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!

Los Angeles-based Gallery 1988 has opened up a new exhibit in which pre-existing works are given a new life by contemporary illustrators (ok then, this is officially a trend). It’s called Cover Band.

This time instead of designing entirely new film posters, the artists were given the actual vinyl copy of a classic album and asked to paint, draw, or somehow design over top of it. Over 50 records were altered as as result.

What differentiates this exhibition from any silly old online gallery of photoshop fun is the basic use of physical materials. Designing directly onto the LP meant no software tricks could be (reasonably) employed, and real art equipment could be used. Some of the results even have three dimensional elements to them, like the cover for Tom Waits’ Mule Variations, which has a miniature window sculpted onto the front of it.

Not every cover is a bona fide winner–there are some that just seem like routine pieces of trendy illustration tacked on, and others for which I’m at a loss to understand how the illustration fits (or contrasts with, or does anything useful with) the original album art. But there are a lot of covers, and among them are several worth mentioning:

This Velvet Underground LP reminds me of those Penguin Deluxe comic-book editions I love so much. Sure, you can whine about altering Andy Warhol’s classic cover, but then none of us would have any fun.

Here, Coltrane’s A Love Supreme gets that nautical treatment it’s always been crying out for.

Ah, Simon & Garfunkel. While it’s not perfect, any cover that features an elegant looking bird in a trenchcoat and collared shirt standing in front of Paul Simon is a cover that speaks to me.

Not content with Morrissey being just a plain old quarry, he’s now several additional things. I really like this one–it’s a full transformation of the original cover that works entirely on its own. This one is actually done by Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy.

Wear it With Pride has just opened up a new exhibit that I swear is custom-made for me. Showing earlier this year in London and just opened in Barcelona, Now Showing displays the work of several designers comissioned to create new posters for old films. The tagline for the show is “Exploring the ‘Lost Art’ of the Film Poster.” While I don’t think the film poster as ‘art’ was never really lost in the first place (commercially there’s been a decline, but there were plenty of bad film posters way back when, too), the title is really a play on words, as though these new works are somehow lost posters only just rediscovered.

It turns out having fun with the previously known images that surround old films really inspired these designers, as some of the work is really damn good–either paying homage to various design periods in time, or using completely contemporary methods to re-present the film in an entirely new mode. These aren’t your traditional film posters, full of little credits, following a reasonably consistent set of guidelines set-up to market a film. This is work done by contemporary artists who know their films–a company like Criterion couldn’t go wrong in licensing some of this stuff if they’re releasing any of the featured films in the future.

Check out this Five Easy Pieces poster as an example. The title of the film is a reference to Jack Nicholson’s unchosen career as a pianist, and his giving up of an upper crust, artistic direction in life in exchange for a conscious embrace of the working class American world of menial jobs, cheap diners and bowling alleys. The brilliant thing is that the poster evokes the very records Nicholson’s character would have been listening to as a child, back when he prepared his “five easy pieces” for a (unseen in the film) recital. Take a look at the recently released and quite excellent Classique for an idea of a few quality classical music LP covers, and then look at the poster again. It’s clearly done by someone who knows and loves the film enough to put that level of work into it.

My other favourite is this poster of Fellini’s 8 1/2. Not only is it one of the best films ever made, but the Italian film posters of the 1950s and 60s are some of the best examples of the form, anywhere. Redoing any of them is a tall order, and artist Fons Schiedon does a killer job here. Conceptually smart and beautiful to look at, it’s one of the best on display.

Metropolis, Rear Window, The Birds, and Planet of the Apes also get amazing treatments. Prints are for sale here, and the show is playing at Vallery, in Barcelona, through November 1.

My vintage product design obsession shows no signs of lessening, and as though it knows what I want, flickr continues to scheme away, providing me with a horribly infinite well of images. While the “pools” or “groups” are so big as to be daunting, with categories like “vintage illustration” having something like 10,000 potentially day-destroying items in them, people’s individual sets are far more digestible and can–at times–be favourable to your fledgling attempts at time management.

