London-based infographic maker Dorothy has been inspired by a lot of different types of prints in their times, creating great prints such as fhorror films arranged as star charts to periodic tables of sex talk. But its latest print, Electric Love, might be its cleverest yet. It's a semi-complete history of electronic music, arranged as a theremin blueprint—one of the earliest electronic instruments.

Loosely grouping together innovators in electronic music as far back as 1857, the Electronic Love chart contains well-known names like the eponymous Léon Theremin, Bob Moog, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, and Aphex Twin, as well as distinct genres such as electronica, musique concrète, and Krautrock. Screen printed in metallic silver on a blue uncoated stock, the finished design contains over 200 inventors, innovators, artists, composers, and musicians.

"The style of the diagram is based on instructions of how to build a theremin," says Dorothy founder James Quail. "There are quite a lot of instructions out there, but we took a lot of inspiration from instructions from the mid-'50s—altered and stylized in order to enable us to construct a structure which we can then use to connect related artists."

That means that if you're inspired enough by Electronic Love, you could take it off the wall and use it as a basis to start your own electronic music career. Not a bad value for a price of around $50.

Look at the posters for Lost In Translation, Eraserhead, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Drive, and The Exorcist. So many of the world's most iconic movie posters are still-life adaptations of equally iconic shots.

Simply titled Movie Titles, Barcelona-born, L.A.-based filmmaker Pablo Fernández Eyre plays with this idea by bringing many of the world's most famous posters to life with footage from the original films. And it makes for some killer GIFs.

In addition to the aforementioned films, Eyre includes living versions of The Shining, E.T, Punch-Drunk Love, Rocky, Independence Day, Shame, Spirited Away, Ponyo, and Stranger Than Paradise posters.

But while these make for some killer GIFs, there's a revelation here: With the exception of The Shining and maybe Rocky, most of the scenes that make for the best posters are actually moments of quiet and stillness, even in much more frenetic films. The Exorcist's poster would be nowhere near as iconic if it was Regan spewing vomit soup; Eraserhead's poster just wouldn't work if it was a horrible swaddled baby in a crib; and a poster for Drive which shows Ryan Gosling taking a hammer to a guy's face misses the point of that characters unnerving inner stillness. In way, putting these posters in motion makes the point that the best posters don't need motion to make their points at all.

Check out more of Eyres's work here.

Think With Google is a service Google offers that gives marketers insight into how to best promote their companies. It offers a series of tools which use Google's own data to analyze trends, behaviors, and more. It's a useful service, but Google wanted to figure out a way to make it easier for companies to try it out, while also getting useful results.

Google ended up turning to a curiously throwback technology for their solution: the humble pencil and paper. Or perhaps not-so-humble. With the help of London-based branding agency MultiAdaptor, they created the My Edit, an analog notebook and pencil that works as the UI for the online Think With Google experience.

Here's how using My Edit works. Plugging the notepad into your computer, you open it to the first page, and tick off what you want to do with checkmarks from a pool of options like "increase brand awareness" or "drive sales." Next, you check off the platform you want to leverage, such as search, video, mobile, or display. Once you've ticked the boxes off, the Think With Google website loads up on your computer, showing you ways in which you can accomplish what you just ticked off on paper. It's like a bridge between a paper to-do list and Google's actual website.

My Edit was created with the help of industrial designer Roland Ellis, who developed a conductive bookbinding glue which connects the MyEdit's circuitry to printed pages without any other parts. The reason checking things off on a paper notepad is able to open webpages on a computer is because the ink marking off the checkboxes is conductive. When you draw a line through the box with a pencil, the graphite closes the connection, sending a signal to the Arduino board.

To get this off the ground, 1,000 "My Edit" notepads were made and sent out to companies in Italy and the UK. It's a very clever way to onboard new customers who might otherwise find the abundance of tools on Think With Google intimidating. And even if you're not interested in using Think With Google, the My Edit notepad comes with enough blank pages to be useful, even without plugging it in. I'd love to see a consumer notebook take a similar tack for to-do lists: Moleskine's next tech play, perhaps?

[via Creative Review]

Related: Google's New Logo Is Its Biggest Update In 16 Years

Rightly or wrongly, when you think of BitTorrent, you usually think of piracy. But with Project Maelstrom, BitTorrent is aiming to leverage its peer-to-peer file distribution technology to the very web itself, creating a browser that downloads webpages not from a central server, but from other people who have visited the site. And it's almost as much of a data viz as it is a browser.

