45 ways Super Mario Meets his Doom by Yves Bourgelas

Thought this would be appropriate to save this for a weekend post--"25 Years of Dying" by Yves Bourgelas from Quebec, Canada.  Apparently, it took him 40+ hours in paint Tool SAI, Adobe Photoshop, and Wacom Cintiq to create this timeless masterpiece.  Yes, timeless, because Mario is timeless.  He excels in a comic/cartoon-ish design style, which I find to be kind of awesome.  Click to enlarge.

Follow him @thebourgyman

I think this is something that most of us could relate to.  I really, really hated dying by those piranha plants that pop out of their tubes randomly while playing Super Mario.  Those made me one frustrated kid back in those days.  Anyways, cheers to the weekend.

Video Goodness: Tron Legacy as an 8-Bit Videogame

The Graphic Design of Call of Duty: Black Ops

Even if you've seen this intro animation already, try watching it again to see how many different designs you're able to spot. They move so damn fast, I doubt the human eye can catch up!

Like the millions of 18-25 year old males, I've spent more than a few hours playing Call of Duty.  When I saw the intro animation and cut scenes for the game, I couldnt help but notice so many well designed pieces that were being flipped through REALLY fast.  Like 5 different blips per second.  I'm not sure if any human is able to actually catch all that design just by watching it, try it for yourself.  It was only when I paused every 1/2 a second I was able to see all the beautiful typography and graphics by SPOV Design and Moving Image from London.  It makes me sad to see all this fantastic designs -- pages and pages of stuff that is flipped though in less than 1/5 of a second. Video found via our good blog friend Monsieur Bandit.

Pixar & Video Game Minimalism by Boris Lechaftois

Its really great to see the impact that films, television shows, and games have on fans, especially when those fans are graphic designers that visualize their own simple take on them.  Its become somewhat of a trend in recreating iconic images of these that represent the memorable idea or theme, where upon looking at these images you're able to identify directly with what your takeaway feeling was.  Boris Lechaftois is from Toulouse, France, and has contributed some nice minimal posters to the fan pool.

Follow him @lechaftoisbo

8-Bit Animation Mapping Nuclear Explosions: A Video by Isao Hashimoto

"2053 - This is the number of nuclear explosions conducted in various parts of the globe."

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto rendered this 14-minute long animation that maps out all nuclear explosions around the world from 1045-1998.  It starts out slow, but after 3 minutes the amount of nuclear explosions per country per year starts sounding like experimental electronic music -- which sounds cool, but is definitely the sign of something bigger and scarier.  I had no idea that this many nuclear explosions have taken place, and who knows what the lingering effects are of such nuclear disasters.

In the artists own words:

"This piece of work is a bird's eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second.  No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier.  The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted.  I created this work for the means of an interface to the people who are yet to know of the extremely grave, but present problem of the world."

Justin Russo

Justin David Russo from chi-town doesn't mess around, and he has two sole passions in life--video games and graphic design. His video game inspired posters are crafted deftly (and allegedly in his head overnight), using iconic design points in resembling famous video game characters. He didn't expect his posters to attract so much attention, and ended up getting some of them printed by popular demand.

Last month he just put out this poster in raising money for the Ablegamers Foundation public charity organization "so that all people, regardless of disability, can enjoy the world of gaming"

Thats a worthy cause, and a worthy poster to go with it. 100% of the proceeds go to the cause, and can be bought here. Follow @theroostarr.