Here’s a better-late-than-never roundup of all the worthwhile pixel art I found throughout September. Next month I’m going to expand this feature to include every kind of interesting piece of video-game art (mostly 8-bit of course) I come across, since that’s sorta what I do anyway. For example, the above image really has nothing to do with pixels and everything to do with the NES. It comes from supermandolini. Without any more delay:

ffffound points us to this fun, misleading Atari Game Box. Speaking of Atari, check out these Atari Modern Classics, which re-create today’s games as classic old game boxes. You remember, when everything was a “Video Computer System Game Program” because those words, strung together like that, just sounded great?

Yeah, you gotta plug it in and the scale sorta ruins the whole point of it, but this “high definition” Lite-Brite from Bandai lets you use 1600 LEDs to make the design of your childhood dreams, plus it comes with software to let you plan out and preview things first. You know, because this is such a serious undertaking and all.

Here’s a beautiful video, called “Dot Matrix Revolution”, which chronicles (well, sort of) a history of the computer using pixel art. It’s by a Canadian group known as SuperBrothers. Better quality here.

Last month’s feature had a bathroom re-done entirely in 1×1 tiles along these lines, and now we’ve got it taken to the next, commercial step: get your finest-Italian-ceramic Tetris Tiles today.

Those two guys behind MythBusters rigged up 1100 paintballs to some kind of gigantic, insane gun and fired them simultaneously. It made a kind of painting in about a tenth of a second and is, if nothing else, funny.

Here’s an art installation by Antoinette J. Citizen in which an entire room is made into a Mario Brothers level, complete with sound effects coming out of the interactive boxes. I’ll take it for some obscure basement room in the gigantic suburban house I’ll probably never have.

Finally, NerdyShirts gives us this Nintendo Family Tree on a shirt, and we’re done for now. More next month!

It’s the end of August, and as such I’m back with the second installment of my pet obsession, the monthly roundup of various pixel-art products, designs, and various curiosities I’ve found online. While being a relatively minor part of the design world, I’ve made no secret before of my love for the artform, and every single day designers continue to do incredible things with it. We’ve got some high-profile pieces this month, plus a couple of websites and interactive games that are nothing short of brilliant.

First off, those legendary Germans eboy have published a new, extremely-limited-edition book, entitled Schmock. Published as part of a 500-copies-only series by Rojos, this little 160-pager is full of the studio’s recent work, most of which is pixel-centered, with some toy and t-shirt design thrown in too. Eboy are widely acknowledged as masters of the form: check out the prices on their first amazing book, long out of print, and glance at any of their insanely overloaded city posters to confirm as much. At the time of writing, there was one copy left, so it’s likely flown away to the land of overpriced amazon/ebay sellers by now. Console yourself with a t-shirt instead.

The high profile release I mentioned earlier is nothing other than Brian Eno and David Byrne’s new Everything That Happens Will Happen Today album. Released only through their website, the cover is an incredibly detailed drawing of a suburban house. They’re shipping out deluxe editions of the disc by November–if my dreams come true, the pixel theme will be expanded to glorious lengths for that version. Oh yeah, and the music: these are two giants of the last 40 years, and their one previous collaboration together, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, is fantastic. Expecting wonderful things from this one.

This is just beautiful–a Berlin-based designer created mockups in photoshop in order to figure out how to best tile his bathroom. His lively chronicle of the debate between he and his wife over what masterpiece of art they’d turn into a pixelated, tile-based bathroom wall & bathtub is both charming and enlightening–and just wait until you see their final choice for the tub. It’s absolutely genius. This is probably the best implementation of the 1×1 decorating aesthetic I’ve ever seen.

Here’s a flash game with an artistic bent–abstract pixels float around the screen, and only by moving your mouse to form the design can you move to the next level. To describe it sounds strange, but give it a try and you’ll find there’s something good about it–it’s like trying to pull one hundred pieces of floating confetti out of the air and into a unified whole. Did that make it any clearer? Nah, probably not. You’ll see it when you see it.

Another elegant flash work that uses only 1×1 pixels of different colour–mixed with some fun physics–to create piles of sand at the bottom of your browser. This falls into the “2-minute-diversions” category, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

And our last entry comes from Cubescape, a site that let you build an isometric world using a series of cubes. The most satisfying element for me is the option to “replay the construction” afterwards, which does exactly that: gives you a fast-moving animation of every block you (or other, more talented people) have dropped into place. Strangely gratifying. And with that, my roundup of one small corner of the design world is complete for another month–see you in September!

