Awesome Art & Design

We’ve seen some unusual shoes thanks largely to the art collective MSCHF. But artist Canyaon has them beat in terms of variety and creativity. His Instagram page is packed with wild and impractical shoe designs, including ride-on off-road sneakers, steel welder’s boots, BBQ shoes that hold hot dogs and spatulas, and cocktail-dispensing winter boots.

Spring has sprung for Field Notes’ colorful Spring 2024 Quarterly Edition. Three original abstract designs by Chicago artist Emmy Star Brown grace the covers of this limited-edition 3-pack. Printed on high-quality cover stock, the artwork pops with contrasting glossy and dull varnishes. Inside are three page styles: ruled, dot graph, and plain.

This might look like abstract art, but it’s based entirely on data from Wikipedia. Developer adumb wrote code to graph the relationships between content on the crowdsourced encyclopedia. The image maps over 6.3 million Wikipedia articles and 195 million links between them. adumb explains some interesting things he observed along the way.

Bentley’s latest masterpiece is a unique Bentayga Hybrid hand-painted by Stephen Wiltshire, MBE, an autistic savant architectural artist who can sketch detailed cityscapes after a single viewing. Titled “Belonging Bentayga,” the $200K+ Alpine Green car features 29 people and landmarks to embody the unity and diversity of our world while celebrating neurodivergence and craftsmanship.

It’s been over 50 years since Pink Floyd released Dark Side of the Moon. To celebrate the occasion, drummer Nick Mason asked fans to create their own animated music videos for each song on the classic prog rock album. This playlist is gradually revealing all ten winners plus behind-the-scenes interviews with the artists.

We love IFL Watches’ custom colored G-Shock watches. Good thing they expanded the collection using the thin and sporty 43mm GMA-S2100 as their base. The playful rainbow accents on the dial and bezels contrast nicely with the all black case, but there are also see through and other colorways in the CasiOak Mini Collection.

Samsung made a little brother for the Frame TV. Behind the Music Frame’s 8″ x 10″ photo holder is a surprisingly punchy Dolby Atmos speaker. It has two tweeters, two mid-range drivers, and two subwoofers. It can stream music from most services including Spotify and Chromecast, as well as via Bluetooth.

Filmmaker Thomas Blanchard was inspired to make this short film after seeing the nuclear reaction effects in the movie Oppenheimer. The images you see here weren’t created with CGI, but with alcohol inks, gold powder, magic candles, an electric screwdriver, paper clips, and a laboratory shaker. Most of the sequences were filmed in his kitchen, other than the fire.

A beautiful modern pocket knife from Craighill and design studio Chen Chen & Kai Williams. The Sidewinder’s unique folding mechanism features a duo of wavy handle sections which move in concert to reveal its blade. Its design was inspired by a parallel ruler that Kai played with when he was a kid, combined with the way a snake moves through sand.

The Instagram page for keta_valve has a strange assortment of industrial equipment and DIY animations of pandas. This video falls into the latter category, showing off a clever animation technique that uses an iPhone moving through a sequence of paper cutouts to create motion. Watching how it was made was just as entertaining as the finished animation.

Artist Herschel Shapiro makes amazing geometric wall art. He starts by 3D printing petal-like shapes from sustainably sourced bioplastic, then sands and paints each piece to produce color gradients before attaching them. The sculptures are available for purchase on the artist’s Etsy shop in various patterns and colors. His limited-edition Maelstrom is our fave.

This LED accent lamp features color-changing facets you control with your phone. The GLORB is 9.8″ across, or about as big as a basketball, and includes a tabletop stand and a ceiling hook. It’s got a USB-C port, so it can run on a wall charger or a battery pack, can react to music, and can sync multiple units together.

This cool, single-purpose device connects to your phone and displays album art. Instead of a standard screen, it uses a grid of 4096 individual RGB LEDs to create artful, pixelated images. It works with iOS and Android devices and is compatible with Spotify, Apple Music, Sonos, and last.fm.

North of the Border and Studson Studios both like to make weird, creepy, and nerdy sculptures. For fun, they recorded voiceovers for each other, with Adam reporting on Studson’s literal Mario Kart build and Studson voicing Adam’s wonderfully demented McDonaldland official Mayor McCheese. Those thin layers of clay really do look like Velveeta.

Do you like music and math? Then you’ll dig polyrhythms. JLChnToZ (Vistanz) created this captivating video that displays a representation of these complex and often hypnotic sounds in concentric circles. For maximum effect, put the video on full screen, dim the lights, and crank up the volume.

Damascus steel is made by pressing layers of forged metal together. HANS shows how he made a gorgeous dagger using thousands of steel bearing balls. The resulting metal pattern is something he calls Dragon Skin. After making the blade, he fabricated a brass crossguard and a wooden handle. It’s based on a design by Neels Van Den Berg of Black Dragon Forge.

Science expert Joe Myheck shows how he made a unique crown fit for a mermaid queen by pouring a crucible filled with molten metal into a vat of water-absorbing Orbeez gel beads. The metal he used is called Nordic gold – a colorful alloy composed of copper, aluminum, zinc, and tin.

North of the Border just won’t stop making things creepier than they should be. Adam’s latest nightmare fuel is an oversized clay and wire scorpion with human features like nipples, chest hair, fingernails, feet, and flesh-colored skin. Goopy black eyeballs, Tighty-whities, and mouth-arms bring it all together.

We’re so used to seeing crisp, 4K video these days that we almost forgot how much character analog film can bring to moving pictures. illkoncept brought a vintage Bolex H16 Rex-5 16mm camera to Tokyo and Osaka and captured this amazing footage of Japanese nightlife that’s far more compelling than most things we’ve seen shot on modern equipment.

Scott Sloan builds 1:6-scale digital pinball machines that are fully playable. The 3D-printed systems can play many games using Visual Pinball X and are powered by a GMK 5105 mini-computer. They have a 7″ playfield and a 5″ backglass display. Want one? Contact Scott on Facebook. Glen’s Retro Show has a demo video here. Images courtesy of Scott Sloan.

Mike from Modustrial Maker got his hands on some Mexican Logwood stumps and decided to use them to make a coffee table. After cutting the wood into even lengths, he set them into an epoxy bath. A cross-section of each tree can be seen through the tabletop while the stumps provide support. It took a lot of effort, but the end result is worth it.

We recently saw a 3D-printed Apple Macintosh that looks exactly like the original. Scott Yu-Jan created something with a similar aesthetic but with his own unique design. His Macintosh Studio is a custom dock for an iPad Mini that sits atop a Mac Studio. The finished unit looks like one of Hartmut Esslinger’s 1980s Apple computer designs.

Animals come in all shapes and sizes. In this video from Posit Pixel, they use pixel art to describe some of the extremes of the animal kingdom, from diminutive parasitic wasps to a 42-foot-long snake. Along the way, you’ll learn about a fingernail-sized frog and Quetzalcoatlus, an extinct flying animal with a wingspan as big as a single-engine airplane.