoh (TYPE-LABO), we can clearly see many of the key emoji that would persist throughout the years: smiley faces, food, drink, cigarettes, sweat, umbrella, paperclip, lips, envelope, and most interestingly the (not smiling) pile of poo. This typeface received an honourable mention at the awards. Some 40 years later, I think it’s safe to say it deserved more. 🏆

1979

We can see emoji in the character sets of Japanese home computers such as the Sharp MZ-80K, which included a UFO, smiley faces, stick figures, car, snake, and more. I won’t include them here but you can click the above link to see some in a PDF. 💾

1965

“Full Moon With Face”, also known as BA-90 which was listed in a book of typesetting symbols, published by Sha-ken in 1965. A smiling moon is still present in the emoji set today. 🌝

1959

CO-59 is a character set created in 1959 for exchange of data between Japanese newspapers. In it is included a symbol of a baseball, which again is still present in emoji ⚾️ and at Unicode codepoint U+26BE ⚾︎ today.

Comparing Emoji

I was interested in how the emoji that I have redrawn compared to the 1997 SoftBank and 1999 DoCoMo sets, and an early Pocket Bell, so here’s a little table.

	Sharp PA-8500	NEC PI-ET1	Sharp PI-4000	Pocket Bell R-FAHC	SoftBank	NTT DoCoMo
Year	1988	1990	1994	1995	1997	1999
Quantity (approx)	100	130	170	7	90	176
Resolution	16×16	16×16	12×12	5×7	12×12	12×12

A word about the word

A side discovery: the word 絵文字 (emoji) itself has a much longer paper trail. The earliest citation I’ve found is Kenkyūsha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary, 1954—the standard postwar bilingual reference. It defines:

A settled dictionary headword forty-five years before DoCoMo. “Pictorial symbol” is the second listed sense — more central, by lexicographers’ ordering convention, than “hieroglyphics.”

The word kept showing up in places I wasn’t expecting:

1975: A Sony catalogue describes its ETV-4010 school AV mixing console as having 「パネル面の絵文字、色分け表示」 — “emoji on the panel face, colour-coded indicators”. The 絵文字 are the small pictographic labels on the control panel. Same functional concept as digital emoji, applied to industrial hardware, twenty-four years before i-mode.
1984: The graphic designer Kuwayama Yasaburō publishes a 431-page reference book titled simply 『世界の絵文字』 (Sekai no Emoji / “Emoji of the World”) on global logos, pictograms, and trademark design, spanning the years 1970–1983.
1984: ASCII magazine reviews the Canon PW-10 word processor in its August news section, noting that “各種記号、絵文字をワンタッチで表示することができる” — “various symbols and emoji can be displayed at the touch of a button”. Here are some great photos thanks to Marcin Wichary.
1985: MSX Magazine’s MSX 豆辞典 pocket dictionary supplement, distributed via Japan National Railways station kiosks, uses 絵文字 as the umbrella term in its entry for アイコン (icon), and gently complains that American influence has wrongly promoted “icon” into the same umbrella role.
1988: Toshiba’s Rupo JW95F word processor manual uses 絵文字 as a column header in its emoji-input reference table, no gloss whatsoever — the most casual possible use of a technical term.
1993: Nojima Hisao publishes “絵文字の心理的効果” (“Psychological Effects of Emoji”) in the intellectual monthly 現代のエスプリ. By January 1994 it was being cited internationally in the Pacific Telecommunications Council conference proceedings in Honolulu.

What DoCoMo’s 1999 set did was become the international reference point — which is why English borrowed 絵文字 as “emoji” rather than Sharp’s or Toshiba’s or Sanyo’s much earlier sets. The word’s invention is fiction. Its globalisation via DoCoMo is real, but only in English. 🌍

Conclusion

So what does this all mean? I’d say mostly that the history emoji isn’t as clean cut as you might have thought. You can decide for yourself on what you consider to be the first emoji. It depends on our own personal definition, so there is no right or wrong answer. 😎

Personally, I define the start date of emoji as the point in time when sets of these symbols first appeared for use whilst composing text. I don’t think the timeline should start at mobile phones, as this feels like a somewhat arbitrary decision that dismisses a lot of history. It’s like saying music only began to exist from the moment it could be recorded and listened to without the actual muscians being present. 🤔

As to whether the timeline of emoji history will be rewritten with this knowledge, it’s difficult to say. Much of this falls in the grey area of happening around the time the internet was taking hold, plus most things about the origin of emoji are in Japanese language, so there are unlikely to be sources Wikipedia would consider verifiable enough. The best we could do is quote the pages of the manuals for devices, and for the rest hope that there’s some record in Japanese literature that could be cited.

