20 May 2013
531 Designers make their mark, in pixels
Designer News is a new forum for designers, modelled on the hugely successful Hacker News site. Members, myself included, are given the choice of creating a simple pixel-art avatar. I was intrigued by the variety of expression within the 40 x 40 pixel constraints and wanted to see how many of these mini logos I could gather.
As it turns out, that was fairly simple. I used curl -L "http://news.layervault.com/users/[0001-9999]/portrait" -o "#1.png" to fetch the images to my local drive. I didn’t know how many members there were on DN so I used the arbitrary range 0001-9999 for users and stopped the downloading when it became apparent that I was simply getting 404 codes in return. Then I removed all the 404 results, all the all-white and all-black avatars, and I was left with the 531 images that you see above.
The -L option in the curl command was necessary as the URLs redirect to the actual images used, and the -o "#1.png" allowed curl to write the resultant files sequentially with a .png suffix.