Olia’s post about Alexander Schlegel’s pixel arts utility took me back. In the late ’90s an internet magazine called word.com (“brought to you by the creators of Vibe and aims to be a hip magazine for the 20-something generation” –new on the net, 1995, now a total dot com relic) had a feature called Pixel Time that worked much like Schlegel’s page. They had contests and posted the best results regularly, and hosted an archive of hundreds of mostly stunning past entries by amateurs and professional artists from all over the world. The best surviving reference to it I found on cursory search was this page from 1998, which posted three winning Pixel Time entries as an animated GIF:
*moment of silence for all the great, past internet art that went down the drain with someone’s server and business aspirations in the ’90s*
— tom moody 9/22/07 6:15 am
*truly*
*mouse clicks salute*
- Travis — 9/22/07 @ 10:33 am
Unfortunately Pixel Time didn’t work well across browsers. More then once I spent time making a drawing only to have it vanish when I hit “save.” Somehow a lot of good art got on there–I learned a lot just from seeing what other people did.
- tom moody — 9/22/07 @ 12:40 pm
that’s some fine looking pixel art
- guthrie — 9/22/07 @ 3:30 pm
*pours one out for Word.com* http://www.ehollywood.net/presskit/digitalcreativity/body.htm
- Windfucker — 9/23/07 @ 1:36 am
Good find, thanks. “Almost a year old, it receives one or two million hits a week, charges $12,500 per ad, and is one of the more successful enterprises on the Net.” Their secret? “We pay only about $200 for 10 to 15 beautiful little illustrations.”
Seriously, though, it is interesting to read what what worked and didn’t work about the dot-com model. They were right that it wasn’t print, but it was still way too overdetermined and overdesigned, as opposed to something that demonstrably works now, like the Huffington Post, where the blogger/creators have a freer reign over their content (not that I particularly like the HuffPo, and not that Arianna doesn’t fire you if you get out of line–hello, Justin Raimondo!).
- tom moody — 9/23/07 @ 6:51 am
RSS feed for comments on this post.
TrackBack URI