I won’t be running the Wikipedia editing gauntlet, but if you do please let me know how it goes! 🧨

Terms of use

I painstakingly recreated the emoji sets on this page, pixel by pixel, over many days of hard work. I even went so far as adding a new tool to the pixel art app I use, so as to make the task of redrawing hundreds of emoji a little less daunting. Feel free to utilize the emoji images, just remember to credit @gingerbeardman and include a link to this page. With one exception: I object to the use of these images for the purpose of creating NFTs. Thanks for your understanding!

Printed citations

NEC Electronic Tool PI-ET1, Instruction Manual, p.131, システム外字数 (“Non System Kanji”) ↩
Sharp Electronic Notebook PA-8500, Operating Instructions, p.201, 記号一覧表 (“Symbol List”) ↩

Barbara Nessim at The Ginza Art Space (1986)

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 23:22:00 +0000

At the end of 2023 I bought a one-in-a-million find from Japan: it’s a postcard from Barbara Nessim’s residency at The Ginza Art Space, September 26 thru October 19 1986. This residency came on the back of her breakthrough early computer art that was done on a Telidon system, a type of Teletext graphics system that displayed rudimentary vector graphics.

The postcard artwork is not digital and is dated 6-86. The details on the rear are set in the Chicago typeface designed by Susan Kare for the Apple Macintosh just a couple of years prior.

As well as Barbara’s residency there was an accompanying exhibition “The Work of Barbara Nessim”.

Made in Japan

During her time at The Ginza Art Space, Barbara used an NEC PC-100 to draw new work and printed them on one of the earliest wide-format colour inkjet printers, the Fujix JetGraphy 3000 (I’d love to be able to read this article at ResearchGate). Given the use of early technology and non-archival inks, the prints are prone to fading and are now very fragile.

The choice of PC-100 computer is interesting because its display could be rotated between portrait and landscape. In portrait orientation it had a resolution of 512×720, which is seven times more pixels than the Telidon system and twice as tall as the Macintosh Plus. The PC-100 displayed bitmap graphics so it was more similar to the Macintosh than the vector graphics of the Telidon system.

Colours were limited: the PC-100 hardware could display 16 colours from a palette of 512. The printer used CMYK and could produce around 10,000 colours, some of which printed better than others. This combination may have imposed some limitations as to which colours could, or should, be used.

Below are three examples of the work Barbara produced at The Ginza Art Space: they are Flowers in the Wind, Hand Memory, and The Gift. A description of the creative process is featured in Carol Olsen Day’s article “The Art of Barbara Nessim”, in the October 1988 issue of PC Computing.

What software?

My ongoing research into early Japanese pixel art software shows that Barbara most likely used ASCII’s エアーブラシ “Airbrush” painting software on the NEC PC-100, as it is the only graphics software for that platform I’ve been able to find advertised for sale or featured in period literature.

Early computer art by Barbara Nessim (1984)

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 01:25:00 +0000

Whilst searching for something else entirely I stumbled across these images and was struck by just how beautiful they are. The September 1984 (Vol 9, No 10) issue of BYTE magazine features cover artwork by Barbara Nessim and section pages by Liz Gutowski under direction of Barbara Nessim. Larger versions are at the bottom of this blog post.

They were drawn during a residency at Time Life in NYC, simply because that was the easiest way Barbara could gain access to a colour computer with suitable capabilities: a Norpak IPS-2 Videotex (NAPLPS/Telidon) system. This offered 6 drawing modes (arc, rectangle, circle, line, dot and polygon) and 12 colours, of which half where shades of grey, plus black and white. And at a resolution of 256x200. That equates to a computer system roughly equivalent to an Apple II running a rudimentary graphics application, in fact you could get an add-on card for the Apple II to give it full Norpak Telidon capabilities. The main benefit of the Norpak IPS-2 computer system was that it had pen/stylus input. The system comprised two monitors, one showed the artwork and the other showed the software status menu system. The software was controlled by keyboard and the points that specify the shapes were entered using the pen input.

