Projects/S.P.A.M: Super Pixel Art Maker

S.P.A.M (Super Pixel Art Maker) is a graphics editor specializing in making pixel art. Imagine a version of Photoshop optimized to only deal with creating pixel sprites. Pixel art is a backbone of a lot of digital media. Although it is heavily used in the game industry, pixel art is also used in the web design community as well as printing and advertising industry. S.P.A.M aims to be an easy to use tool but robust enough for the art created can be translated into the professional world. In short, it is a pixel editing tool that is infinitely educational as well as being a professional tool.

Reference

There are already several famous pixel editing tools that are very popular among pixel artists. Following references are few examples that are most similar and closely related to S.P.A.M:

1. Photoshop [1] : Photoshop is probably the most well known graphics editor program in the world. Even though it is not targeted directly for making pixel art, many professional pixel artists use Photoshop as their main tool. A lot of pixel specific editing tools are modeled after Photoshop and the recent versions of Photoshop incorporated simple animation tool set that many pixel sprite animators use.
2. GIMP [2] : GIMP is a free graphics editor. Much closer to Photoshop in its function, it is also loved by many pixel artists around the world. Its obvious strength is making such robust graphics editing tool for free. There are many people who use GIMP on XO.
3. GraphicsGale [3] : Graphicsgale is perhaps the most famous pixel editing tool among the pixel artists around the world. It is only available for PC users. Even though full version of the software charges money, free version is good enough to create pixel art / assets that can be used professionally. It is a very robust pixel editor but still very difficult to use.
4. Pixen [4] : Pixen is another open-rource pixel editor for Mac platform. Just like Graphicsgale, it was created to only deal with pixel art related work. Interface is much simple than any other version out there. But it is robust enough to create pixel art / assets that can be used professionally.
5. Flipnote Studio [5] : Flipnote Studio is a free graphics editor for Nintendo's DSi platform. It has a very simple form of creating pixel based art as well as animation and incorporating music and sound using the DSi device. What is most interesting is that combined with Flipnote Hatena [6], which is like a Youtube of pixel art/animation created in DSi, pixel art/animation created with Flipnote can be instantly shared all over the world.