Not sure how I missed posting this one from awhile back, but what a fantastic resource for “retro” design, both original work and some inspired but those originals. A whole slew of styles are in evidence, from retro-future to candy wrappers and product advertisements. This set embodies the term “inspiration”. Enjoy!
Below are some other crops from the above collection, couldn’t resist posting these, the quality overall is simply astounding.
The Rod Mill by Boris Artzybasheff
ASIFA presents a lovely set of illustrations by Boris Artzybasheff an illustrator who worked from the 20’s to the 60’s, producing numerous commercial works for book covers and magazines. This series concentrates on his fascination and love of things mechanical:
I am thrilled by machinery’s force, precision and willingness to work at any task, no matter how arduous or monotonous it may be. I would rather watch a thousand ton dredge dig a canal than see it done by a thousand spent slaves lashed into submission. I like machines.
His work is a great example of deco-style illustration and really gives a wonderful sense of life to an older generation of mechanical contraptions.
Bruno Borges - Black Plastic
Abduzeedo reveals a great post about when a design is finished, it applies to near any creative process on a deadline. Further, it contains a great set of images and links to some wonderful work out there.
Lovely Flickr set from experienced and prolific macros photographer Opo Terser. Love these sets of beautifully shot organic images, they provide endless inspiration and never cease to amaze at the complexity of life. Whoa.
Cell Phone in Microwave
So here is a fantastic example of using the weakness of a medium as strength in your work. In this case YouTube’s web video quality combined with handheld consumer level camcoder camera work come together brilliantly to provide a cool shock.
Yeah so the British artists Tim Nobel and Sue Webster created some beautiful pieces using light and trash. Fantastic expression of detail in the shadow paintings. This is an effect that I’ve seen to often in motion graphics work that I’d forgotten what the real thing looks like, and what a great example to see!
As-Rigid-As-Possible Shape Manipulation
So the puppet tool in After Effects is a nice addition to CS3, the origins of this tool can be traced back to none other than Takeo Igarashi, the master Japanese animation/graphic tool programmer from the University of Tokyo. This guy is bad ass. The video above is just the tip of the iceberg. Want to know what might be in CS4? 5?
10 optical illusions in 2 minutes
Yeah so I’m not normally one to get off on the old ‘fool the eyes’ optical illusions but the execution of many of these old war horses from the books you had as a kid is too cool to pass up. Not done on screen or paper, these are living in the real world, and all look pretty dang cool, fun Science Museum meets Quirky kinetic art museum.
Here’s something nice and organic, if only I could make a render that looked like any of these! Perhaps, but it’s tough to beat nature for beauty, much easier to just mimic machines! But look at these beautiful shots by underwater photographer David Doubilet for National Geographic. This one most definitely belongs in the inspiration category.
This is simply a beautiful piece of work - fantastic use of imagery to draw the viewer through the piece’s narrative. With a fantastic twist that is sure to make you think. Work like this is outside of my usual mograph/animation focus but I had to include this one. Shilo is one of those houses that produces consistently high caliber work, if you haven’t already check out some of their other work. Enjoy.
jiveon | 
05 31st, 2008| 