My first thought was “such cool pixel art!” but a little bit more reading shows that they are actually vector illustrations. NAPLPS is an early graphics format which could represent both text and vector graphics with all coordinates and other properties—such as size, fill pattern, density—encoded as ASCII for easy transmission. It was designed to display information on TVs, and also used for display on terminals, in BBS software, and on the Prodigy online service. Readers from around the world might be more familiar with Teletext, which is a close relative of Videotex.

Doing pure illustration using a system meant for creating pages of information is exactly the type of software subversion I love to discover!

Barbara Nessim is a name I was already familiar with, as I’d seen her mentioned and interviewed in Verbum magazine, COMPUTE magazine, in various books about illustration, and regarding her groundbreaking interactive art exhibition/installation Random Access Memories (1991/2)—which addressed world issues such as migration and population growth and allowed visitors to operate a Macintosh containing the work, selecting images and printing their own customised booklet of her work with their choice of national flag on the cover. Source 1 and 2

Whilst I had seen other early computer work by Barbara—portraits, nudes, abstract (all of which are worth checking out!)—I had never seen work quite like these images from BYTE.

The chunky scan-line gaps in between the rows of pixels are the result of these images being photographs of the monitor on which they were displayed. Screenshots had existed since the 1960s but in the 1980s getting such an image off a mainframe was not yet easy or universal. Instead images were saved by pointing a camera at the screen, in this case a Polaroid Palette Video Image Recorder, capturing the image on 35mm slide film, and printing them by cibachrome process. Which is really saying something! Of course, I think the photos are much better than screenshots because of the scan-lines, the phosphor glow, the bleeding of colours, and the general analog feel to the whole thing.

Barbara was one of few people to embrace computers for art in the early-1980s, when the rest of the art world considered them at best a “fad” and at worst a threat to their existence. The dismissal was near-total: she couldn’t persuade a single one of her artist friends to come and try the computer with her, and was left wondering whether she was the only one who wanted to. That attitude held for around a decade. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s—when affordable colour arrived and Photoshop went mainstream—that the resistance finally broke and, as Barbara puts it, “that’s when the change happened, and then it was all over”. Before and after the 1980s Barbara carved out a hugely successful career for herself, encompassing many different forms of art, teaching and activism. She continues to create and exhibit her art.

Scans

Piskel for Playdate

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I just pushed some changes to my Playdate-centric fork of Piskel:

github.com/gingerbeardman/piskel-playdate/tree/dev-1047

This fork:

can be used to build desktop apps on latest operating systems
- updated to future-proof dependencies and build process
- builds for Windows, Linux, macOS
has Playdate-specific features
- get frame size from imagetable filename
has quality-of-life improvements
- save keyboard shortcut will export PNG
- ignore warnings preference
- turns off animated preview by default
- different window size and positioning
- stops nagging if run in WebKit
- modern macOS icon
adds useful community improvements
- Outliner tool
- Dither modifier keys
- Keyboard cursor
- Shift Palette Color Index Brush
adds new default Pencil tool
- draws in the opposite color to that of the start pixel

Apple silicon support

Check out the readme for details on how to quickly generate a new build without having to build nw.js from scratch. It’s very easy! Thanks to Ayushman Chhabra for help and hints.

Image Table support

Most of the time I load Piskel and drop an image table (a sort of sprite sheet) on it. Having to manually enter frame/cell size dimensions got old really fast, so this was my main motivation for doing a custom build. It’s a simple hack that checks the file name and parses out the cell dimensions. Slightly more tricky was trigger changes to the import panel so that everything looked and worked as it should.

Ignore Warnings

After editing an image in Piskel the majority of the time I export it and then quit the app. The app always nags twice: firstly to make sure you wanted to “leave the site?” - a leftover from the fact this is a web tool at heart - and a secondly to make sure you want to “abandon unsaved changes?”. An option to ignore these warnings is such a time saver.

I also took the opportunity to add some useful features developed by the community.

Outliner tool

Thanks to ElectricToy for this patch, it works like flood fill but only fills the outline of any pixels it hits. You can hold Cmd to do a slightly thicker outline including corners.

Dither modifier keys

Another one from ElectricToy, this gives you 25% ad 75% dither patterns by holding modifier keys, in addition to the standard 50% checkerboard dither pattern.

Keyboard cursor

I’m not sure how useful this really is, but I added it anyway. Thanks to juliandescottes for the patch. You can control the pixel cursor location using Alt+cursor, and space will activate the current tool at that location. I haven’t tried it but you could set up a game controller to use these keys and draw like Dan Malone did!

