One thing I kinda like doing is discovering an illustrator or designer after I’ve already purchased or enjoyed some bit of his/her work without knowing it, and then being taken in by the rest of their stuff. The latest candidate for this process of mine is Olly Moss, whose stuff I first saw on Threadless a long time ago. Specifically, that was this Spoilt t-shirt, which fit well with Threadless’s generally clever theme and plays on words.

Turns out this young designer (he’s 21) has also done some great re-imagingins of film posters, which for some reason is a tiny corner of the design world that I can’t help but be enthralled by every time. I have to say, if I was working in the packaging/publicity department of any major studio, I’d be out canvassing these guys and letting them do the hard work for me. Just looking back at Now Showing, any of the major studios have ready-made covers for any future blu-ray special editions, no problem.

Check out his awesome re-imagingings of the great film The Deer Hunter, plus Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. He’s also doing some good work with colour-layering, throwing a bit of typography-based information in there to boot. The “retro band/old song vs. new DJ/new beat = remix” illustration is fantastic, a nice simple encapsulation of where a remix lies, told through a design that stands out.

Then for the people who are somehow visually excited when they see mixing consoles (check), we’ve got his wonderful Mixer Shirt (called AV). Speaking of his shirts, he was also responsible for the Nintendo Family Tree shirt that I pointed out in the last month’s post on pixels. As seen below, his infographic stuff is playful without being overly coy–all fine examples of, say… the Threadless Aesthetic, if there is such a thing, only done right nearly every time.

I’ve seen his designs dozens of times and they’re still funny, which isn’t always the case with Threadless. Partially it’s the illustration, which holds up in a kind of aircraft-emergency-pamphlet way, but the typography and sense of visual timing (check out the rules of shotgun one) are spot-on. This kind of stuff is hard to do well, which is painfully evidenced by the mountain of threadless-imitation sites out there trying to turn bad puns into even crappier t-shirts. Here’s the winning formula: very, very solid joke + design that would make a good shirt even if the joke weren’t funny at all = memorable and funny shirt… maybe. Olly Moss knows how it’s done.

For some strange reason I’m really feeling the alternative-universe design stuff recently, and designers are happy to fufill my every need. Check these out: Antrepo Design gives us some more alternative movie posters, except these ones are ultra-modern, based solely in typography, and list all the brand placement inside some big name films.

There’s nothing wrong with brand placement anyway–a film is a film, and I don’t take these posters as criticism; they’re just a creative way to express a statistic. The fact that a few of the films with the longest list of brand placements are actually quite good (Iron Man, The Bourne Ultimatium), should dispel whatever argument might be brewing in your head at the moment.

I don’t care if people are hopping in nice shiny cars–if you’re going to play a rich character and Lamborghini wants to sponsor you, that’s great–it’s the kind of car I’d expect your character to be driving anyway. No problem! Phones and computers and other things are obvious too: we use these things, so why not movie characters? They just happen to use nicer, cooler versions of them, which work as advertising.

Where brand placement does go crazy, though, is when it temporarily hijacks the film and makes it feel like a commercial. I’m talking about when the actual dialogue of the film suddenly runs off the rails for a second, and characters start talking about the brands themselves. I can think of only one giant example off the top of my head, and it’s from 2006’s Casino Royale. Check out the last 15 seconds of this clip:

“Rolex?” she says.
“Omega,” he replies.
“Beautiful.”

Aye. Subtle. Although I guess one notable film from my childhood was actually far worse, with the entire film being a gigantic advertisement for Nintendo. This scene is pretty cringe-worthy these days, especially considering what a terrible product the Power Glove actually was. I suppose “I love the Power Glove” is a bit more direct than Eva Green’s “beautiful” line.

What a commercial, though: I saw The Wizard twice, putting my anticipation for Super Mario Bros. 3 absolutely through the roof afterwards, and it didn’t abate until I had it in my hands.

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!

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!