Christmas is a natural time to send messages to our loved ones. These are messages which are full of love and happiness. We decided to gather all the happiness travelling through the internet at that special time of the year and build something great and beautiful with it.
At Christmas, GNF wanted the concept of sharing happiness with family and friends to take on a special meaning. To this end, Marcus Gmür (a well-known pixel artist based in Barcelona) took all the Christmas messages sent by users via our website, broke them down into colored pixels and used them as digital paint on canvas to create The Happiness City, one million pixels illustration made from real people’s best wishes through the text messages they shared.
We created an interface that represented Marcus’ desktop and showed how he was drawing the illustration as the messages arrived. The user could pick the color of the message, send it, and automatically place it in a queue. When it was its turn, the message written with «pixel font» was broken down into colored pixels that ended up in the «digital painting» bucket that Marcus used.
