There’s something entrancing about the pixel. Square and elegant and when pushed by the right people they can form beautiful art, stunning animations and gorgeously crisp text.

But as resolution and pixel density increase these building blocks of the screen become smaller and individually insignificant especially as the dpi of displays hits 220+ppi. What once was a building block of art and design becomes nothing more than a indistinct element in a photo-realistic image or a glint in a faux-texture supporting a skeuomorphism.

FamFamFam produces a great set of 1,000+ free silky-smooth 16×16 pixel icons called Silk Icons. You can never have too much of a good thing.

Here are the 450+ new icons in my Silk Companion #1 icon set (download) now available:

The Silk icon pack available from FamFamFam (also known as Mark Jones) is an excellent pack of free 16×16 pixel icons.

Whilst the pack contains over 1,000 icons I still find plenty of gaps when I am using them and being that there has been no new updates in 18 months I have decided to release my own companion pack of several hundred more icons in the same style.

Many many moons ago I created myself a set of animated mouse cursors that I could use day-in, day-out.

They were designed to be easily clear on any background and just catch the attention of the eye when needed without being visibly distracting when not. They achieve this using a gently pulsing white outline.

AnkhSVN has been updated since this post.

AnkhSVN is a Visual Studio add-in that delivers Subversion functionality where you need it and Arild has just made available release candidate 4 of the forthcoming 1.0 version.