Apple Pixel Park
173,250 itty bitty rainbow pixels come together to form the iconic Apple Arch inside the courtyard of Apple Park.
I've always had a thing for pixel art. It might be the 90s kid in me, but beautiful pixel art teleports me straight back to the days of having my retinas radiated in front of my tube TV playing games like Final Fantasy, Mario, and Chrono Trigger. Done well, pixel art is timeless, with games 20-30 years old maintaining an ageless quality to this day. And even as technology continues to advance, pixel art remains a popular style across many different gaming genres & platforms.
The palette of most of the colours used with this latest design is shown above.
I am fascinated by how pixel art can construct intricate compositions through cleverly thought out and precisely placed pixels, all with a very minimal colour palette. And having long admired the art form, I have wanted to take a stab at creating a piece of pixel art myself and set my sights on Apple Park as my inspiration in creating this piece.
The Process
The first step in producing this piece was to collect a series of images & brainstorm the design I wanted the wallpaper to have. I knew I wanted it to feature the arch inside the courtyard of Apple Park, and I began to scour the internet to find images and palettes that I would use. I settled on the idea of having the arch facing head-on as the prominent element in the design, backed by trees and the Apple Park campus in the background.
This storyboard served as the inspiration for the elements - arch, sky, trees, Apple Park Campus - used in this wallpaper.
Once this collage of images was assembled, I imported it into Asperite and began tracing out the critical geometry of the image: where I wanted the campus to be, the roundness of the arch, where the trees would go, etc. Then came the painstaking process of layer-by-layer, pixel-by-pixel assembling the design. The project was broken up into many pieces to simplify things, including distinct layers for the sky, grass, Apple Park, each part of the arch etc. This helped to hide pieces while I worked on individual elements because staring at 173,250 rainbow pixels gets real tiresome after a while.
The finished image is just over half the size of a 512 × 512 icon.
After many hours of work, the resulting 495 × 350 image is just over half the size of a standard 512-pixel icon, a number that harshly understates the time and effort that went into the creation. But scaled up, Apple Pixel Park becomes a colourful & whimsical wallpaper for your Mac, iPad, & iPhone. I hope you find this homage to Apple Park as delightful as I have.
Downloads
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