There are hundreds of these things floating around flickr, but these are the five (plus one extra) I’ve found most enjoyable; I find myself returning to a few of them several times over and saving various jpegs into my “put these on a t-shirt one day” folder, an 8-year project that has produced exactly zero shirts. One day, I swear to you…

5. Vintage Transistor Radios

This guy has about a billion different transistor radios, radio boxes, radio rooms, and other radio things on here, sorted by brand, country, type, etc. My favorite are all these ones with the round, oversized speaker grills, which look incredible.

4. Polish Matchbooks

At a market in Brussels I once tried to buy an entire box of old Belgian and French matchbooks, but the guy was asking something like 20 euros for about 200 of them. There were so many, I couldn’t make the necessary evaluation as to whether or not it was worth the price–I just kept looking at various packages and trying to decide if, alltogether, they added up to something worth 20 euros. Probably.

3. Old I.D. Badges

Thanks to bad banana blog for this one. I found an old Belgian ID card at that same Brussels antique market, and it’s still kicking around. I’d love a few of these, though–badges are just way better. Can we get back to these, and away from ID cards? I know it’s completely cost-prohibitive, but come on. Imagine if we all carried individual little badges for every organization we belonged to, all wonderfully designed with our austere, serious-looking photos inside. I suppose our pockets would be prohibitively heavy, though. There goes that idea. Wallets and ID cards it is, then.

2. Typewriter Ribbon Collection

Thanks to Rosencrans Baldwin for pointing this one out. As he said, if only today’s inkjet-cartridge package designers would think of posterity.

There is plenty of great packaging being made today (check out www.thedieline.com if you don’t believe me), but the ridiculous cavalcade of solid, craftsmanship packaging that once existed is a lost art. Shelf packaging was one of the primary concerns for a product’s viability, back when 70% of the marketing outlets of today didn’t exist, and it was just plain necessary to put some work and thought into it. There are also industrial reasons for the posterity: plastic packaging wasn’t prevalent in the slightest, so the nature of the materials used lent itself to being designed upon. It’s not easy to spend money on a beautifully done piece of clear plastic today, when your customers are just going to cut into the thing with a pair of scissors anyway.

1. Society in Decline; Intrastate Commerce

Not products, but street signs, this set recently got some notice on various blogs. I’m assuming the guy’s username (also called society in decline) is expressing his need to document these pieces of signage that are disappearing from the American landscape. I’m inclined to agree with him: as much as 1950s motel signs are trashy, overly kitsch, or just plain bad, anything beats a boring franchise sign you’ve seen 4,000 times before.

(and an extra): Bottle Caps

It’s not just because I enjoy various bottled beverages that these are awesome, although that does affect my judgement a little bit.

It was only yesterday when Olympus went ahead and released a new concept camera, capturing some semi-classic styling in a new format called micro four thirds. This new format is a conscious attempt to return to the old SLR types popularized by cameras like the Canon AE-1–it’s an entirely different approach for digital SLRs that shies away from the big bodies popularized by most cameras, but still allows for interchangeable lenses.

With that in mind, I decided to round up some examples of modern digital cameras that are beautifully designed, but keep to the best traditions of classic camera bodies. This has been a definite trend of late, with manufacturers realizing that the same old grey-rectangle isn’t how it always has to be when it comes to a digital camera.

Why get stuck in the exact same manufacturing ghetto when there’s a huge tradition to draw upon? With big thanks to the invaluable Retro to Go website for their tireless mentions of many amazing products, let’s run down the list:

5. Olympus Micro Four Thirds (Concept)

This is only a mockup of the aforementioned Olympus, but I hope it comes to market in something like this form. It’s a different direction for the digital SLR, and stands out from the rest of the classic bodies we’ve seen on the other cameras today. Obviously it needs some polishing, but here’s hoping the general idea gets retained.

4. Leica C-LUX 3

And the parade of Leicas beings. Here’s their attempt to inject clean lines and classic design into what is otherwise a basic, contemporary digital camera design. It doesn’t look so far off from some of the cameras you might find in a big-box superstore, but the subtle detailing makes all the difference.