To explain how Project Maelstrom works, BitTorrent put up a great graphic explainer. Project Maelstrom uses BitTorrent's magnet links to find copies of a webpage across its peer-to-peer network. BitTorrent works by sharing bandwidth; everyone is uploading the parts of a file they have to everyone else in the swarm, while downloading the parts they don't. In the old days of BitTorrent, you had to download a torrent file from a tracker to get a list of all the other people who were currently torrenting it. These days, though, you can click on a magnet link, which automatically finds all the other people who are currently torrenting a certain file.

As BitTorrent explains, magnet links work sort of like finding a person at a huge party: you just ask. You bump into one person, then ask them if they've seen your friend. If they haven't, you keep asking. Eventually, you might find someone who knows where your friend is, or just knows someone they think might know where he is. Ask enough people, and you'll eventually find your friend.

That's the way Project Maelstrom finds a website. If you go to Fast Company, it'll use this exact same process to find people around the world also running Project Maelstrom who have little bits and pieces of Fast Company still on their computers. They'll seed what they have to you, while anything that's missing gets downloaded from Fast Company's servers. It's a faster approach that also helps prevent web servers from being crushed by extreme traffic.

What's cool about Project Maelstrom is that it's not just a web browser, but it's also a data visualization of how a website is being served to you. If you want to see it in action, you can download the Windows beta here.

We put handles on our mugs and our pots, but not our bowls or our plates. With their new line of dishware, Japanese design house Nendo is asking why not. The Totte-Plates line of bowls and plates each have a small, bracket-shaped handle on their rims, allowing you to carry your bowl of soup as easily as you would a coffee mug.

The dishes, which get their name from totte, the Japanese word for handle, are available in three sizes and five different colors. Their calling card, the handle, is a simple addition, but I actually think this makes a lot of sense. First of all, handles can prevent bowls and plates from burning your hand if they're too hot to touch. But more to the point, handles make things easier to store in small apartments and kitchens. Instead of needing shelves and cabinets to store your plates and dishes, you can just loop the handles through hooks in the wall.

Considering the fact that bowls and plates are some of the bulkier items you need to store in your kitchen, it's actually pretty remarkable no one added a handle to them before now. Sadly, like many of Nendo's products, the Totte-Plates are only available for purchase in Japan right now, and range in price between $8 and $22.

Inspired by micro-organisms, anemones, and undersea plants, German glass painter Wilfried Grootens is such a master of his craft that by simply turning one of his cubic paintings to the side, the "three-dimensional" creations trapped inside completely disappear.

The effect is remarkable, even if it's an optical illusion. To create his cubist glass paintings, Grootens paints dots, lines, tendrils, and swirls upon dozens of panes of laminated glass. When sandwiched together, the combined paintings take on the appearance of a cubic aquarium, inside of which a beautiful, phosphorescent organism of alien origins floats and glows. But since Grootens paints only on the surface of each layer, the painting disappears when you look at it from the perspective of the cube's cross-section. It's a beautiful, slightly surreal effect that only underlines his mastery of his chosen craft.

Grootens has been painting glass since he was 15, when he first became an apprentice at the Deric Company in Germany. There, he learned to restore antique stained-glass windows. When he left at the age of 19, Grootens opted to tour the world, visiting Asia and South America before he eventually returned to his youthful passion for glass. Since 1989, he has been creating extraordinary glass paintings out of his studio in the northwestern German town of Kleve, close to the Dutch border.

If you'd like to see one of Grootens's glass paintings for yourself, his work will be on display at the upcoming SOFA Expo Chicago through Habitat Galleries, starting this Thursday, November 5.

(Via: This Is Collossal)

Accidentally bump against a normal coffee table, and you might get a shin bruise. Do it against South Korean designer Seung Jun Jeong's Table Chieut, though, and you might sheer your legs right off. It's a table with a profile as thin as the blade of a knife.

Created out of solid steel, the Table Chieut almost looks like a Korean logogram from the side. It uses three thin, widely splayed legs to keep a heavier steel tabletop balanced, regardless of how much you stack on top.

Truthfully, this probably would only look good in an ultra-modern apartment, but I sort of love it. It looks like a Zoolander joke: "What is this, a table for Flatland?"

As for those of us with less two-dimensional living space? We can opt for Table Chieut's Swedish-style sister table instead, which trades the Table Chieut's steel tabletop and legs for white plastic and bamboo.

