How to make a great tile

Mosaic tiles are 500 × 500 pixels and 1-bit — every pixel is either pure black or pure white. Here's how to make one that looks good etched in gold.

Short version: send any image to our form and it'll be converted for you. Read on if you want better-than-default results.

Why 1-bit?

The disk is etched: every spot on the surface is either gold or not gold. There is no gray. Each tile ends up about half a millimeter across on the finished disk, so what you submit gets resolved as 500 × 500 hard pixels.

This sounds limiting, and it is — but it's also why some kinds of images come out looking great. The constraint rewards bold, graphic, high-contrast subjects. Anything that survives being printed in a black-and-white zine will work here.

The two paths

1. Send any image, let us convert it.

Our submission form will take any image in any format and convert it to 500 × 500 1-bit using Floyd-Steinberg dithering. You'll see exactly what we'd etch before you commit. There's an "invert colors" button if it comes out the wrong polarity. If you don't like the result, pick a different image — or jump to path 2 for full control.

2. Convert it yourself, send the result.

For best results, prepare your image in your own tool. We'll trust whatever 500 × 500 PNG you send and skip the auto-conversion. Tools below.

What works well

Some subjects thrive in this format:

Pixel art. Usually already monochrome or close to it. Resize to 500 × 500 with nearest-neighbor scaling and you're done.
Line art and pen sketches. High-contrast drawings convert cleanly with simple thresholding — no dithering needed.
Logos and bold typography. Hard edges look identical in 1-bit as in color. Use heavy weights for any text; thin fonts get eaten.
Comics and cartoons. The 1-bit limitation lines up with the medium's natural look.
High-contrast photos. Portraits in stark side-lighting, silhouettes against sky, anything with clear figure/ground separation. Dithering handles the midtones reasonably well.
Patterns and geometric designs. Tilings, mandalas, ASCII-style art — all great fits.

What's hard

Some subjects don't translate well:

Soft photos with subtle gradients — sunsets, faces in even light, foggy landscapes. The dithering creates noise and the subject often disappears into texture.
Fine printed text. Type smaller than about 30 px tall in your source becomes mush. Use bold or extra-bold weights, large sizes, and prefer geometric over decorative typefaces.
Anti-aliased screenshots. Fonts and shapes from screen captures have soft edges that turn jagged. Re-create the content in a 1-bit-native tool if you can.
Images that depend on color for meaning. A red apple on a green background becomes one black blob when desaturated. Pick subjects whose intent survives a value-only world.

Tips for any approach

Crop to square first. Otherwise we center-crop for you, which may drop something important.
Boost contrast in your editor before dithering. It dramatically improves how the conversion reads.
Skip the thick black border. It just eats pixels you could be using.
Think of the output as half a millimeter wide. Fine details disappear at that scale; bold shapes survive. If you can't recognize your image when zoomed out to a thumbnail, the etched version won't fare better.
When in doubt, send it and see the preview. The form lets you iterate without committing.

Tools for doing it yourself

Online (no install)

dither.it — browser-based, several dithering algorithms to compare.
Lospec dithering tools — pixel-art focused.

Photoshop

Open your image.
Image → Adjustments → Levels — boost contrast.
Image → Image Size — set to 500 × 500 px.
Image → Mode → Grayscale, then Image → Mode → Bitmap.
Pick a method: "50% Threshold" for hard edges and clean text, "Diffusion Dither" for photographic content, "Halftone Screen" for newspaper-style effects.
Export as PNG.

GIMP (free)

Image → Scale Image — 500 × 500.
Image → Mode → Grayscale.
Image → Mode → Indexed with "Use black and white (1-bit) palette" and pick a dithering option (Floyd-Steinberg works well for photos; no dither is best for line art).
Export as PNG.

ImageMagick (command line)

# Simple threshold — best for line art, logos, text:
magick input.jpg -resize "500x500^" -gravity center \
  -extent 500x500 -monochrome out.png

# Floyd-Steinberg dither — what our form does. Best for photos:
magick input.jpg -resize "500x500^" -gravity center \
  -extent 500x500 -colorspace gray \
  -dither FloydSteinberg -monochrome out.png

# Ordered (Bayer) dither — better for gradients and skies:
magick input.jpg -resize "500x500^" -gravity center \
  -extent 500x500 -colorspace gray \
  -ordered-dither 4x4 out.png

A note on dithering vs threshold

If your image is already mostly black and white (line art, logos, comic panels), use a simple threshold — it gives you clean edges and no noise. If your image has lots of midtones (photos, paintings, gradients), use dithering — it spreads the midtones across nearby pixels in a noisy pattern that simulates gray. The two look very different and one usually wins clearly for any given image. If you're not sure, try both.

Back to submit a tile →