I Am 16 Pixels

For some reason the other night i got an itch to whip up a new one, so here we go. You should be seeing it now up on your tab or location bar. Can’t believe my previous site icon was almost 3 years old.

I wanted to come up with something that was more me. The last one was kinda abstract for the sake of being abstract. So i started with the picture i use as my profile image for just about everything online.

The photo had to be cropped to a square icon shape, but simply cutting the sides off left the composition lacking to me. So i played with going in closer.

I was inspired (by the Layer Tennis banner) to try using the Photoshop checkered transparency pattern as the background.

Then i added a border. And scaled them as if blown up from a tiny icon, creating big blocky elements behind the irregular, organic silhouette of my face.

It looks great at full size, but the pattern and silhouette don’t quite translate to tiny icon size. I may keep the checked pattern for other uses, but for the site icon i just made the background transparent like my last one.

I might want to try some variations, but i’ll let this one ride and see if i still like it after a while. My favorite part again is the see-thru portion that looks cool on shaded tabs and location bars.

I’d like to play more with the transparency/checkered pattern stuff (different images and colors showing through), so i may be toying with that as part of a sorely-needed new theme for this site.