Check out more of the work from Jeong's Studio Design Jay here.

When you're backpacking, there's nothing quite as nice as tucking in early and curling up with a book in your hostel. And that's doubly true at Tokyo's Book and Bed hostel, a place designed to look and feel like sleeping over in an old bookstore for the night.

Hostels tend to be one of a couple things. Either they're antiseptic dorm rooms lined with tile, fluorescent overheads, and crisp bleached sheets or "rustic" fleabags. So you've got to give props to Book and Bed, the self-described "accommodation bookshop," for finding a different aesthetic. It's full of lined shelves, cozy nooks, and comfortable reading lights, not to mention thousands of books that guests can peruse.

Located in the commercial/entertainment hub of Northwest Tokyo's Ikebukuro district, Book and Bed was designed by Makoto Tanijiri and Ai Yoshida. Not only is it filled with more than 1,700 Japanese and English books, curated by Shibuya Publishing & Booksellers, the hostel bunks themselves are built right into the bookshelves, with each separate nook outfitted with a separate mattress, light, and power strip.

You can't buy the books, sadly, but you can read them to your heart's content, as long as you're willing to rent a bunk for the night. Prices ranged for around $29 for a "compact" bookshelf to around $37 for a "standard," which is actually pretty good for a hostel located in one of the most expensive cities on Earth.

If you're a librophile looking to go to Tokyo, you can book a room at the Book and Bed website here.

First created by famed British typeface designer Eric Gill in 1928, Gill Sans has been used over the years by everyone from the BBC to Ferris Bueller. Its most iconic use, though, is probably on the jackets of Penguin paperbacks starting in 1935. Penguin's vintage covers are a good illustration of both Gill Sans's strengths (it's an excellent font for headlines, titles, and logos), as well as its drawbacks (it's much poorer at body text). Joanna, Eric Gill's lovely serif typeface, has similar qualities, which is why Penguin used it on the covers of their Modern Classics series, starting in the 1960s.

Add in the fact that both typefaces are looking a little frayed in the digital age, and it's no wonder that Monotype is remastering Gill Sans and Joanna for the 21st century as Gill Sans Nova and Joanna Nova. But they're not stopping there. In addition to expanding and cleaning up Gill Sans and Joanna, Monotype is releasing a new typeface, called Joanna Sans Nova, which combines the DNA of both fonts to create a humanist sans serif. The result is the first Gill-family font designed for pixels, and not hot type.

"The reason we're doing this is because Monotype needs to have both a foot in the past and a foot in the future," says Steve Matteson, creative type director at Monotype. "We have this amazing legacy, represented by Eric Gill and other famous designers, who brought a rich tradition of type to our company. But we also need to focus on contemporary type designs for contemporary needs. With the Eric Gill Series, it was a unique opportunity to put both of those feet on the same page."

Monotype is no stranger to remastering typefaces from its archives: It has previously remastered Verdana and Georgia, Unica, and many others. There are many reasons why you might remaster a typeface—perhaps expanding it with new characters and weights. And that's certainly true of Gill Sans Nova and Joanna Nova, which gain both features. But the real reason Monotype is remastering these fonts has to do with the time in which they were originally created.

"Both Gill Sans and Joanna were originally designed for Monotype machine typesetting," Matteson explains. In other words, each character in these typefaces needed to be physically carved out of a piece of metal, so Gill Sans and Joanna were originally optimized for a finite number of point sizes. In the digital age, though, a font can be anywhere from 6 points on an Apple Watch to 1,000 points on a billboard. To keep up, Gill Sans and Joanna needed to be unbounded, tweaking their designs so they looked clean, crisp, and readable at a nearly infinite number of sizes, weights, and mediums.

The remastering of the Eric Gill Family has also allowed Monotype to expand these typefaces in fun, unexpected, and sometimes obscure ways. Matteson tells me that Monotype, over the years, has occasionally created custom versions of Gill Sans for various customers. One such variation called Gill Sans Deco, which contained drop shadows, was withdrawn from production because it was simply too expensive to maintain. But now it's a part of Gill Sans Nova. Likewise, when Gill Sans was first released, its main competition was Futura, prompting some Monotype customers to ask if Gill Sans could be retrofitted with the pointy tips of the font (now a Wes Anderson favorite). They weren't ever part of the regular production of Gill Sans, but for Gill Sans Nova, Monotype has introduced these Futura hybrids as alternate characters. (Joana Sans Nova also has some adorable alternate characters, such as a curvy, loopy K.)

