1bit Postmodern Collage

An experiment based on the idea that cloud nine is a work in progress.

This design is less than 30 kilobytes (KB) in size (Kilobyte minimalism at work).

I was inspired by the 1bit MacPaint artwork by the designers Bert Monroy and Susan Kare.

A chaotic composition with black and white dithered photographs and loopy type reading cloud nine. It features a parrot, a dove in flight, grapes, flowers like daisies, daffodils, sunflowers, clouds, an egg's nest, an eye, a tuft of grass, and hands reaching toward the sky and a skyscraper in the horizon.

Detail

Tanner Helland wrote an informative and instructive article on dithering algorithms called Image Dithering: Eleven Algorithms and Source Code. In it, the style of dithering used in the Macintosh, Atkinson Dithering is described as being very popular in the 1980s. It can reduce colour bleed but the downside is that dark or whiter sections of an image can become washed out.

To develop this piece, I collected stock photography and photographs of my own, positioned them on separate layers on a canvas, then exported them to be converted to 1-bit with the program PhotoDemon which has a Monochrome filter which allows the selection of a dithering algorithm, colour palette, threshold, and amount of dithering.

PhotoDemon is a powerful program which lets you create a MacBook aesthetic without actually having access to an old Macintosh computer.

Tools used include PhotoDemon, Clip Studio Paint, and Affinity Designer.

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