Inside my brain: lasers and gold

Inside my brain: lasers and gold

This was going to be a triumphant article about a stellar idea, a struggle of problem solving, learning curves, dangerous lasers, and the final, exuberant splendid result in all its plasticky-golden glory. Yeah, well… The idea! …so the idea: to laser engrave a bunch of slices of my brain in transparent acrylic, stack them… it ...
Beautiful plywood

Beautiful plywood

laser engraving 3D I have mentioned elsewhere, I love laser cutters. I got to try one at uni, and to do some pretty cool things. And wanted to make more. I could have made files and ordered the pieces from professional companies, but the laser is a tool and unlike any other, and to get ...
Hexagon Project: doodling for two hundred frames

Hexagon Project: doodling for two hundred frames

In the chaos that is self-employed life, it's hard to find the time to do personal projects. Personal work is a great way to explore styles and hone your skills. Especially as a graphic designer, I think personal work is muy importante. But when do I do it? After about a year of not doing ...
Twelve golden wild ducks – fairytale in smoke and mirrors

Twelve golden wild ducks – fairytale in smoke and mirrors

There is a fairy tale here in Norway, called the twelve wild ducks. The story is not really important, it a fairly classic good versus evil, patience, purity and deceit. I think it is a pretty convoluted story, and I always found it dissatisfying that there is no attempt at explaining why the princes are ...
Biomimicry: generative art of @inconvergent

Biomimicry: generative art of @inconvergent

inconvergents plotter plotting a plot @inconvergent is a guy who makes magical, beautiful art with algorithms, heavily influenced by nature. In my endless ignorance, I did not think those two things could combine quite like that. I have of course seen wonderful things that nature do, like the amazing life of slime moulds, the murmuration ...
Weightless graffiti

Weightless graffiti

Graffiti – often seen as a bad thing; vandalism (I for one, am a fan for the most part). Then there is "non-intrusive" graffiti, that has a temporary, transient and digital component. Light painting. An act in space and time, that afterwards only lives digitally. The documentation of the act is the only evidence. So ...
Elin's bubbles

Elin’s bubbles

My friend Elin is turning out to be quite the photographer. To my delight, her work is turning increasingly abstract, and her latest batch is of frozen bubbles. What fascinates me is the sense of spindrift in the crystalline structures. And the ephemeral nature of it; of ice, water, air. Delicately frozen in time, frozen in ...
8-Bit Philosophy: Answering humanity's most important questions in 256 colors

8-Bit Philosophy: Answering humanity’s most important questions in 256 colors

The guys over at Wisecrack have created one of the most compelling videos collections I've seen. The group - a media collective run by comedians, academics, filmmakers and artists - attempts to answer humanity's most important questions using 8-bit graphics and constant awesome game references.  The videos themselves are great, with some of the most complex philosophical problems ...
Hexagon Project - Serial Doodles

Hexagon Project – Serial Doodles

Doodling is a great habit to generate new ideas through keeping active. Sketches, drawings and experiments without any objective allow the mind to roam free and prompt new ideas. That's how inspiration is born. Sometimes it's hard to make time for doodling in between all the serious work for customers. That's why I created my ...
Equil smartpen2: phenomenal tool or novelty toy?

Equil smartpen2: phenomenal tool or novelty toy?

I am not into gadgets. The very word implies something useless; perhaps fun for a week, but quickly discarded. A pet hate of mine is the insane amount of electronics made, for stuff that do not need electronics. Waste of resources, batteries, minerals, human costs and filling up insane landfills with rubbish. Enter the Equil ...
Doppelgänger—©Wizards of the Coast

In memoriam: Quinton Hoover

I can't talk about inspirational art for very long until I brush the subject of Magic: the Gathering. I've been playing this geekery-heavy card game for almost twenty years now. In that period, a humonguous amount of fantasy art has been produced by a myriad of artists. It was this art that drew me to ...
Machinarium: details make perfection...

Machinarium: details make perfection…

...and perfection is not a detail. I am a great fan of the work of Amanita design and their games, in particular, Machinarium. Because of this enthusiasm, I have been told that my drawings are heavily influenced by Machinarium and Samorost. But here is the thing; I loved that sort of humour, aesthetics, whimsy and ...
Central Asian art in a couple video games years apart

Central Asian art in a couple video games years apart

Video games are getting prettier and prettier. It's good to see that some of them incorporate actual works of art, sometimes in very distinctive styles. Even some old, very old games have had great art direction. Computer gaming is an old love. I had played multiple simple games on my MSX2 starting at age 8, ...
There is grandeur in this view of life – visualising Darwin

There is grandeur in this view of life – visualising Darwin

If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I had to have to give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. It is not just a wonderful scientific idea; it is a dangerous idea. it overthrows, or at least unsettles, some of the ...
Twelve-fold symmetry

Twelve-fold symmetry

Little trick in Illustrator. One group of half-transparent objects, mirrored and rotated for a twelve-fold symmetry effect. Change one object, all eleven others follow suit. Goodness ensues ...
Summoning seals & glyphs

Summoning seals & glyphs

As a huge gaming geek, I love video games. As a huge design geek, I love ornaments and decorations.  Thus, I love good video games that sport beautiful ornaments. One example that never ceases to inspire me is the Final Fantasy series. Especially the elaborate magical summoning effects border on amazing. An important part of ...
tracing of Tropaeolum majus -- Indian cress

Stylisation a la 1910

Both my father and his father have been interested in art and decoration. Apparently, things like those are in the blood. Recently, my father passed me along scans of a book by one J.H. Boot he found in his archives, which must have belonged to my grandfather. It's a book about stylisation, the art of ...
Design and information

Design and information

Confusion and clutter are the failure of design, not the attributes of information. – Edward Tufte ...
3D printing: liver and silver

3D printing: liver and silver

I am guessing we have all heard of the exciting new technology and research were it is possible to print organs. To me this is mind-blowing on so many levels: ponder the implications. We could print entire organ systems, repair damage, replace tissue, digitally mould external and internal organs. Just thinking about what this could ...
Diego Mazzeo: mechanical animals

Diego Mazzeo: mechanical animals

Green with envy, I present Diego Mazzeo and his wonderful mechanical animals. I am speechless; they are absolutely stunning and perfect in detail. I am particularly fond of the insert heart on the dragon, with the magnification in the corner. Inspired! Diego Mazzeo mechanical animals mechanical dragon dragon closeup mechanical raven raven closeup Diego Mazzeo, ...
textexture

Visualising data, telling stories

Telling stories that can only be seen. Data visualisations can be extraordinarily beautiful. Here are but a few tools. gephi Open-source desktop application, primarily a network visualisation tool, but with plugins galore for space-time extensions. Gapminder Beautiful, multivariate statistics. See this phenomenal TED presentation by Hans Rosling - love that guy Google charts Not surprising, ...