But let's not forget the other half of the equation: Joanna Sans Nova. Designed not just to be a digital-first typeface, perfect for reading on screens, it also fills a hole in the Eric Gill Family of fonts as a go-to for body text. "The three typefaces work perfectly together in a publishing situation," he says. "For a magazine, you might put your subheadings in Joanna Nova, the bulk of your text in Joanna Sans Nova, and your headlines in Gill Sans Nova."

After spending two years as part of a team of three other designers (George Ryan, Ben Jones, and Terrance Weinzierl) putting the Eric Gill Series together, Matteson says he's confident that these three new typefaces can now stand up to the scrutiny of the 21st century. But would they stand up to the scrutiny of Eric Gill, the notoriously fussy perfectionist?

"Is Eric Gill rolling over in his grave? Probably yes," laughs Matteson. "He was quite a character, but he also had a big ego. He wanted the public to appreciate his work. So even if he's rolling in his grave over some of our decisions, we think he'd still be in approval of bringing his work into the 21st century. He'd be happy he's still relevant."

The new typefaces are available for license and download from MyFonts, Fonts.com, and Linotype.com.

Piggy banks teach kids lessons about savings, spending, delayed gratification, and responsibility. But they're also increasingly obsolete, as allowances increasingly get paid out in ATM cards and Bitcoin, not cash and coin. How do you transfer the lessons of the old-fashioned piggy bank to the digital age?

Ernit is a cute cyber-piggy that aims to teach kids to give, save, and spend money wisely, even if that money's all virtual. Instead of plunking coins into his belly, family members contribute money to Ernit by app. But the money isn't invisible once it's inside Ernit. Instead, it's linked to concrete goals—a new bike, maybe, or a birthday gift for Grandma, or even a gift to charity. Kids can check how far along they are to their goal just by looking at how full the ring of LED lights is on their piggy bank's snout.

Ernit is the brainchild of Søren Nielsen (previously the editor of Denmark's largest financial magazine, Penge & Privatøkonomi), Lars Larsen (owner of the award-winning design bureau Kilo) and Thomas Bjerring and Mads Tagel, previously of ad agency DDB and design bureau Thank You. According to Nielsen, the impetus of all four cofounders uniting to make Ernit a reality was the fact that they shared fatherhood in common. The discussion about Ernit started three years ago between Bjerring and Nielsen as they contemplated the impending birth of their first children.

"We talked about parenting and how to give your children good habits," says Nielsen. "Both Thomas and I had had a piggy bank as children and we loved to put money into it, save for different things, and pour the money out to count it. Even three years ago, Thomas and I were mostly digital when it came to money: none of us ever had cash. So how were we going to teach our children about this intangible object?"

According to Nielsen, the piggy bank is a valuable tool to teach children lessons that will serve them well for the rest of their life about their finances. As money becomes an increasingly abstract concept, Nielsen says it's important for children to feel like they can experience money physically, through sight, sound, and even touch. So the Ernit piggy bank has been designed to be a sensory experience. When you deposit money in the piggy bank, it lights up and makes a sound. It's also made of organic silicone to give it a soft, cuddly feeling, inviting a child to caress the piggy bank, even if money is only put into it digitally. Although the industrial design of Ernit is reminiscent of a classic piggy bank, it is a decidedly 21st century take on one. That's a concerted effort to use industrial design as a way to connect generations. "It's supposed to awaken nostalgia in parents about their own childhood," says Nielsen, even as it looks new and high-tech to kids raised in the iPhone age.

Ernit just completed a successful Kickstarter, and will start shipping in June of next year. You can also apply to preorder Ernit directly from the official website for $79.

When Shannon Goff was five years old, her grandfather bought a brand-new car: a 1979 Lincoln Continental Mark V. "Rakish, decadent, and wildly inefficient," Goff still remembers every detail of that car, including its color (Medium Metallic Turquoise), its "white padded vinyl carriage roof, turquoise leather interior, and Cartier clock." A native Detroiter, now Goff has recreated her grandfather's 1979 Lincoln Continental in cardboard, right down to its Cartier clock. The only thing that's missing is the turquoise.