I can’t hide my fascination with the little corner of the design world known as pixel art. Ever since I bought a hoodie emblazoned with a 10-pixel figure from an 80s arcade game, the irresistible pull of the squared art form in its newly-commercialized iteration has pulled me in again and again. It’s a purposefully constricted style that, for me, never seems to lose its appeal.

With that in mind, here’s the first of a monthly post looking at my favourite examples of found pixel art over the previous month. We’ll keep it simple on our first go around, with these three great highlights.

Agnieszka Bartosiewicz’s Customizable Sideboard

Core77 showed us this wonderful sideboard from the aforementioned Polish designer, in which a series of holes lets you insert coloured felt pieces to create your own designs. The mind reels. 3500 holes! Get yourself some video game maps and re-create the hell out of them.

This is the kind of thing I can never have in my place, for should I find myself with an urgent deadline, essay, or what have you, I could be found reconstructing a part of this mere hours before submission time.

Post-It Art: 8-Bit Edition

Post-It art isn’t the newest thing in the world, but using it to recreate classic 8-bit scenes is a more recent development, not to mention something even the artistically unlucky can try their hand at. Check out this fantastic Megaman illustration to see how.

Easily the most impressive was the UCSC students re-creating a Donkey Kong level using several floors of their school’s engineering building. 14,000 post-it notes later…

A Nintendo Console Inside a Nintendo Cartridge

Alright, this isn’t pixel art per se, but since the NES was the source of so much wonderful pixel art over its lifetime, and drives most of the examples here, let’s show this one off anyway. A ream of tech blogs picked up on the fact that a resourceful designer managed to modify an old NES cartridge using a custom screen and various other parts to make a functioning NES-within-a-NES. I love it.

That’s it for our first outing–the next roundup comes in August, with the best in pixel and game-inspired art from every corner of theinternet. If you’ve got a must-have inclusion, don’t hesitate to send it in!

For those who grew up playing videogames in the time of Nintendo’s famed NES (pop demographics would call you the Net Generation, from 74-83), any evocation of that oh-so-recognizable graphic style and its surrounding aesthetic exerts a strong pull.

Some nights I find myself mindlessly, obsessively hoarding JPEGs of 85/86-era NES box art, searching for that perfect nostalgia that comes from seeing the star-scened, pixellated cover with the strange, smeared trailing lines. Why save these little pieces of ephemera? It’s not that hard to explain–sometimes it reminds me of a specific moment from childhood, be it a trip half-squandered with my head in a glossy Nintendo catalogue, or a guy at the local game shop showing me an imported NES and Super Mario Bros. III many months (!) before it arrived in North America.

As such, the aesthetics of NES design left a huge stamp on my childhood, and influenced much of the way I see design today–in the same way that 8-bit gaming has for thousands. And along with my generation’s purchasing power comes a series of wonderfully nostalgia-savvy products that continue to vie for some of our cash. While Nintendo proper stays busy working on how to make exponential amounts of money on products they finished 15+ years ago (see the Nintendo Wii’s virtual console), the world of un/licensed NES-inspired design continues on. With that, let’s run through our top 5 NES-inspired designs that hit that sweet spot of nostalgia without fail.

5. Banpresto’s Super Mario Bros. Dioramas

These evoke the same memories that a cherished vacation photo can. We stare at it every once in a while, remembering the location, the kind of person we were at the time, the people we were with, the turtle we jumped on 144 times to increase our life count… everything. Besides, in each diorama Mario is controlled by a small magnet at the back, further enabling the detached-yet-tangible reenactments of the game that inevitably follow picking this thing up. Sadly, no longer made.

4. Banpresto’s Nintendo Bath Towels

These are more than slightly ridiculous, and yet if I saw one in a store I’d buy it immediately. Mostly out of print, if there’s such thing as a bath towel being out of print.

3. Cole Ranze’s Nintendo All-Stars

While not strictly NES-inspired, they’re sort of amazing, and the design’s theme just fits so damn perfectly with the name of the shoe.

2. The NESBuckle

Something about the fact that these are done with actual controllers–meaning there’s a finite number of them to be constructed–makes my brain need one a little more. NESBuckle also does other game-controller buckles, but even a cursory glance at the competitors shows that only one can give you the perfectly squared dimensions and still-wonderful black/gray/red colour scheme your nostalgia yearns for.

1. Beatboxtaun’s Ridiculously Nice Punch-Out! Scarves

A perfect mix of hand-made design and NES nostalgia. There are times when pixel art, with its little perfect quadrants and rigid aesthetic, translates magically to more “old fashioned” disciplines like sewing and cross-stitch. This is one, and here’s another spectacular example.

Have your own can’t miss piece of NES-inspired design we forgot? Let us know in the comments!