Concept
Deviant Pixel
Creativity & Learning
Design
Philosophy & EthicsWhat is the deviant pixel in the Agency editorial?
The deviant pixel is the allegory at the center of the Agency editorial Design.1: one pixel that rebels, detaches from a photograph of an anemone to pursue its own meaning and, by exploring itself, becomes a vector graphic. The author uses it to explain the difference between raster and vector images and to talk about personal evolution.
In short
In Design.1, a pixel at a 12800% zoom decides to rebel and detach from the composition. The designers round its corners, which makes it organic, and treat it as a conscious form of life. Through the geometry of the Vesica Piscis it stretches, discovers it can change its own color, duplicates itself and gains shape, outline, scale and rotation, until it is a vector graphic. The article says the analogy can represent many different things in life.
Key facts
- What happens to the image when the pixel leaves?
- Nothing that can be seen with bare eyes. Only when zooming in does a white dot appear, which the article calls just the lack of a rebel pixel.
- Why does the pixel become organic?
- Because the designers round its corners. The article says round things are organic and squared things are artificial and engineered, and that the pixel, having taken action and removed itself from its origin, can be considered a conscious form of life.
- What does the deviant pixel become?
- A vector graphic. After finding it can change its own color and shape, its outline, scale and even rotate, it is no longer a pixel on a raster image but mathematical formulas that form an image, and it can have any dimension or resolution it wants.
What is the deviant pixel?
The deviant pixel, also called the rebel pixel, is a character the author creates in Design.1 to make a technical lesson memorable. It starts as one purple square among the 24 million pixels of a photograph of an anemone. A single pixel, the article notes, can't represent anything by itself. This one decides to leave the composition anyway, and the story of what it does next carries the reader from raster images, through the Vesica Piscis, to vector graphics.
How does the deviant pixel appear in the Agency editorial?
The article follows the pixel in stages. First it detaches, and the author wonders whether it disliked representing an anemone or did not even know it represented one, since it was just born there. Then its corners are rounded and its purple filling is removed, leaving an outline: a circle, a whole universe within itself. It moves toward its own delimitation, stretches, and by understanding one of its sides it duplicates itself, forming the Vesica Piscis, the area the article calls the Eureka zone.
The pixel is said to have found a new version of itself through pure exploration and courage, cutting the cord regardless of what the other pixels would think. In the last section it turns itself into an anemone again, this time drawn with curves. The author adds that, although the analogy was constructed in the context of the pixel, it can perfectly represent many different things in life.
Source editions
Where this entry comes from in the Agency editorial.
Also from these editions: concepts
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Related concepts
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- Vesica PiscisThe Vesica Piscis is a sacred geometric figure formed by the intersection of two congruent circles whose centers each sit on the circumference of the other. Historically…