Drawing with two colors and no excuses

Sample article — replace me with your own writing.

The Game Boy shipped with four shades of green and nobody complained. Go one step further — pure 1-bit, ink on dark — and something interesting happens: every pixel becomes a decision.

Constraints do the designing

With two colors you can't shade, so silhouettes have to carry everything. A chest reads as a chest because of its outline and one hinge pixel, not because of a gradient.

• Walls get texture from pattern: brick courses, mortar gaps.
• Floors stay quiet: sparse speckle, nothing that fights the sprites.
• Characters get one bright accent so your eye finds them instantly.

Practical rules I follow

1. Draw at actual size (16×16 here). Zooming in lies to you.
2. If a sprite needs a label to be understood, redraw it.
3. Dither is salt. A little is texture; a lot is noise.

The sprites in this site's dungeon are defined as text — rows of characters in a TypeScript file, blitted to an atlas at boot. Version-controlled pixel art, diffable in a code review. The 1989 dream, basically.