THE BEST Art & Design

A true marriage of art and science: the starkly beautiful, dramatic collection of science experiments captured on film, from Maine photographer Caleb Charland. Outstanding.

As Chief Art Director for ArenaNet, Romanian artist Daniel Dociu has created digital illustrations for games like Guild Wars, NFS and MechWarrior with noteworthy light quality and architectural details.

Photographer Marc Da Cunha Lopes envisions the true creative process behind classic arcade games like Tetris, Arkanoid and Pong in his Made of Myth feature for Amusement magazine.

Akiko Ida and Pierre Javelle of Minimiam imagine tiny worlds in every bite of food. These carefully posed edibles look like tiny landscapes once populated with their miniature residents.

Wood is having a bad day from the looks of this clip by Buck. The art direction in this thinly-veiled environmental statement is worth a watch no matter what you think of cutting down trees.

This animated film by Bricenco and Alapont may be in French, but you don’t need to understand a word to drink in the story – in which the true colors of a black-and-white world are revealed.

A while back, designer Olly Moss created this funny t-shirt that revised the standard food chain diagram by adding zombies. This anonymously upgraded version of the chart is just that much better.

This mechanical device by artist Blake Fall-Conroy does one thing and one thing only. It pays you $7.15 an hour by simply turning the crank. Despite the tedium, it’s probably better than your job.

The Deluxx Fluxx Arcade is an enveloping art collaboration between famed street artists Faile & Bast, where game rooms and machines are transformed into an interactive experience.

An entertaining animated short from Icon Motosports with a visceral graphic novel appeal, illustrated by Lukas Ketner which features a few of their cool jacket and helmet styles too.

Illustrator Franco Brambilla envisions a world of alien invasions, carefully compositied into vintage postcards. There are a variety of lifeforms in the series, the Star Wars images are classics.

Hmmm, does crowd-sourcing in outer space sound surprising to you? Startlingly beautiful photographs of the surfaces of Mars, in locations picked by we, the gen pop, through NASA’s HiWish program.

Artist Rosemarie Fiore doesn’t use brushes to create her bold modern works of art. She blows things up. To put a finer point on it, she “paints” by placing lit firecrackers under small cans of paint.

Graphic artist Juan Pablo Bravo has put together this amazing drawing which shows off 100 characters from Pixar’s animated films, all drawn in proportion to one another.

If you have even the slightest fondness in your heart for the original Star Wars movies, you owe it to yourself to check out these beautiful original concept issues by illustrator Ralph McQuarrie.

Iowa artist Michael Myers has created a richly jewel-toned series of posters, inspired by vintage DC Comics. Be sure to check out his amusingly accurate Lost character illustrations too.

We like the way Chicago photographer Eric Holubow captures the lost souls of abandoned buildings, and all the decaying and dignified stories that still exist within them.

We featured Neill Cameron’s A-Z of Awesomeness project nearly a year ago, but he’s finally releasing it as a signed 286mm x 439mm poster; all profits will be donated to SSNAP.

In addition to exploring strange new worlds, NASA has some mad Photoshop skillz too; these official Mission and Expedition Posters are done up like sci-fi and action movie posters.

Packed with more trivia than a Comic Con, this Periodic Table of Sci-Fi Film and TV Poster takes us back to the future and breaks down all things geeky into its basic (fifth) elements.

Gabriel Cañas’ Tetris Chair has only been seen as a digital render, but he’s finally put the pieces together and created a prototype; it’ll be displayed at the Video Game Museum in Paris.

The Hardcore Gamer’s IQ Test will require all your 8-bit superhero powers; the result of 8 months of work, it packs in 375 games and more than 425 characters and is available as a poster.

Ji Yong-Ho’s Used Tire Sculptures breathe new, organic life into a “tired” substrate: he crafts stunning sharks, wild dogs, and other creatures from tires, steel, wood, and styrofoam.

Patrick Action is Lord of the Buildings: his Matchstick Minas Tirith was finished 2/16/10 after three years and consists of 420k matchsticks, 24k blocks, and 100s of structures. Thanks, Hutchison!

Vandalism is bad, kids, but we can’t help but chuckle at TrustoCorp’s Subversive Street Signs; none of them endanger the public welfare while maximizing (and befuddling) public mindshare.

We wish they were t-shirts, but our geek antennae are still tingling over Chop Shop’s trio of uber-nerdy prints; they include the Nerd Rider, The Craftsman, and The Squid and Robot.