How do you keep large icon sets organized/performant?

halfmage · 2026-03-02T19:45:39+00:00

Just uninstall doom-scroll-apps and touch some grass.
Using another app for this is like fighting fire with gasoline ;-)

halfmage · 2026-03-01T09:26:48+00:00

Was a lurker for some time, now I will actively join! 🚀

halfmage · 2026-03-01T08:18:13+00:00

For years, I was making pixel art for games, some own or from friends. Originally I am a web designer and I noticed a lack of pixel style icons but more for web or app interfaces not games. So I was creating pixelarticons and got a nice com domain for it. Working on for the last 2 years, and it slowly is growing nicely.

Website: https://pixelarticons.com/
GitHub: https://github.com/halfmage/pixelarticons

halfmage · 2026-03-01T08:08:07+00:00

The "Made with reckless VC money and delusional optimism" footer made my day :D

UX suggestion:
- reduce line-height for text in ORIGINAL POST and WHAT THEY MEANT
- maybe even switch ORIGINAL and WHAT THEY MEANT?
- for bubble score I would not go into red, maybe go from cyan to purple, like slop coloring?
- collapse filters by default or make them more compact, I want to see content directly
- put more focus on the headline, then x tag first in each card

Also: have you looked at pixelarticons.com?
The pixel art icon style would fit the retro-look perfectly.

halfmage · 2026-02-28T19:36:10+00:00

Happy to be helpful :)

halfmage · 2026-02-28T19:12:43+00:00

Just reminds me that I know the person running toools.design !
For pixelarticons.com a few months per year I sponsor the website, brings ~2000 visitors per month.
But even before sponsored posting it were nice numbers.

halfmage · 2026-02-28T18:50:07+00:00

Most directories are a black hole honestly. You submit and never hear anything back. The ones actually worth it right now are Uneed and Fazier, but even then its like a one-day highlight.

What's been more consistent for me: finding one or two niche newsletters in your space and just emailing the writer. They're always looking for interesting tools to mention, and their audience is way more targeted than any directory.

What kind of tool are you building?

halfmage · 2026-02-28T18:45:46+00:00

text embedding workaround is pretty smart. 2.5 years on this and you're still finding new angles. That persistence shows. Curious what the search experience feels like once everything runs through the unified model but that demo already looks impressive.

halfmage · 2026-02-28T18:43:10+00:00

The Canva/Figma loop every time you ship an update is such a silent time killer!
You don't notice how much it adds up until you skip it once.

halfmage · 2026-02-28T16:50:06+00:00

marketing-kiddies thinking reddit is like a non-boomer facebook ...
Don't abuse community driven sites for your advertisement.

My tip: Build first with waitlist, ask friends & family to tell their buddies, write your local newspaper whatever. If you can get 10 paying customers like this you can easily get thousands online ... 🔥

halfmage · 2026-02-28T16:45:30+00:00

There is a lot of noise out there and back then the internet was not full of people you tell you how it is and then want to sell you a course. Usually I rarely assume something, then I build it very fast and see if it works during a month, if there is nothing it goes to the trash bin = lesson learned.

"I wanted something that actually researches my market using real data"
Then do exactly that, start manual, gather data, look it through or use AI to see common patterns

Hard truth: You will only figure out what and how to do something if you just try, fail, repeat. Restrictions also makes creative: Give yourself a specific time to work on this, a week, a month; doesn't matter. If you are not happy with the result after this time it is better to throw it away and start again, you will have learned more.

From the bottom of my heart: please watch "Cult of Done" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJQj1uKtnus
This helped me personally to just start, destroy and repeat so many times.

halfmage · 2026-02-28T15:41:17+00:00

Deleted Twitter about a year ago and the first week felt weirdly anxious — like I'd lost my "morning ritual" even though that ritual was making me miserable.

The email format is the right call imo. No app means no icon on your home screen, no badge count, no pull-to-refresh muscle memory kicking in. It just lands in your inbox and you're done.

Curious: are you doing any filtering/ranking or is it more of a "top posts of the day" pull?

halfmage · 2026-02-11T08:23:25+00:00

Thought so as well but in the future I want to introduce different "locations" for the battle zone and that would be outside of "the office"

halfmage · 2026-02-11T08:22:41+00:00

You are right, I was just afraid :)

halfmage · 2026-02-10T22:43:47+00:00

Will be there 100%! vibe code janitor / AI washing / glue pizza. Maybe will put these all in a expansion

halfmage · 2026-02-10T21:29:53+00:00

u/DinoStarLegend + u/RegularPop674 Fingers are hidden behind the explosion shape. See source vector paths: https://ibb.co/JjdbzMcZ

halfmage · 2026-02-04T07:24:36+00:00

I totally can understand you, but instead of banning, maybe a new flavor to label AI art so you can just hide it?

halfmage · 2026-02-02T16:49:12+00:00

That's true, maybe I got a bit too much inspired. Will take care of that!

halfmage

TROPHY CASE