@flauwy is in search for a rebranding / redesign oh his 1UP mascot. Currently, he's using Nintendo's 1UP Mushroom and obviously, that poses some legal issues. Therefore, he issued a contest in search of a new mascotte / logo. See his >>post<< for more details. I've picked out a few of the requirements which I deemed most important.

• Only pixelart will be accepted (big pixels like the original!)
• The design must look clear in small and in big
• It must be a square shape
• It must use the Utopian logo colors

The Concept

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So the initial concept is a quick sketch of the base I wanted to create. I wanted to incorporate 1UP in some way that even without text, the mascotte/logo would still immediately be recognized as representing the 1UP trail

from that base, I elaborated into something more resembling a logo/mascotte

The Design

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From above quick thumbnail sketches I quickly set to work in Photoshop (still my preferred application when doing pixelart.

I started with the eyes, because apart from the 1up outline, I also wanted something to represent the eyes on the best utopian contributions. Therefore, I have a big eye representing 'taking a closer look'.

After that I started laying down the outlines, and per the requirement, adding the Utopian colors (also in pixelart gradient, meaning a dithered gradient.)
This design works from as small as 25 pixels (it's actually 21px square but I'm keeping 2 pixels on each side so it has some space.)

25px

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50px

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125px

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1000px

There's also a vector file (Adobe AI) included for infinite scaling.
PNG & AI Vectorfiles