3. Leica D-LUX 4

A wonderful metal body and a ridiculous level of simplicity make this look miles away from most digital cameras you’ve seen before. Wonderfully done.

2. Rolleiflex MiniDigi AF 5.0

Yes! A redesign of the famous Rolleiflex top-down camera design that started all the way back in 1929. You use a crank (purely aesthetic, this part) and look down at this camera from above. This remake is actually done by a Japanese manufacturer who has reproduced the original Rolleiflex design in miniature (the originals are insanely popular in Japan).

1. Leica M8 and M8.2

Yeah, these are new digital cameras. Leica has a massive, half-insane following around the world, and online you can find no shortage of endless diatribes that debate the exact differences between two limited-run lenses from the 1960s that only seventeen people have tried. Every artistic realm has its hardcore subculture full of passionate devotees, and what Steinway is to pianists and B&W is to audiophiles, Leica is to photographers. These two cameras (above is the M8.2, at the top of the page is the M) pull the famous Leica M-series, first introduced in the 1950s, into the digital realm–and the incredible bodies are easily the best I’ve seen in digital cameras of this type.

If you’ve got any more examples of some fine-looking digital cameras, let us know in the comments!

A few months ago I stopped into the kind of store you can find easier in Paris than anywhere else–full of old advertising art, vintage posters, and ancient maps. Next to nothing cost under 100 euros, and if I were rich, I would decorate 20 houses with the posters I found in there. I’m not rich.

I did still manage to find some beautiful prints around Paris, though. The great thing about all the green-stalled vendors that line the Seine is the variety of their stuff; they don’t have the exact same posters and cards that their neighbour has, and a lot of it is a step above the mass-produced vintage reprints more widely available. I bought a ton of it and it’s still all over my walls.

For those of us, however, who no longer have a fast train connection to Paris, there are other ways of decorating with some of the best old illustration and cartography available. Sure, you can order about 17 billion different prints online, but the minimum cost for a poster is often above $20–a quick glance at the “Italian Maps” section of barewalls.com shows an amazing 3/4 map of Rome, and it costs $31.50. Not the end of the world, but not ridiculously cheap either.

I recently spent some time back in my native Canada, and figured that on my return to Europe I’d hit whatever old, dustry print shops I could find (there are really 17,0000 of them in every big European city) and get to decorating my new walls. I didn’t expect to find much in Ottawa, but as I was wandering around a paper shop I suddenly saw a beautiful, faux-aged vintage map of Rome. Then I saw another hundred copies of the same map below it. They were hanging over a little bar, nestled in among other big pieces of paper featuring small dogs and various forgettable patterns. The price? $3.95. I’d just found my new, cheap-as-hell decorating source: wrapping paper.

The company that makes these maps is Cavallini & Co., they have a sizeable line of them, and they’re all worth a look. Sure, it’s just gift paper and obviously not as strong as a real poster, but that’s the whole point–you can buy 4 or 5 of these for the price of a single poster. And there’s actually something about the texture and consistency of the wrapping paper that serves the vintage theme rather well.

Most of these are 20″ x 28″ sizes, which you know is just fine for your wall. There are also several selections of vintage advertising illustration, some of which I received half-wrapped around some recent books I got–my friend didn’t even tape the wrapping paper, she just hastily placed the books inside and treated the gift-wrapping as a gift in itself. It’s on my wall as a result.

You can find the Cavallini & Co. wrapping paper online here, here, or here.

And here are a few other examples of gift wrap that can easily double as posters, and cost nothing:

The French Paper Company also has a ton of quality wrapping paper that can be used for other stuff too, and Whimsy’s Dude Wrap “Paper Invaders” edition is awesome as well.

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!

