How to: Make your own Bitizen

If you've been playing the app Tiny Tower as much as I have (and since it's free and great, you probably should be), you have likely imagined yourself as a Bitizen, one of the little residents of the floor-by-floor residential and commercial construction that is your own tiny tower. And thanks to this tutorial by developer and pixel art creator Brandon Trebitowski, you can make that a reality.

He's essentially reverse-engineered the design of the little Bitizen characters (though he admits they're not in as much detail as the Retina Display-enabled game versions), and walks you through step-by-step in Photoshop how to make one of your own design. All it takes is some Photoshop grid shadings and a little coloring, so you don't even have to be a super great artist (or like me, have any design skill at all) -- just keep tweaking it until it looks right.

I love it -- just like NimbleBit's own Ian Marsh, I look forward to having a Bitizen of my own as a Twitter avatar. Now I just need to figure out how to open up this Photoshop template...