Shift Palette Color Index Brush

This tool allows you to do shading using neighbouring colours more easily. Thanks to blurymind.

And I even added a new tool myself!

Pencil tool (new default)

Classic Macintosh style Pencil. Draws in the opposite color than that of the pixel the stroke begins on. If the stroke begins on transparent, or the secondary color, it draws in the primary color. If the stroke begins on the primary color, it draws in the secondary color. This minimizes the need to switch between selected colors. To draw in a single color you won’t need to change colors or tools at all.

Where can I see Hokusai’s Great Wave today?

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been obsessed with The Great Wave (or its more literal title: Under the Wave, Off Kanagawa) since the mid-1990s. This Japanese woodblock print designed by Katsushika Hokusai is one of the world’s most iconic works of art. You’ve probably seen it crop up in a whole host of scenarios.

The interesting thing about woodblock prints is that the original piece of art was destroyed during the act of mass production. In the case of The Great Wave, there are around 100 known, publicly viewable, early impressions that were made around the time Hokusai was alive. And there are very many impressions made after his death, not to mention modern prints that are not made using woodblocks.

The trick to seeing one of the early impressions is being in the right place at the right time, because they are sensitive to light and will fade with over-exposure. Most are stored away for several of years, make a brief appearance, and then go back into long-term storage.

These early impressions vary in their details, colours and condition, so it’s worthwhile seeing more than just one. I’ve been lucky enough with timing to get to see two different impressions: the first was at The British Museum back in the early 2000s, and the second at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery in 2018. But in 2021 I missed seeing a different impression at The British Museum, one of three in their collection.

Missing a viewing made me think about all the impressions in galleries and museums around the world, and which of them might currently be viewable. So I made a list of known impressions, with thanks to Capucine Korenberg at The British Museum for a head start. I spent time digging up their respective pages across the various museum and gallery online collections, which was the most laborious part of this project. After that I set up some automation using Huginn to alert me when an impression is pulled out of storage and put “on view”. This doesn’t happen very often—every few months or so, if we’re lucky—so it’s a nice surprise when a notification pops up. I also monitor Japanese press releases and news websites. If there’s any interest I’ll write a separate blog post about the automation I put in place for this project.

Of course, there’s no fun in keeping this to myself so I put together a website containing the places where you can see The Great Wave today:

greatwavetoday.com

As well as checking the website you can also subscribe to its RSS feed, so you’ll also receive those lovely surprise notifications! Both the web page and RSS feed are automatically generated.

Thanks to Soleio for thinking of such a great domain name!

Final thoughts

Please do let me know if this project helps you see an early impression of Hokusai’s Great Wave.

If you’re a museum or gallery and would like to have your impression tracked, please click this link and follow the prompts.

Open Studios: Christmas 2022

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This weekend I’m taking part in Christmas Open Studios at Krowji in Redruth.

FRI 2nd Dec, 5pm–9pm
SAT 3rd Dec, 10am–4pm
SUN 4th Dec, 10am–4pm

See you there!?

You’ll be able to buy my art and play my games.

More info: www.krowji.org.uk/open-studios/

Tomoya Ikeda - Macintosh Artist

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction
Berkeley Systems
Enzan-Hoshigumi
MacWorld EXPO
Selected Works
Mandala
Timeline

Introduction

Tomoya Ikeda (池田友也) might not be a name you’re familiar with, but if you used a classic Macintosh computer at any time during in the 1990s you’re likely already familiar with some of his work.

Berkeley Systems

Tomoya Ikeda played a key part in the evolution of After Dark’s world famous Flying Toasters. The original prototype artwork was done by Jack Eastman, at which time Ikeda-san was brought in as a contractor to draw the final 1-bit artwork. Later versions of the toasters were drawn in colour by Igor Gasowski and eventually rendered and animated in 3D by Jarir Maani.

Tomoya Ikeda also did the artwork for the Fish! screensaver module in Macintosh After Dark 2.0, once again replacing existing artwork from its life as Mac Fish! by Tom & Ed’s Bogus Software.

Enzan-Hoshigumi

We need to travel back in time a bit, to the days before Ikeda-san was living in California. When he was in Japan he worked for a company called Enzan-Hoshigumi (演算星組). The company name is best translated as “Computer Gangsters”.

They became well known on the early Macintosh scene by providing collections of extremely high quality Clipart in a traditional Japanese style, Dennou Emaki (電脳絵巻 or Cyber Picture Scroll), mostly drawn by Ikeda-san. And also their MacCalligraphy package that allowed drawing of traditional Japanese calligraphy using only the Macintosh mouse, with the thickness and subtleties of each stroke being controlled only by the speed and movement of the mouse.

