July is the month we say goodbye to writers who are retiring or moving on to new adventures, and this is Cotter’s last post. He has been writing with us since August 2018.

Of all the pandemic hobbies I tried, cross-stitching is the one that has stuck most. It’s the kind of thing I’d wanted for a while—something relaxing and repetitive I can do with a show on in the background. It sounds like a brag but I sincerely find it annoying: I have trouble doing one mindless thing at a time when I’m alone, but two combined sounded serene.

Around the same time, I watched a video about text in early arcade games. Low-res and low-power computers needed to store text in as little memory as possible. With pixels still the size of your fingernail, gridded digital fonts were born.

Anyone who creates knows there’s freedom in constraints. I knew I wanted to start cross-stitching with something simple, with just one color. I was interested enough in the world of “1-bit” fonts to start here.

Some designers have gone way further and smaller than the 8×8 grid afford by a single byte. Like a mathematical proof building from the most base case, I like reducing things to their logical extreme. Supposedly, this is a 2×3 pixel font:

The designer describes generating all combinations, then picking the 26 that most convey our letters, or at least are most distinct from each other, plus some punctuation. (A 2×3 box—with 64 total combinations of on-or-off pixels—is the smallest from which 26 letterforms can be pulled. Braille also uses a 2×3 grid of points, but they don’t trace the letterforms at all, or maybe they do, with a little imagination.)

Even the slightest loosening of constraints explodes the possibilities. Even a 3×5 font is so much more legible, and begins to allow upper and lower cases!

A tiny, iconic phrase.

On computers, through the decades, pixels quickly shrunk to the indistinguishably small, and everything could be crisper. But on cross-stitch fabric, the “pixels” are a constant size, about 1/16 of an inch. More intricate designs are necessarily that much bigger. And they take that much longer to weave through.

1-bit moon art from Adobe Stock

A bigger 1-bit moon by sango

The hobby has totally worked for me. While I stitch, I watch Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s a corny and wonderful show from the past, imagining an advanced future. Though the ships and computers are blazingly fast, it’s mostly about slow things—diplomacy, curiosity, and conflict resolution. Any action crawls through moral quandaries and intrigue made over slow dialogue and long reaction shots. I like slowly and manually working over something made when its technology was optimistic but elementary. The film, with beautiful, visible grain, lingers over iconic spaceship interfaces.

Icons created by a Japanese cell phone carrier in 1997, likely the first ever emoji set!

My cross stitches of some of these first emojis.

I figured out early on that I don’t wanna design my own patterns. It’s a relaxing hobby, and I’m a graphic designer 8–5. I usually like my job most when we create and communicate inside style guides—a few fonts, colors, and shapes to maintain for a brand’s materials to feel consistent. It can be like a puzzle, and I’m notorious with my coworkers for trying out every iteration possible before committing to anything. In some ways, there are finitely many, but so much is still possible.

1-bit adventure game item set at four resolutions, by Kacper Woźniak

Instead, I’m going to paint-by-numbers with what I can find. There’s a rich history (and Pinterest tag) of 1-bit art, and I like feeling over the limitations of pixelated things, discovering the cheat codes for simplifying and implying. Whatever really remains is integral, and sometimes it’s surprising. It’s a form of art where almost nothing is arbitrary.

1-bit icons for the original Mac computer by Susan Kare

This year I learned how, in constricted spaces, a surprising amount of nuance is still possible. Maybe even more is possible for me that way. It just takes a different intentionality. Forced binary choices can sometimes be a grace. There is only so much you can do.

Tiny but recognizable gridded designs are little optical illusions, games, and miracles. They’re goofy and beautiful packets of efficiency and practicality. Restrictions force design decisions; patterns of forced decisions slowly impose a rule set of what works. Checkered boards can be sandy. An irregular edge can be a liquid. Darkness equals density. In the right context, with a little imagination or a little squinting, a few bricks can imitate brushstrokes, and a handful of squares can be 8 or ∞.

Cotter Koopman

Cotter graduated in 2018 in computer science and now works at Kynda as a graphic and web designer. He likes good graphs and large dogs. He makes music with friends and alone too.