THE BEST Art & Design

BenQ’s swing-arm LED lamp kicks out a much wider field of light than typical desk lamps. It’s been optimized for on-screen reading, and minimizes glare. You can adjust its brightness and color temperature from 2700K to 5700K, and it has an ambient light sensor. Made from lightweight zinc and aluminum alloy.

At the end of the day, just about any hollow enclosure can serve as the cabinet for a speaker. Whether its acoustic properties are any good is another story, but we’re intrigued by this Bluetooth sound system that X-Creation built into the body of a wheelbarrow. The design certainly makes it easy to move around.

Visual effects artist RubenFro creates imaginative 3D worlds. He starts by capturing a point cloud matrix of locales using 360º cameras, then manipulates and renders the dots using a custom shader in Unity, resulting in incredible, ethereal imagery. This footage was captured in the streets of Hanoi, Vietnam.

Microsoft Windows has a long history of throwing annoying and cryptic error messages at us. Video artist 4096 decided to memorialize some of the operating system’s various foibles over the years with a fun-filled electronic music remix inspired by this Japanese video. MacOS even gets into the game at 1:24.

MakePlayingCards is showing off a truly unique deck of cards that you can see through. The waterproof plastic cards feature a high-gloss transparent print that produce an embossed effect. Since you can see their values through their backs, you wouldn’t want to play poker with them, but they’re beautiful for cardistry.

Ceramics artist Trevor Foster created this collection of cups which are designed as a reminder to live life to the fullest. The skull-shaped stoneware cups will come in espresso, tea cup, coffee cup, and mug styles, and can be finished in a variety of glazes, from a deep red iron oxide to pleasant pastels.

Filmmaker Fabrice Mathieu is best known for his creative reimaginings of classic movies. But his latest short film is a standalone work about a mysterious afterworld a man encounters after his death. We love the collaged style of the visuals, and the surrealist environments inspired by the art of Marc Giai-Miniet.

Star Wars fans will love these laser-engraved baltic birch coasters, each of which features a planetary destination in a galaxy far, far away. There are nine designs in all, with familiar locales like Hoth and Tatooine, along with less-explored lands like Kashyyyk and Geonosis. Sold in sets of four or more.

Looking for another relaxing activity to pass some time at home? This book is filled with dot-to-dot illustrations of famous locations around the globe. Like the other books in in Thomas Pavitte’s dot-to-dot series, each image is made from exactly 1,000 dots, and comes printed on a tear-out page, suitable for framing.

Filmmaker Seán Doran processed about a week’s worth of data captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory to create this awe-inspiring UHD video of the Sun’s activity. Max out the resolution, go full screen, dim the lights, and crank up the audio for a truly hypnotic journey to our Solar System’s number one life-giver.

dP Art Drawing loves to experiment with many different drawing techniques. Recently, he decided to create an image by covering a background with charcoal powder, then revealing its subject using an electric eraser. The second drawing achieves more subtle shading with an ordinary 50 cent eraser though.

Erik Jensen creates art using a non-traditional medium. Instead of paints, pencils, or ink, he creates original works and replicas of famous paintings using computer keys. He dyes the the keys with various colors then painstakingly arranges them into pixel grids. Erik sells originals and prints on his website.

UK shop ReadyPlayerTwo creates neat 3-dimensional logo signs inspired by classic video game and computer systems. Each one is 3D printed from PLA plastic to accurately replicate the original color scheme, and has neodymium magnets securely mounted inside. They also make personalized C64 and Sinclair ZX logos.

Anyone who lived through the 1990s can tell you that watching movies on videotape was a decidedly lower quality experience than today’s HD and UHD technologies enable. Tom Scott met up with the team from Red Giant to learn how their software can make modern footage look like it was recorded on VHS.

A fantastic Japanese import for fans of monster movies, this oversize 96-page coloring book is loaded with Yuji Kaida’s line art illustrations of classic monsters and creatures, including Godzilla, Gamera, Ultraman, and more. The book also includes small color images of the original paintings for reference.

Former Pixar animator Erick Oh’s goofy short film is packed with the silliest array of characters we’ve run into in a while. It follows the story of a naked hot dog on a quest to figure out his who he really is, and the other possibly edible folks he encounters along his journey.

Pop Chart’s double-meaning wall print is a great gift for pie bakers and graph makers. It features 13 yummy kinds of pies, each represented as a pie chart; its ingredients displayed in relative proportions, along with a color-coded legend. Measures 24″ x 18″, unframed.

Want to make your own stop-motion animation? Animator Edu Puertas shows off a few simple tricks using household items like tape, wire, aluminum foil, and pillow stuffing to embellish your creations with, and give them a more finished look.

(PG-13: Gore) A coyote miraculously survives an attack by a pack of wolves, but remains haunted by horrible visions of the carnage as he attempts to get back to life. Director Lorenz Wunderle’s award-winning short for YK Animation is a brutal and powerful tale of loss and revenge. This one’s definitely not for the kids.

Motion designer Jonathan Lindgren’s animated short film is a mouth-watering tribute to the art of making sushi. The combination of Lindgren’s sharp visuals, Luke Brown’s sound effects, and staccato voice work by Yoshi Amao, creates the perfect reflection of the precision with which sushi masters ply their craft.

LAMAR+NIK’s music video for the track Manhorse by Husbands uses a technique known as “Scanimation” or “picket-fence animation.” The trick uses several frames of motion interlaced together onto card stock, and then viewed through a transparent bar mask. You can download Scanimations from the video here.

Metamaterials are materials that are defined by their structure, rather than their composition. In 2017, researchers from the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences designed a modular framework which can reconfigure as if by magic, resulting in entirely new structures when directional forces are applied.

While stuck at home with some free time on his hands, car enthusiast Brian King aka AWDcutlass decided to rebuild a full-size GM LS V8 engine inside of a transparent acrylic shell. It’s pretty wild to see all the parts moving inside of it, and it looks especially awesome when he turns on the LED lighting. See Part 1 of the build here.

Being quarantined has forced filmmakers to get really creative working within such constraints. To make the video for Glass Animals‘ track Dreamland, director Colin Read and his production team shipped musician Dave Bayley all of the lighting, camera gear, props, and a 50-page manual for shooting the entire video by himself.

Artist and programmer Cyril Diagne shows of a slick tech demo of an augmented reality app that can snap pictures of real world objects and drop then directly into Adobe Photoshop. Simply point, click, and aim your phone where you want to paste the object. Source code available here.

Jackman Works builds all kinds of interesting things from wood. Here, he shows off a rather interesting way to construct a large decorative vase. He started out by gluing wedges of wood into circles, then carved ripples into the pieces before stacking them like a bunch of offset Pringles.