In a very real way, points out Goff, the 1979 Lincoln Continental was an utterly absurd car. "My grandfather paid $21,000—just shy of $70,000 in today's money—for his two-door leather-draped luxury cruiser, which was in fact an underpowered gas guzzler," she says. It averaged 10 to 12 miles per gallon during the oil crisis of the Carter administration. Meanwhile, the same year, Honda released the CVCC, a vehicle that retailed for $3,999 and got 40 miles per gallon. "Lincoln's advertising copy essentially ceded the future to other cars," Goff points out. "The company didn't claim to have made the best car; it just asserted it had made something no one would see again."

Quintessentially, then, the Lincoln Continental was a car that could only come out of the insanity of precrash Detroit. By translating the Continental into cardboard, Goff says she strives to reconnect with Detroit's great history of car manufacturing, not as someone working an assembly line, but as an artisan and maker: the sort of people who originally made Detroit great. It's also a tribute to her grandfather. "I always loved my grandfather's Lincoln, and had thought about making it but shied away due to its overwhelming scale," she says. "But a few years ago, after he passed away, this idea rose to the surface."

To build her cardboard Continental, Goff spent two years in her garage putting it together piece by piece. She researched the design of the original at the Benson Ford Research Center and Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, where she was able to leaf through spec drawings, advertisements, and so on. She also worked off a 1/64th scale model of the car, which she turned into a 3-D scan, then sliced this apart into "umpteen layers," which she cut out of cardboard with a jigsaw, then pieced together into the finished product after countless months.

One thing Goff says her cardboard Continental is not is a replica of her grandfather's car. The dimensions of this paper-craft automobile aren't exact to the original, and it's still missing many critical pieces, like a floor. It's also not turquoise . . . a conscious decision, says Goff. "I considered making it the color of my grandfather's car, but in the end, I decided white was perfect. It's forlorn and forgotten, a ghost rider of sorts."

Calling the finished product Miles to Empty, Goff sees her cardboard Lincoln Continental as a project about memory and loss, and, ultimately, a memorial to her grandfather and the once great city of automakers in which she grew up. If you'd like to see it for yourself, it's currently on display at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery in Ferndale, Michigan, until November 21.

In music theory, phasing is a compositional technique in which the same sequence of notes are played over and over again by two instruments, one of which continuously increases its tempo. This creates a number of interesting effects. First one instrument seems to echo the other. Then each note is doubled. Then the notes begin to sound like they're ringing, until finally, the up-tempo instrument loops totally around, and the instruments are completely in sync again.

What phasing demonstrates is that a musical composition isn't just influenced by its arrangement of notes, but by the tempo and combination in which they are played. Musicians such as Brian Eno and Sufjan Stephens have made use of phasing in their albums, even if you don't realize it. But you'll be able to spot it immediately next time you see it thanks to Piano Phase, a new visualization by Google creative director Alexander Chen, that shows how phasing works.

Previously on Co.Design for his strummable MTA Subway Map and animating the Beach Boys' pop ecstasy, Chen is a master of musical visualizations. (He was also the creator of the popular Les Paul Google doodle.)

With Piano Phase, Chen visualizes a twelve note sequence from Steve Reich's 1967 piece of the same name. In that piece, two pianists repeat the same notes, but one gradually speeds up, so that he is playing the second note while the other pianist is playing the first. Eventually, by the end of the piece, the two pianists completely sync up again. It's a complicated process to wrap your head around, but by animating the two pianos independently as a duo of red and blue lines, Chen makes what is happening in the piece seem more intuitive.

Even if you don't care about phasing though, Chen's Piano Phase visualization is neat to look at, almost like an animated piano duel.
You can check it out here.

We live in the full throes of the electric age. Why do all our gadgets look the same, then? Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Dan Adlešič was sick of the sleek-but-boring rectangles of glass, plastic, and aluminum that make up the material geometry of pretty much every 21st-century gadget. Instead, he has imagined a series fictional appliances that look like they just came from Pee-Wee's Playhouse: surrealist devices that are meant to re-awake our sense of wonder in the electric age.

The name of Adlešič's project is "Electricity is just like... woah!" That's a pretty good encapsulation of the Ted "Theodore" Logan-like response he's hoping to garner from his gadgets, which look like everything from dinosaurs to Pixar cyclopses. What unites them isn't just their unconventionally wacky looks, but their equally surreal interactions. Adlešič's gadgets are designed to be turned on and off by yelling at them, slapping them, squeezing them, and even smacking them with sticks.

