pixeloom

What the Sites Are Drawing

A wall of real websites, seen close up. Guess what they are drawing before you step back.

Pixeloom Original · Hidden

How to play

Look first, then answer

A wall of real websites, seen close up. Guess what they are drawing before you step back.

  • Under a minute · one question · then the explanation
  • This one moves, or may seem to.
How it works — best read after you have tried it

A picture made of the directory

Every tile in this picture is a website listed on Pixeloom, drawn as its initials in its own colour or as its logo. Each site gets the same number of tiles, and nobody chose where theirs went.

Only the brightness of each tile was chosen, and the shape chose it: tiles inside the butterfly are darker, tiles outside it lighter. Up close you read letters and colours, which change from one tile to the next. Step back and the letters are too small to read; what is left is the brightness, which changes slowly across the picture, and slow change is what your eyes read as shape.

It is the old trick of the photomosaic, and the reason a printed photograph can be nothing but dots.

Woven from 27 sites

Every tile is a site listed on Pixeloom. Nobody paid for a place in this picture; each site gets the same number of tiles.

Show all 27

Keep looking