One of the best things about a 45 minute commute each way by train is you can watch some TED videos for inspiration. Here are some of my favorite talks from the series.
Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds
Temple makes the case that there is a little autism in all of us. Its what makes great minds and needs to be celebrated.

Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight
What happens when a brain scientist experiences the very thing she has been studying? Jill talks about her experience during a massive stroke which she knows all about.

David Blaine: How I held my breath for 17 min
David goes into detail about the great lengths he took pushing his body to the limit of oxygen deprivation.

Lewis Pugh swims the North Pole
This guy is tough. To help spread awareness to global warming, Lewis swam in the icey waters of the North Pole in nothing but a speedo.

Kevin Kelly tells technology’s epic story
Kevin explains how technology evolves like a cell or a meme.

Hans Rosling: Asia’s rise — how and when
Hans has a thick Sweedish accent that you would expect from a great mind. Here he predicts the exact day when India and China will outstrip the US as the economic powerhouse of the world. I marked the date in my Google Calendar.

Willard Wigan: Hold your breath for micro-sculpture
Willard makes incredibly detailed sculptures out of single grains of sand. His patience for his work, which can be inhaled without thinking , is really mind blowing.

Painting by Scott Listfield who owns the awesome domain astronautdinosaur.com.

(via BOOOOOOOM)

Matthew Carden has an awesome set of food macro shots on his site 350degrees.com. Using small people figurines, Matt creates imaginative scenes out of food items. The scuba diver on the wine glass is one of my favorites.

There are a lot more on his site including the option to buy prints.

(via The Last People)

Is this Pixar’s next movie? Nope, this is the 2006 demo reel of a fellow Art Institute classmate of mine. Billy Woodward and I graduated at the same time in September of 2006. During our graduation screening, Billy’s demo reel blew everyone away. And even if you ignored his 3d animation or his storytelling abilities, the fact that he got the “Voice Over King”, Don LaFontaine, to do a custom voice over for his demo reel shows just how far he would go to make his vision as compelling as possible. Watching this short trailer made you feel like you were actually in a theater waiting for the feature presentation to start. It was easily the best showing of the night leaving everyone wanting more.

I was going to write up this post at some point in the future but when I heard Don died yesterday from complications of a collapsed lung at age 68, I immediately thought of Billy’s demo reel. The fact that he would take the time out of his busy voice-over schedule to help a graduating art student spruce up his demo reel shows just what a great guy Don was. He will be truly missed and movie trailers just won’t be the same without that booming, authoritative voice we’ve grown familiar with.

I have no idea if these portable cardboard toilets are serious products or some sick joke but I got a kick out of the page design. Featured in Smashing Magazine’s Texture and Patterns Design Showcase, TheBrownCorporation.com lured me in with their simple, to-the-point layout and Little Jack, the quirky mascot.

At any rate, working at The Brown Corporation must be the shit!

Lazy Sunday Afternoon by Brandon Bird features Christopher Walken building a humanoid robot in his garage, presumably on a Sunday afternoon.

I really like the quirkiness of Brandon’s paintings. Most of them feature celebrities in odd situations like The Anguish featuring Michael Landon in a stream holding a squid. Or one of my other favorites, No One Wants To Play SEGA with Harrison Ford, showing the popular action movie star holding a Sega Genesis looking on at two kids playing Nintendo, ignoring him.

Prints of the paintings are available in different sizes and in some cases the original is even for sale. Check out the rest of Brandon’s funny paintings.

by Rob-Sheridan. A wallpaper version is also available. His painting titled Cereal Mascot Reunion is also worth a look.

Mauricio Guimaraes is a web designer and illustrator from Brazil. His online portfolio at mauricio.art.br demonstrates this in a unique way by creating an immersible environment that shows off his world.

It is not a very complex site, only having 4 sections in total, but it more than makes up for depth with rich visuals. The drawings are detailed, animations smooth, and overall is just down right fun to explore and poke around. Flash is the perfect medium for a site of this nature as the non-linear layout is hard to translate in HTML. Plus, Mauricio avoided many of the things that depress the user experience of a Flash site like music blaring, lengthy load times, and an non-interactive intro screen.

So if you are ever thinking about doing a pure Flash website, take a good hard look at your requirements and make sure the medium supports the desired user experience.

This seems like something Nintendo should have come up with but Petri Purho of Klooni Games from Finland came up with an interesting game. You solve puzzles by drawing shapes on a screen. The goal is to get the ball to touch the star but the twist is the shapes you draw are affected by physics like gravity and collisions. Draw a fully enclosed shape and it will drop and bump into other shapes on the screen. The video below gives you a better idea of how it works.

Klooni Games is an experimental game play project where every month Petri comes up with some kind of experimental game. This is a great project to build fresh life in to the gaming world which has a habit of copycatting succesful titles instead of innovating.

Hopefully we will see more exciting things Petri comes up with in March, which just happens to be tomorrow.

Stumbled upon Andy Council’s portfolio today where I saw this…

The title is Scrapzilla, appropriately enough. He has other similar pieces like Rail Rooster and Junk Robot.

Andy has lots of other intricate illustrations in his complete portfolio. It blows my mind how someone can think up something like this.

(via DesignFlavr)