Awesome Art & Design

This special edition puzzle adds a tactile dimension to the classic Rubik’s Cube. Each of its color cubes also has a different embossed texture, making it possible to be solved in the dark, with a blindfold on, or by people with visual impairments.

New Zealand artist Glenn Jones of Glennz is known for his silly illustrations of objects in outlandish and sometimes punny situations. Here, he envisions a place where a Slinky can enjoy perpetual motion, thanks to an Escher-esque impossible staircase. Of course, there’s already a real world solution to this problem.

A while back, maker Ivan Miranda built himself a robot which could write words in the sand. He’s back to build an upgraded version of the machine which can draw much faster than the previous one. It uses 50 mini servos to doodle, two mini tanks to drive, and Arduino Mega controllers for its digital brains.

Calling occupants of Planet Earth! This fun kit lets you build a pixelated 3D model of our globe using 1338 tiny bricks. The resulting planet is small enough to fit in the palm of your hands, and will look great sitting on your desk or bookshelf. Just don’t let the dog get ahold of it, or you’ll have a tiny armageddon on your hands.

During the lockdown, the digital artists of Universal Everything imagined what the world might be like if society as we know it ended, and nature took back over the planet. The first of the two infinite-loop vignettes replaces highways with grass and flowers, while the second envisions an airport overgrown with greenery.

Add a touch of LEGO awesomeness to any room with these whimsical wall hooks that look like oversize round LEGO 1×1 studs. The set of three includes one white (1″), one black (2″), and one grey (3″) hook. They’re perfect for hanging minifig cosplay hats.

Geoff Collard takes us on a POV tour of his recreation of the bridge from the Starship Enterprise D on The Next Generation. It features an incredible level of detail, with light-up displays, and a viewscreen that plays videos of space. You can check out more pics of his impressive seven-year build on Facebook.

Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s Robot Knight – an automaton he created somewhere around 1495, Robotime’s drawing machines use a series of stackable wood cams to create different sketches as you turn their hand cranks. Available in The Gambler, The Slayer, and The Robot designs. Assembly required.

Video artist Donato “Milkyeyes” Sansone combined footage of Olympic athletes performing a variety of movements, from gymnastics to diving to track and field events, seamlessly melding together their motions so they look like one extended routine. The technique is a refinement of his earlier clip, Concatenation.

Makers of cool metal objects AltDynamic are back with another really sweet design. The Tesseract is a CNC-machined aluminum cube within a cube that looks like a rare totem from another dimension. It comes in three sizes: 1.9″ Mini, 2.4″ Mighty, and 2.9″ Mega, in raw aluminum and three anodized colors.

Designed by Enrica Martiné, these unique playing cards feature imagery inspired by the traditional mechanical drawing style of blueprints. Each card is printed in an indigo blue with fine white line art, while the face cards, backs, and boxes will have accents of metallic silver ink thanks to already reaching a stretch goal.

Maker Jimmy Diresta wanted a place to hide some of his whiskey, so he set about crafting a book with cutouts that can hold a couple of bottles of Bulleit (and a single glass.) Most of the work was performed by slicing through the book’s pages with a laser cutter. Of course, laser cutting paper is not done without the occasional fire.

Phil is a skeleton. He quickly rose to fame on the big screen as a stop-motion superstar. Then, modern effects put him out of business. Michael Shanks’ (aka “timtimfed“) charming short film is a fun blend of live-action, animation, and VFX, and a loving tribute to the great Ray Harryhausen. Behind the scenes here.

M.N. Projects shows off a nifty little weapon he machined from aluminum. It has a set of hinged arms which are attached to springs that store up energy when the bow is drawn back. We certainly wouldn’t want to catch one of those metal-tipped arrows in an eyeball.

Traveler Arkady Fiedler and photographer Kamil Piechowiak present 3-minutes of footage their epic 6000-mile journey from Copenhagen to the Arctic Circle to Finland. From the Aurora Borealis to whiteout snowstorms, the images they captured along the way are spectacular. The full documentary series is due out 9.2020.

This stainless steel tool helps draw circles, arcs, and straight lines, and can also measure. It combines a protractor, straight edge, T-square and compass functions, and can measure in inches, centimeters, picas, and pixels. It packs neatly in your wallet alongside your credit cards.

William Crook’s 23-second animated clip might be short, but it’s an impressive and clever bit of stop-motion. The premise is simple, but effective: imitate the action of striking, lighting, and burning a match using nothing but a twig and some appropriately colorful leaves.

Blackhand typically uses his X-Acto knife to build stuff out of cardboard. But in this clip, he used his sharp hobby blade to cut out silhouettes from 1400 pieces of paper, transforming footage of a dancer’s moves into a stop-motion animation. Original video here.

Black Beard Projects shows off a nifty kind of material that can be used to make handles and grips on tools. By stacking together thin layers of cork and soaking them with resin, he produced a sturdy and unique stock that can be used sculpted and sanded like a block of wood.

After building himself an F1 car out of soda cans, builder The Q decided to make himself another cool, but highly-impractical vehicle. This time, he spent over 200 hours building a bicycle entirely out of wood and glue – including the frame, wheels, chain, seat and pedals.

Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite was arguably the best movie of 2019, blending tense storytelling, moody cinematography, social commentary, and the darkest of humor. Great Big Story explains how the house at the center of its story never really existed, and was entirely created as a series of sets by Production Designer Ha-Jun Lee.

Sunlife Drawing’s unique coloring books offer a different kind of relaxation for your mind. Rather than traditional illustrations to color in, each page is filled with black and white lineart which result in halftones line and dot patterns when filled in.

Photographer Jens Heidler of Another Perspective is always showing off great ideas for shooting your own creative photos. In this clip, he reveals some simple tricks you can do using sparklers and a power drill to bring light, energy, and motion to images.