Mr. Wonka! Just Punisher of Coddled Children

As much as I hate posting anything with a shelf date of more than 1 month, this was simply to good not to rave about. This amazing piece of design, this fictional relic...it's everything I love in visual form.

1. It's a Geek/Americana mashup (if you can consider 70s Penguin book covers Americana, and I do)
2. It's Engrish.
3. It's cute.
4. It works on many levels (this is not only the best scene in the movie, but it's a metaphor for the ENTIRE MOVIE, which I never realized till now. Omg.)

The time traveler responsible for this is Spacesick. He has tons more of the "I Can Read Movies" series on his webpage, and tons of just all around great design on his Flickr, like this:



This was a threadless t-shirt design but it lost! What the hell! People just don't get the wereburger joke.

Team Fortress 2 - Cartoons Never Looked So Badass

Since the PS3 and XBox360 came out I've wondered how long it will be before video games begin using character animation sophisticated enough to make gameplay indistinguishable from say, a Pixar movie. Turns out the designers at Valve are in fact hard at work creating gorgeously rendered, chunky-yet-smooth cartoon character designs for the upcoming Team Fortress 2.


Illustrative Rendering In Team Fortress 2

This behind-the-scenes vid is refreshingly technical and info-packed, but those who, like me, don't include the words "clamped lambertian" in their volcabularly might get lost around 2:13. Might. I'm not saying I did.

For high-res vids of these hot graphics in action, check out the game teasers, which show off a great sense of humor as well.

Via Bleeding Pixels