There are seven gadgets in the series. Four of them are power strips, but these aren't like the boring white plastic rectangles you have plugged in near your desk. One has four antenna and a baby arm sticking out of it, which only turns on if the dice-like remote is facing up. Another has a sensor hidden inside an embedded eye which uses motion detection to turn on. The "Solid Multiplug" looks like a bar of soap, but is so heavy, you can't actually move it: to turn it on, you hit it with a stick. And finally, there's the "Multiplug Dino," a Tyrannosaurus power strip you need to yell or smack to turn on, and which only provides power as long as you are screaming or hitting it.

There are three other gadgets in the series, too. "Live Screen" is a mirror which only reflects you when you're dancing in front of it. "Safe" is a jewelry box that squeezes precious objects in an accordion of polyurethane foam, and only unlocks when you place a set of keys in a small toy hand at the base. And the "Stand By" lamp is a soft-colored mood light inspired by light indicators on consumer electronics that are only visible in complete blackness.

What madness inspired these gadgets? Adlešič says he was originally inspired by his experiences in improv, and wanted to figure out a way to introduce some unexpected spontaneity in our interfaces. But he also wanted to play with our expectations on what a gadget should feel and look like. "Electronic components are colorful and playful but often hidden behind minimalistic shells which I find very sad," he says. "I believe electricity should be used in a much wider and more poetic manner. There might be a limit to technology, but there are no limits to how and where it can be applied."

I'm fussy with my notebooks. I want them to be orderly, chronological compendiums of my ideas, my creative processes, and my life. But all too often, they become disorderly. I've been known to throw out good notebooks just because they gradually turned from models of Bullet Journal efficiency into schizophrenic, stream-of-conscious diaries that look like they were plucked right off the shelves of the apartment of Kevin Spacey's character in Seven.

The Rekonect is a new journal, somewhat similar to a Moleskine in appearance, with one killer feature that promises to make disorderly notebooks a thing of the past: it features a magnetic spine that allows you to pop pages in and out, rearranging them according to your choosing.

It was designed by Charles Goodman, a California based graphic designer who was frustrated by his own inability to keep an orderly notebook. "I came up with the idea while working on another project," he says. "I noticed I like notebooks, but had a hard time keeping them organized." He started thinking of a notebook with magnetic pages. At first, the design didn't seem practical, but after two years spent working on research and development, he says the Rekonect Notebook is finally ready for prime time.

The Rekonect has a hard cover made of faux leather, bound with a magnetic spine that snugly holds a sheath of 60 specially designed sheets inside. Just by applying a little force, you can pull them out of the notebook, then slot them back in again in a different location. Not only does this allow you to keep your notebooks organized even if you constantly find yourself scrawling on whatever page you open to first, but it allows you to replace pages in your notebook as easily as a loose-leaf binder. When you fill up your notebook, just snap some new Rekonect pages in, Magsafe-style. And if you have a pen or pencil with a metal clip, the magnetic spine even functions as a pen holder.

Now on Kickstarter, the Rekonect Notebook is currently available for preorder, starting at just $34 for a notebook and an replacement packet of magnetic pages.

It's hard to imagine, but up until 1992, astronomers had no direct proof that any planets existed outside of the solar system. Sure, it seemed likely—the earliest speculation about exoplanets was way back in 1584— but it wasn't until the discovery of 51 Pegasi b that we actually could prove it.

Since then, we've made up for lost time: in the last 25 years, astronomers have discovered almost 2,000 other exoplanets, from tiny dwarfs half the mass of the moon to enormous gas giants, 29 times the size of Jupiter.

The latest infographic from Martin Vargic, the 17-year-old designer behind some of the most viral visualizations on on the 'Net, aims to put the staggering variety of astronomy's exoplanets in perspective. It contains more than 500 exoplanets, arranged on the x-axis according to average temperature, and on the y-axis by density of mass.

To create his infographic, Vargic used data from the exoplanet database, which lists statistics about the known universe's extra-solar planets. Of course, for the vast majority of planets, we don't have a really good idea of what they look like: our best images of them are often times just blurry blips of light or radiation.

So Vargic had to get creative. "I based the looks of each planet chiefly on its estimated radius and temperature, however other factors, such as density, age or stellar metallicity were also taken into consideration," he says. "The colors of gas giant planets were chosen to be as realistic as possible, reflecting the different cloud compositions of hotter gas giants."

