about pixgel

pixgel is a free, browser-based pixel art editor where pixels don't sit as hard squares — they bead together, like droplets of mercury or beads of water on a windshield. The result is pixel art with the block structure of a sprite and the surface tension of a liquid.

same five cells — left, sharp pixels — right, pixgel blending

the physics

The geometry pixgel produces is older than pixel art. In the 1800s, Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau studied soap films and showed that three films always meet at curved, concave junctions — Plateau borders. The same shape appears in capillary bridges between droplets, in the spikes of ferrofluid under a magnetic field, and in the gap between your fingertips just before they touch under a bright light. Each is nature finding a minimum-surface joint. pixgel applies that exact rule per corner of each pixel cell — and so the editor produces shapes that look physically real, even though they're authored as discrete blocks.

the geometry, exactly

For every filled cell, pixgel checks each corner against two rules:

Round outward if both orthogonal neighbours are empty and the diagonal cell isn't the same colour. Convex corners get a quarter-arc.
Stay sharp if any neighbour is occupied, or if the diagonal cell is the same colour. The cell extends all the way to the contact point so the joint can form.

For every empty cell with two same-colour orthogonal neighbours, pixgel drops a concave quarter-arc filler at that corner. Two such fillers, on either side of a diagonal touch, meet at the shared corner and form the signature pinch — the same pinch ferrofluid drops form when they bridge.

what it's good for

App icons with crisp grid structure and softened edges
Logo marks that read as both pixel art and modern type
Glyphs and emoji where the rounded joints add personality
Stickers, badges, and avatars for the web
Vector pixel art exported as SVG at any size without aliasing
Print-ready pixel art that scales infinitely

tech

pixgel runs entirely in your browser. There's no account, no server-side storage, no tracking. The drawing lives in your tab. The share button encodes the whole grid into a compressed URL fragment using a tiny binary format plus CompressionStream('deflate-raw') — share links round-trip the full drawing, no backend involved. SVG export uses the same path generator the canvas uses, so what you see is what you get.

why it exists

Most pixel art tools force a choice: hard pixels (Aseprite, Piskel) or smooth vectors (Figma, Illustrator). pixgel sits between them. Author with the constraint and clarity of a grid; render with the softness of liquid. Export to SVG and the file scales forever.

Made with care. Free, no signup, no ads. Open the editor →