Pixel Chess is Namik Zade’s, simple attempt to see how far down can a chess board can be scaled down digitally in order to keep the size of the board minimal in dimensions, while being able to recognize the different pieces.
What Namik Zade has made, is the minimum dimensions for a chess piece that can be recognized, and not confuse the player. It is 3 pixels wide and 3 pixels high chess pieces, placed in a 5 by 5 pixel square. These dimensions give just enough freedom to create the 6 different chess pieces (Pawn, Knight, Bishop, Rook, Queen, King) in a manner to be able to see the difference between them.
While the chess board can still be scaled down to 24 by 24 (3×8) pixels in dimensions, Namik Zade could see that 1 pixel of free space is still needed around a chess piece in order to have a visually pleasant and recognizable chess set, that adds extra 16 pixels in both dimensions to the overall design.
It is not that hard to see the difference between the different chess pieces, and while it might be unusual at first, one do learn the different pieces quite fast.
Pixel Chess by Namik Zade and Marc Sonne Dahl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.