Of course, as massive as this infographic is, it only covers about 25% of all known exoplanets. And with more exoplanets being discovered every year, it won't stay up-to-date for long. The universe is a vast place, and we've already proven that our solar system isn't nearly as special as we thought. How long until we can fit 500 life-harboring exoplanets on a poster too? Probably not as long as we think.

Although there's plenty of aliens in the Star Wars canon, most of the main heroes and villains look human. But why human? The universe existed a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. In that context, it would make just as much logical sense for these characters to look like elephants, hippos, or rhinoceroses as it would for them to be human.

Thanks to New York based designer Blank William, we now have a pretty good idea of what that evolutionary split would look like. His latest project imagines a "new order" of Imperial Stormtroopers, modifying Ralph McQuarrie's timeless helmet designs so they would snugly fit the aforementioned examples of African megafauna.

Each helmet uses a combination of white or black metal, and silver and gold chrome to adapt the Star Wars film's iconic Stormtrooper look to the animals' massive heads. They sort of look like props from a Muppets parody of the Star Wars film, except a lot more artfully made.

Although they look complicated, William says the design process for his New Order helmets was surprisingly straightforward. "The source materials, in this case Star Wars, animals, and a dash of samurai helmets and pilot masks, blended easily and so well together," he says. "The hard work was really done by the designers of the original Stormtrooper helmet (Ralph McQuarrie, Liz Moore, and Nick Pemberton) and by mother nature herself."

Asked if his helmets are supposed to make some sort of broader statement than just being fun to look at, William is pretty upfront about it.

"Not really," he says. "It was interesting for me to think that I grew up in a world where my idols were Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, and Stormtroopers. In another time, animals like Elephants, Hippos, and Rhinos were once revered in the same way. For better or worse, we've replaced this reverence of beautiful, powerful animals with these amazing creations of pop culture."

Dustin Yellin, a 40-year-old Brooklyn artist who has posed naked for Vanity Fair, dated Michelle Williams, and billed as the art world's next "it boy," is a fun guy to interview. Over the phone, he asked me if I thought God had fuzzy bunny ears, and thought that after you died, you went to a level-select screen, like in some giant cosmic video game. Talking to him is like being dropped into a kaleidoscope where references to art, pop culture, and the metaphysical all sort of swirl in explosions together.

In other words, Yellin, the person, is a lot like the six new figures he has put on display outside of the six-building Columbia Square Compound in Hollywood, which was for decades the headquarters of CBS's West Coast operations. He calls them Psychogeographies, and although they resemble three-dimensional figures from afar, their volume is actually an optical illusion, created by sandwiching cuttings from magazines, photographs, and books between up to 28 distinct layers of glass. Yellin thinks of them as colorful explosions of humanity, like a Body Worlds sculpture, except instead of bone, blood, and guts, he uses a person's thoughts, emotions, fears, and pop-culture fascinations.

Yellin has made about 80 Psychogeographies to date. Helped by a team of assistants, each one starts with some almost stream-of-conscious spitballing from Yellin. "I'll create some crazy multi-dimensional narrative that will live within the vessel," he says. "I might say, this one's going to have two heads, and both heads will telepathically be communicating with each other by this tendril of thought, and I want there to be a seascape inside the chest cavity, made up of Roman and pre-Columbian artifacts, and small children falling into the sea."

To make these ideas a reality, Yellin has an extensive cutting room, with a "taxonomy of drawers" which file away pre-clipped images and photos; there are drawers for humans, mushrooms, trees, plants, African artifacts, icebergs, and so on. After finding all the proper images, Yellin and his team spend months arranging them on slides of glass, then fit them together until they create the illusion of a 3-D figure, trapped within a tank.

Although Yellin's design process sounds scattershot, many of his Psychogeographies have focused themes. A recent installation Yellin did for The Kennedy Center contained 12 figures, originally exhibited by the New York City Ballet, all arranged in 12 poses. And for the Columbia Square Compound, all six Psychogeographies on display were all created with Tinseltown ephemera, including cutouts of the Lone Ranger, Orson Welles, and Bob Dylan, among other. "I snuck into these explosions of consciousness all these different attributes that correlate to the landscape of Hollywood, a city that's going to eventually fall into the sea, and which is the strange environment which creates all these movies in our lives," he says.

Yellin has no intention to stop making Psychogeographies any time soon, telling me he eventually hopes to top out at 120. Why 120? Here, the sly businessman behind the eccentric artist slips into the conversation. "It's arbitrary," he admits. "But I'm hedging my bets that if I make 120, I'll get at least 48 back from installations and exhibitions at the end of the day, which will be enough to take this show on the road."

