In the spirit of Million Dollar Homepage, I will soon be selling pixels on a Million Dollar Beach Towel. Actually, it’s more in the spirit of always wanting to make my own towels, sweaters, socks, and anything woven from my own original (or unoriginal) bitmaps.

Guthrie found this webpage, truWest.com, that allows you to order your own custom beach towels. Wow, the color combinations are impressive (black/white, navy/white, royal/white, purple/white, hunter/white, red/white, red/black, jade/black, black/gold, royal/gold, maroon/gold), the price is right or at least affordable ($30 a towel), but… you have to order at least 24 towels (at least $720, not including shipping or whatever else they might charge). This is a total bummer but led me to an almost more important idea. The towel could be divided into squares that different notable and notorious bitmap artists could buy in exchange for one towel (aka one edition of the collaborative artwork). Each participant could henceforth, ha, exhibit their edition of the towel locally. Thus, the towel would be seen all over – another bonus of collaborating.

Another extra thought – what if the tiles were individually designed to intentionally continue from the design of the previous or surrounding tiles. How cool and unimaginable that would turn out to be.

Now for the specs (I got this informative reply from truWest.com):

The towels measure 64 inches x 32 inches.
Any 2 to 1 ratio will work.
Send art in a 6″ x 3″. at 150dpi

This kind of leaves more possibilities open that I wanted to deal with. Should we treat each thread as a pixel and have a high resolution image with tons of contributing squares (aka 900 x 450 pixels) or represent a pixel with many threads and just get the ratio right (and thus nice and bold like 256 x 128 pixels aka 8 columns x 4 rows of 32 x 32 icon size bitmaps)?

I need to figure this out before opening the call for $$$ and black and white bmps, but let me know if there’s anyone I should ask to do a square. I would like to kind of curate it, but how could anything be out of place when the medium is so restrictive.

Also, I hope I don’t send off a thousand dollar order and have the company totally send back low quality beach towels… I thought about asking if I could send a sample bitmap and get a swatch back or something.

Plus, if this first try works out, I would like to do more towels collaboratively (one for every color combo, of course) and maybe some myself – like my favorite black and white icons ever… in a towel.