Awesome Art & Design

From robots to UFOs to giant monsters, Franco Brambilla takes classic sci-fi staples and mixes them with near-photorealistic imagery; some giclee prints are available here. Thanks, Rick!

Darth Vader never mentions Other Vaders, and with good reason: twang-speakin’ Uncle Garth and bare-butt Barth embarrass the Dark Lord–with the exception of Flavr Vader, of course.

Siberian artist Vitaly Samarin’s work is a fantastic blend of digital and traditional pieces; he specializes in sci-fi and fantasy themes with a leaning towards post apocalyptic scenes.

We’ve seen 3D street art before, but we’re amazed by the sheer scale of Edgar Mueller’s end of the world pieces; who doesn’t relish waking up to a chasm in their driveway?

This 48″ x 18″, poster-sized 2009 Bubble Calendar may not be the best idea for bubble wrapaholics; if we got our hands on one, chances are we’d pop the whole year in a day.

Leading Light Conceptual Design has a gallery of lush concept art for the tentatively named Survivors, a disaster survival game that makes us giddy with post-apocalytic glee.

Infinitely cool for math geeks: Perfectly Scientific’s Prime Number posters show primes up to 2^43112609 – 1; they’re printed so small you’ll need a magnifying glass to read them.

While this Scintillation video is no doubt beautiful, it’s the method that’s most amazing: it’s a 35,000 shot stop-motion film with fantastic DoF focus shifts and live projection mapping.

Somebody get artist Mike Rivamonte a movie studio right now; his retro-styled robots each manage to have a personality all their own, perfect for the next animated short film.

Andy Warhol’s iconography gets Imperial with The Vader Project, a collection of 100 custom fiberglass Vader helmets by street artists including Frank Kozik, Marc Ecko and Dalek.

These 1960s-style paperback covers actually show off contemporary movies including Shaun of the Dead and Big; made by Mitch Ansara, they’re a funky blend of cinema and literature.

Death and Taxes poster creator Jess Bachman is back, this time with 389 Year Ago; it’s a slick typographical homage to the Obama presidency and African American history.

Created by the wizards over at LICHTFAKTOR for a cinema ad, this lightwriting video is some of the slickest light art we’ve seen; look for the cool “bicycle” at about 40 seconds.

Thanks to popular demand, artist Jason Chan’s Zombie Playground is now available as a print; we’ll bet on a gang of rabid third graders over the undead hordes any day.

A twisted take on the famous duck/rabbit optical illusion, Tomas Schneider’s Business As Usual is a mixed media piece about warmongers with ceramic bronze, brass, wood and sand.

Created by Harvard’s Samuel Arbesman, this Milky Way Transit Authority map was inspired by a reading of Carl Sagan’s Contact and applies subway mapping on a galactic scale.