Dutch firm MVRDV—the designers of Seoul's skygarden, a tennis club shaped like a comfy couch, and 676 Lego skyscrapers—have just unveiled a new addition to their unorthodox architecture portfolio: a Rotterdam arts building that looks like a giant disco ball cut in half and converted into a terrarium.

The design is for the Collectiegebouw—or Collection Building—a proposed public art depot for Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam's Museumpark. At 14,000 square meters, the project is more than just the depot, also encompassing the grounds of an attached public sculpture park. But the glittering, reflective depot is definitely the focus of the project: it will not only put the City of Rotterdam's extensive art collection on display, but also reveal to the public a lot of the backstage activity that happens at museums, such as restoration, transport, and storage of art.

"It is fantastic that the public art depot will be realized," says Winy Maas, principal architect and co-founder of MVRDV. "In this way the entire population can share something that is normally hidden behind closed doors."

Behind its reflective facade, which has been designed to help the building blend into the park surroundings, the Collection Building will be laid out like a dome. From the entrance, visitors will walk through a spiraling path, touring the building's collections and observing behind-the-scenes museum processes through glass, until they reach the roof: a stunning, verdant garden. There, they can dine at a restaurant, have a coffee at the cafe, or even tour the Futuro house, a UFO-shaped, prefab pod from the '60s that was recently restore and will apparently be moved to the site upon its completion.

"With Collectiegebouw Rotterdam creates an icon the entire city will benefit of," says Rotterdam City Councillor Adriaan Visser. "The building will strengthen the cultural cluster around Museumpark and add to a lively inner city, this is important to attract and maintain the higher educated and investors." It is due to be completed in 2018.

Hovering in the middle of the room, this amorphous, color-shifting blob looks like a CGI effect: the warp core of a faster-than-light spaceship, perhaps, or the entry portal to a stargate. Unlike a CGI effect, though, you can reach out and touch the Anima. It's a glowing, two-meter sphere that uses light and sound to explore its relationship with the room in which it is contained.

A key aspect of the Anima is that the animation on the surface of the sphere, as well as the sounds it emits, are influenced by the movements of the viewer in the room. Inside the Anima is a wide-angle projector and a fisheye lens, which bends trippy, T-1000-style animated textures of a viscous metallic fluid so that they seem to swim across all 360-degrees of the translucent surface. Eerie, otherworldly tones modulate throughout the exhibition space, reacting in the timber of their oscillation according to how people move around the Anima.

The Anima was made by Berlin-based studio Onformative, previously responsible for the floral wallpaper based on Facebook posts, and this experiment on using Google Maps to explore pareidolia.

Initially commissioned for the Amsterdam Dance Event, the Anima installation has since toured and exhibited at various galleries and events in the Netherlands and Berlin such as TEDxDelft, the Kantor Art & Technology festival, and the Van Gogh Museum. You can keep up with where it's going next here.

Ranging between light beige and dark brown, plywood usually isn't very colorful. But a new process from Japanese designer Kazuya Koike makes plywood as beautiful and colorful as textiles, thanks to a dying process. And while the plywood chairs may look like a selection of blue Pantone swatches placed together, there's no paint involved: The color's baked right into the wood, accentuating the wood's innate burl patterns instead of obscuring them.

Plywood is normally made by taking at least three thin layers of wood and affixing them together with paste. These veneers are made by shaving the top layer of a piece of source wood off with a peeler, a process sort of like unrolling toilet paper. The resulting veneer's pattern may only be surface deep, but most people can't tell. It's a cheaper method of making wooden objects, but plywood ends up having the same color as its sandwiching veneers: ash, maple, mahogany, oak, teak, and so on.

To create his Decresc chair and accompanying stool, Koike teamed up with the Gisen Company, a Japanese textile processing company that produces dyed synthetic fabrics. Koike discovered that by dying strips of maple veneer using Gisen's textile dyes, he could impart a lovely blue patina to the wood, without hiding or destroying the maple's spiral burl pattern.

Presented at the Material Design Exhibition held at the Material Connexion Tokyo during Tokyo Design Week, Koike's process could open the door for all sorts of lovely dyed plywoods. A gradient pink molded plywood Eames chair, or rainbow-hued Ikea furniture? Sign me up.