What is the Universal Charm Society?

The Universal Charm Society is a gathering of friends who exchange charms with each other over the internet! It's a hobby, a game, a collection, or whatever you prefer. The central activity of it is reaching out to others to give and receive charms, tiny pieces of art that can be displayed in a personal collection.

What's a charm?

A charm is a 50x50px piece of art made by your friend. They can be animated or static, and can depict anything that makes you happy. There's some different types of charm you can collect:

A signature charm is someone's default charm that represents them. You can gift your signature charm to anyone you'd like.
Custom charms are made when two members make charms for each other in a trade.
Special occasion charms are exactly what they sound like! These can celebrate anything you want.
Monthly spotlight charms are given away just for being a member!
Free-to-take charms can be any kind, and are left on a member's page for you to grab as you wish without having to be messaged.

How do I join?

To join, you'll first need a charm gallery, like this one here. It can be decorated however you want, although one should be considerate of others and avoid extreme flashing or unreadable text. Your gallery can be made anywhere that's editable; some suggested places are neocities pages, personal websites, tumblr custom pages, carrd pages, toyhouse profiles, and more.

It should have the following things on it:

A place to put your charms. You can organize them by colour, type, order received, subject, or just pile them all together in any way you like!
Your signature charm (see below).
Contact info for people to message you to give you charms. This can be by email address, Twitter dm, discord message, or other means of contact.
A link back to the UCS page. If you want to get fancy with it, feel free to use one of the buttons at the bottom of this page, or make your own!

Next, you'll need a signature charm to gift to others. This can be anything you want! It should probably represent you in some way. A pixel-art style is not required. You can always change it later.

All charms should follow these few requirements:

Must be 50x50px, and a jpeg, png, gif, or gifv.
Must be something you made to be a charm. Edited or stolen works are not permitted.
Animation is allowed, but please try to avoid extreme flashing.
Bigoted or otherwise offensive material, and any material putting down an individual or group, is not permitted.
Make something that you would be happy to receive! Prior art experience is not required, but effort is.

Once you've designed your signature charm and assembled a charm gallery, email the link to plovers@tuta.io along with your name (can be a username, nickname, etc). You will be announced to the UCS via the official Twitter, and added to the members' book. After that, you're in! You can message other members to give them your charm, and you will be messaged in return to receive them! You may find some free-to-take charms by looking at other members' galleries too.

It's a good idea to follow UCS on Twitter to stay up to date with new members, monthly charms, and other future events!

How do I get more charms?

There's a few ways to get more charms for your collection:

Gifting your signature charm to someone else (they will usually gift you theirs back!)
Trading custom charms with other members
Getting the monthly charm and any special occasion charms
Free-to-take charms left on other member's profiles
Future special events such as a secret santa exchange!

Please be sure to display only charms that you were given or allowed to take. The Universal Charm Society is run on respect for other members, and simply hoarding charms that don't belong to you defeats the purpose of gifting them to each other.

Also, keep in mind that hotlinking should be avoided when charms are hosted on someone's personal website.

I don't know what to make for my charm!

Here's some ideas:

Your favourite food, animal, plant, etc.
An abstract drawing
A tiny person doing an action (dancing, exercising, eating, etc.)
An everyday object you like
A little scene of nature
The first item you see on your right
A mini mastercopy
A childhood toy
What's outside your window

And if you want to make a special occasion charm, here's some possibilities:

A birthday charm to give away on your birthday
A birthday charm as a gift for someone else's birthday
A charm to give to someone for gifting you your 20th/50th/100th/whatever charm
A 'welcome to UCS!' charm
A holiday or special event charm

Who makes the monthly charm?

It's sometimes made by me (Heavendeluxe) but whenever possible I'd like to invite other members to make a monthly charm. If you're interested in making one, let me know!

Why a charm society?

One of my favourite things on the internet is the concept of a charm society, and all its incarnations. Pixel quilts and screenies on Neopets, pixel families on tumblr, and all other manner of social exchange of tiny art are the cousins of the charm society, an exchange upon which the UCS is modeled.

In and around the year 1999, internet denizen vikimouse's Good Luck Friends Society were trading and collecting charms amongst themselves (alongside their contemporary, the Lunar Friends society; rivals or allies? We'll never know). Not much remains of this seemingly busy bunch except for a few geocities and tripod pages, some archived and others standing abandoned. But despite hints of drama about rulebreaking and the like, there's something very earnest about these tables of little pictures, arranged as if on display in an antique trinket shelf. It's a remnant of a slower internet that is becoming increasingly more difficult to find as feed-based social media and its algorithms dominate the scene; 'art' painfully metamorphosizes into 'content', and we all compete with everyone else.

There are only 2500 pixels in a 50x50 square. Each one counts, and you can only cram so much detail into such a small image. The key trait of a charm is its sincerity; skill level and experience can't really compensate for that. Perhaps it's an overly optimistic or romantic view, but I want to be able to share something that anyone can make, and share it in a way that can actually be returned to rather than buried under an endless scroll. I've always felt the tiny image is perfect for this. I've maintained collections alone, but I think they're best when made together, and I hope if you feel the same that we can share with each other too!

(For clarification, considering the current times: UCS as a concept is unrelated to NFT/crypto/tokenization, and is neither an imitation, solution, nor response. Weird timing, huh?)

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please let me know at plovers@tuta.io !

Be sure to link your charm gallery page back to UCS! You can use a text link, make your own button, or use one of the buttons provided here!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.