While its easy enough to create pixel-art in a bitmap editor such as Photoshop, Windows Paint or the Gimp - For some real flexibility artistically, Illustration software like - well - Illustrator is a better choice. Because its vector based, pixel shapes are crisp and square. They can be rescaled without pixel artifacts or antialiased soft edges. And it can be manipulated with transforms, 3D extrusions and more without losing quality.
That means groovy poster art, alongside the usual pixel-level bit map export. Some examples below show a range of ways that we can make the classic invader into a variety of visually interesting styles in Illustrator. Of course, we can also export the original image in actual screen res. pixels too for those actual bitmap projects (ie. like game makers, etc).
