When I first started my website way back in 1996, I had this image as the centerpiece of the page. Back then, there was no WordPress or SubStack or such so if you were a “blogger”, you just edited a bunch of HTML. (WordPress showed up in 2003). Back then, I still owned the k2.com domain and used it for my consulting side-hustle and a blog. But that’s another story – this one is about the image

The name of the image is Iceworld, created by the artist Ron Cobb (also here on Wikipedia and on Lambiek). It is an example of pixel art, a piece of artwork painstakingly created a pixel at a time. According to this subreddit, the image was originally called ICEWORLD.GIF and was created around 1990 so the tools to do this would have been quite limited. One of the comments suggests that it might have been done with PixelPaint, which came out around the right time for Cobb to do this piece.

In later years, after I had moved my blog over to WordPress, I extracted the iceman from the image and used it for the blog header. You can also see on the left how I sort of crafted my own, very weak version of the ice man to go along with the domain name and when I sold k2.com, I redid the upper left logo with the jeffreykay.com.

Probably the most disappointing thing in this story is that I never credited Ron Cobb for the image. I’m pretty sure at the time I had no idea who created it and the tools for discovery on the Internet were not nearly as good as they are today. I have no idea where I even found the image. And given the wild West that was the Internet, no one cared about copyright infringement, fair use, and things like that (if you look at the archives of this blog, you’ll see all sorts of things posted about this, mostly in the context of music sharing). So at long last, now that the Iceworld image has been retired and replaced with one of my own (the image of the Hoover dam is one of my own photos), here’s my thanks to Ron Cobb for an inspirational piece of artwork.