MacWorld EXPO

The 1988 MacWorld EXPO held in San Francisco was attended by over 45,000 people and hosted over 400 exhibits, one of which was Enzan-Hoshigumi. The hot topic of the time was the new, colour and expandable Macintosh II. Photos courtesy of Izumi Okano.

The Boston MacWorld EXPO event later that year also had an Enzan-Hoshigumi stand, accompanied by a 7x12 feet multi-panel Japanese folding screen comprised of a sheet-by-sheet assembly of thermal prints from an enlarged Tomoya Ikeda PixelPaint illustration. The screen was later shown at the “imagine” event organised at Boston Computer Museum by Verbum Magazine.

Selected Works

Below are some of my personal favourites.

“The Golden Dragon” drawn in 1987 by Tomoya Ikeda (Enzan-Hoshigumi Co., Ltd.) using PixelPaint, the first full-color paint application for the Macintosh.

Mandala

From 1988 Ikeda-san became fascinated with mandala—the circular figures representing the universe in Hindu and Buddhist symbolism—and would go on to draw many of them. A handful have survived in print, scattered across Macintosh graphics books published at the time. I’ve scanned those that I’ve found so far.

The life and times of Tomoya Ikeda

Timeline and memorial details taken from the p-media web site.

1959: Born in Tokyo
1983: Graduated from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Department of Design.; While studying at the University, he became interested in computer graphics, and upon graduating he began creating his own works.
1984: Won the Grand Prix at the 2nd ASCII Software Contest for “Coron” (link).; Designed the arcade game “Dai-Kaiju no Gyakusou” for Enzan-Hoshigumi which was released by Taito.
1985: Awarded the Silver Prize at the International Exhibition of High Technology Art, for the work ‘Reincarnation’.; By 1988, he had designed many software products for the Macintosh, including “Dennou Emaki”, “Mac Shodo”, and “CyberSpaceDeck”.
1989: Moved to the United States.; Started CG production in Berkeley, California.; Designed “Flying Toaster” at Berkeley Systems, known for After Dark.
1994: Began translating and designing game software at the request of Palm Software in Silicon Valley.
1997: Planning and production of “Type Designer” at Palm Software.
1998: 1,000 typographic designs for the “Type Designer” are created. Type Designer is released simultaneously in the US and Japan.; Sudden death from cancer in October, aged 39.
1999: Memorial exhibition “The World of CG: Tomoya Ikeda’s Digital Communication” held at the TEPCO building, Ginza, Tokyo.; Memorial speech delivered by Kazutoshi Otani (大谷和利)

Birthday blog post?

Check out my other #birthday blog posts.

Daily Driver: Teaser Artwork

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I commissioned the talented @vxclhd to create a clay-style diorama of Daily Driver!

There are a few things in this scene that I’ve not yet shown in game footage. Imagine this is a box shot teaser in a game magazine, while you wait for the Playdate and its game to release.

“Please understand”, as Satoru Iwata used to say.

It's inspired by a style of plasticine modelling I often see in old 1980s Japanese computer/games promotional art.

Examples that come to mind: box art on some of the Fujitsu FM-Towns Free Software Collection and select covers of MSX•FAN, but there are too many to mention. pic.twitter.com/aAdSEVL4yA
— Matt Sephton🎴 (@gingerbeardman) August 20, 2021

Verbum “The Journal of Personal Computer-Aesthetics”

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Verbum “The Journal of Personal Computer-Aesthetics” (1986–1991) was an early computer lifestyle magazine focusing on interactive art and computer graphics.

All issues (well, except issue 4.3): archive.org/details/verbummagazine?&sort=date
Table of contents for all issues: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbum_(magazine)
Podcast interview with its creator Michael Gosney: www.drfutureshow.com/drfutureblog/interview-media-pioneer-michael-gosney-on-the-renaissance-of.html

Today screensaver

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Today is a Mac OS X screensaver inspired by On Kawara’s Today Series—nearly 3,000 date paintings made over five decades, each a monochrome background with the current date inscribed on it in the language and calendrical conventions of wherever Kawara happened to be that day.

The screensaver displays today’s date in the same spirit. It can show the date, time, or day of the week, on a background colour of your choosing—or a random one.

Download

gingerbeardman.com/today/