Tiny Icon Factory

200,000 tiny icons and counting...

Tiny_interface Wood_icons Icon_sampler

Overview

Tiny Icon Factory is an online gallery and studio for creation of 13x13 pixel, black and white icons. With over 200,000 anonymous and uncensored contributions in under two years, Tiny is an ongoing exploration of creative expression. Lovingly built by Brent Fitzgerald in collaboration with Luis Blackaller in the Physical Language Workshop at the MIT Media Lab.

Press

Tiny has been featured on Lifehacker, Digg, Del.icio.us, Flabber.nl, StumbleUpon, and other design blogs and news sites. Also included in the Delight by Design show at the MIT Museum.

Technologies

Tiny uses modern, standard web technologies and practices. Both the interface and the backend are simple and lean – critical qualities when you're serving up over 20,000,000 icons a day to Digg users.

  • XHTML/CSS
  • Javascript/AJAX/JSON
  • Ruby on Rails
  • RMagick
  • MySQL
  • Apache with proxy balancer
  • Mongrel cluster
  • RSS feed of new icons

Extensions

In collaboration with Anita Lillie, we also experimented with transferring these small images to physical media by burning a small set of icons into cherry wood using a laser cutter. See also the Woodbits blog entry.