In Italy they’re called by the more elegant and somehow far cuter name Motorino. A cornerstone of mediterranean culture, especially in urban centres, motorini are still the simplest and easiest way to navigate a city. The various iterations of Piaggio’s famous Vespa from the 1950s onwards are indisputable vehicle design classics, and even after days and days in the south of Italy I still found myself staring like a man transfixed when an old white vespa whizzed past me.

There’s something about the simplicity of a motorino that’s irresistible: it’s a culture entirely different from that of the motocicletta or motorcycle, which involves shifting gears and straddling the bike like a horse; on a motorino you sit like you’re having dinner, with only a simplified spedometer and a couple of lights on your display. People from 14 to 85 drive them here, and hopping on a scooter is about as natural as going for a walk.

A couple of years ago, Piaggio introduced a new line of their famous Vespa scooters that, while not exactly re-creating the perfect heavy lines of the old Vespa frontpiece (for those you need the just-cancelled Vespa PX), comes pretty close. It’s a happily backwards-looking design similar to Fiat new’s cinquecento, the closest a lot of people will get to ever owning one of Fiat’s old masterpieces of a car.

Vespa Canada (yeah, we do drive some vespas in Canada, even if they’re prohibitively expensive and our scooter season outside of Vancouver is far too short) recently commissioned some great print ads that simultaneously introudced the new Vespa and harkened the arrival of spring. The theme is butterflies, close enough to the original meaning of the word Vespa (which would be wasp) and a little more appealing than that annoying insect when we’re talking about heralding in a new season.

The thematic unity of the butterfly/scooter concept left the designers free to incorporate elements of different design eras into each particular ad, with splendid results all around. I especially love the 1970s-themed design with its concentric lines and perfect colour scheme. Beautiful stuff.

Our final scooter-related find is this set of stunning high-end helmets from the Parisian designer Les Ateliers Ruby, which top any helmet I have ever seen anyone wearing anywhere. They’re lush, shiny, and thematically perfect for anyone buying a scooter for more than just a convenient method of transport.

I once saw a dude on a vintage vespa in Paris, sporting white converse, good jeans, a perfect vintage button-up shirt, and smoking a Gauluoises–which wasn’t hanging out of his mouth, mind you, but resting there in that inimitable ‘this took me 3 seconds to do but would take you a damn lifetime‘ French style. If he’d had this helmet, we would have our winner in the coolest man ever to ride a scooter. He’s probably already got one, the bastard.

The Olympic Games are a consistent magnet for design criticism–professional and amateur alike–as seen most clearly in last summer’s messy reaction to the London 2012 logo. Personally, when speaking of an event as universal as the Olympics, I tend towards the “better a weird logo” camp than the “obviously designed by committee” one, so I found the harshness directed towards the London logo (it does have its defenders, too) far preferable to the usual collective shrug/ignorance meted out to high-profile logos like this.

Last year in Brussels I saw a great shirt with the Moscow 1980 logo on it, and I realized there’s a dearth of products out there that take advantage of the wonderful design history of the Olympic Games. Whether it’s the concentric lines of the Mexico 68 logo (the closest thing I own that’s similar is this killer shirt from iso50) or the beautiful simplicity of the Tokyo 64 logo, this is a heritage of design ripe for a wide-scale reintroduction–something likely blocked because, for legal reasons, any old designer can’t slap a classic Olympic logo on a t-shirt and start selling it.

Whether or not Colloco’s new PVC-leather Olympic Logo Bags are legal is beside the point–they’re fantastic. The aforementioned 64 and 68 designs are beautifully represented, and the Munich 72 games are rendered with the iconic sport-specific pictograms created by Otl Aicher specifically for those games (good thing, as those symbols are more enduring than the actual Olympic logo of that year, although it’s good too). There’s also a re-imagining of the Los Angeles 84 logo, and the great Moscow 80 one as well.

It’s an Olympic Year, which means it’s time to either protest, embrace, observe, or simply ignore the Beijing Games; I’m not sure which one I’ll choose for August (probably the complicated ignorance through vacation route), but should I decide, on a whim, to express my Olympic Spirit through a woman’s handbag, I’ll stick with the classics.

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!