Pixel Your Life

Project Overview

A friend of ours runs a commercial print shop capable of producing large-format artwork on a variety of materials. At the time, Ryan was working at a modern furniture outlet that featured pixelated art on the walls, art that customers constantly asked about. That sparked an idea: what if we built a website offering custom pixelated artwork for purchase and installation? So… we did! It took about two years to launch, and the project ran for a few more years before we lost momentum.

What We Learned

• We misread the market. We invested heavily in building a print-and-drop-ship e-commerce system, but most of our actual business came from custom large-scale installations. These projects were rewarding and fun—and had we focused on them earlier, we might have built more traction.
• The core pixel art tool was built in Flex/AS3, which was soon deprecated. At the time, there were no comparable JavaScript libraries that could handle image processing and PDF export without significant custom development.
• We gained hands-on experience in business formation, partnership structure, branding, and operations—including pricing strategy, order logistics, and customer support.
• Learned how to test assumptions faster—had we validated market demand earlier, we could have focused efforts on the higher-value consulting and installation side of the business.
• Built experience in pitching ideas, forming creative partnerships, and turning a concept into a full-fledged product offering.
• Learned how to balance product development with marketing—a reminder that even great ideas need visibility and targeted outreach to grow.

At some point we had to decide whether to invest in the project further. We considered pursuing funding opportunities and had a few individual offers for investment, but we both had personal commitments, family, and day-jobs at the time that swayed us to pivot and move on to other things. We had lots of fun, made some money, and learned lots of things for the next endeavor.

Technical Stack

• Graphic design, business concept & partnership: parallelarts.com
• Pixel art editor: Flex / ActionScript 3
• Sencha tools
• LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
• User account system with galleries, order tracking, and project dashboards
• Automated order workflows and drop-shipping integration
• Custom image processing and file generation pipeline

Special Note

The Pixel Your Life project lives on through several large-scale murals in downtown Boulder, CO and is also featured inside Google’s Boulder campus (check out that project here!).