I’ve been using an image with a grid of tiny colored squares on websites related to Nuhubit Software Studios LLC. One may wonder why; in fact I’ve already been asked about it. The image is a small excerpt from a photograph I took of a tile mosaic decorating the front of the Santa Clarita Business Incubator building.

The building was originally built to be the library for downtown Newhall, which purpose it served for many years. When the beautiful new Old Town Newhall Library opened in 2012, the old building was closed. The City of Santa Clarita decided to renovate the building and repurpose it to house city offices and a business incubator for tech startups. Nuhubit was chosen to be one of the four initial businesses at the incubator.

According to Katie Knybel, a City of Santa Clarita employee who was involved with the renovation project, the original plans for the city are dated 1956 and the building was completed and opened in 1957. The tile decoration on the front was part of the original design when the building was first constructed well before pixel oriented computer graphics had become ubiquitous, and possibly before they had even been invented. Here’s one of the places in the original building blueprints specifying the tile decoration.

According to wikipedia, the use of the word pixel in regards to graphics was first published in 1965 and was in use as technical jargon as early as 1963. It appeals to my poetic sense that the little colored square tiles in the mosaic function exactly like pixels in this pre-computer-graphics art piece on the front of this building. The building now houses technology companies in this day and age in which pixels are taken for granted as graphic atoms. Manipulating pixels on a detailed level is certainly a basic part of our work designing educational games. Reinterpretation of old or ancient entities in surprising modern ways seems to be a theme at Nuhubit. In fact, the very name “Nuhubit” embodies that same pattern. I’ll write about that in another blog post – coming soon.