# Pixel Sorting (ピクセルソーティング) — image generation prompt
# IndexStyle No.573 — https://indexstyle.org/styles/pixel-sorting
# Style descriptors only. This prompt names no artist, studio, brand or work.

Produce four original images in the visual language of Pixel Sorting, a technique from Digital Image Techniques, 2010–.

## What to make

Make the kind of thing this style exists for: covers and posters that damage part of a photograph while keeping the subject legible, or transitions that turn a frame's color distribution into bands leading into the next shot. Choose one subject and hold it across all four images.

## What has to be visible

- Long horizontal or vertical pixel streams leaving a figure or landscape
- Only part of an outline flowing into bands
- Unselected areas preserving the source image
- Local color bands smoothly ordered by value or hue

Someone who knows this style should be able to point at each of these in the finished image.

## How to build it

- Layout and structure: Choose one sorting direction, tune the threshold to the subject and preserve islands of the source image
- Type and lettering: Keep copy outside the sorted field, or flow only part of a headline along the same axis while preserving body legibility
- Material and surface: Select pixels by value, saturation or hue and reorder only contiguous intervals within a row or column
- Colour: #EAEAEA carries the ground, #00A8C6 is the colour the style is remembered by, #191919 holds text and outlines. Read off real works, so treat them as a direction rather than a fixed palette.
- What it should feel like: technique, rebellion, play

## What goes wrong

Sorting the entire frame removes the tension with its source and leaves an ordinary striped pattern. Decide what breaks and what remains.

## Across the four

Keep every cue above present in all four. Vary the framing, the scale and the arrangement so the set shows the range this style covers rather than four versions of one picture.

## Constraints

- Do not imitate, reference or name any specific artist, studio, brand, character or copyrighted work.
- Do not reproduce the composition of an existing work.
- Produce original compositions in the general period language described above.

Full design spec: https://indexstyle.org/styles/pixel-sorting/design.md