When Dr. Martens celebrated its 50th anniversary, its agency, Exposure Communications, decided to launch a website featuring 10 contemporary artists interpreting 10 alternative music tracks from the past 50 years. Vanessa Marzaroli from the Los Angeles -based multimedia design studio, Blind, was asked to create the music video for “Lilac Wine” by the Cinematic Orchestra. Marzaroli captured the “sweet and heady” lyrics in the delicate, fluid lines of Spencerian calligraphy – a perfect melding of music and images.

As a senior project at the Kyoto Institute of Technology in Japan, designer Mika Tsutai came up with this manga comic drawing approach to decorating Japanese-style plates. It’s a sight-gag that really works best when dining Japanese style, where each dish is served on its own small plate, rather than served with side dishes and entrée placed together on one large dinner plate.

On Tsutai’s manga plates, the food itself becomes the “hero” or subject of the story — e.g., the fist drawing striking a pulverized food mass; the strawberry slices forming the woman’s earrings, a volcano erupting a red lava flow. The presentation is meant to be appreciated as a single visual image. Even the arrangement of plates imitates the panels of manga comic strips. This is just as Tsutai intended. “By placing these dishes in a particular manner, you can transform your dinner table into a story, just like that of a page from a Japanese comic,” he says. It’s an interesting concept for those who like to be entertained while eating, but it’s hard on the cook who has to plan the menu around the storyline. Via Design Boom.

The World Wildlife Fund, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2011, has produced some terrific ads over the years. This is a series that we hadn’t seen, although it was produced by BBH Shanghai in 2008. The ads address the misconception in China that the World Wildlife Fund only protects Giant Pandas that are native to the mountain forests of central China. To raise awareness of WWF’s other conservation activities in the country, this black-and-white print and outdoor ad campaign integrated WWF’s panda logo (and China’s national symbol) into images of antelopes, forests and water.

The headline reads: “Saving Pandas Is Not Our Only Mission.” The text goes on to report that WWF’s environmental initiatives in China sparked the recovery of the Tibetan antelope population, protected over 10 million hectares of forest through sustainable management programs, and reconnected 17 lakes to the Yangtze River and infused new life into the water ecosystem. The creative director was Johnny Tan with lead writer Leo Zhang.

“Madagascar, Carnet de Voyage” (Madagascar, a Journey Diary) is one of five animated short films nominated for an Academy Award this year. From a purely artistic standpoint this animated short by French filmmaker Bastien Dubois is compelling to view. Colored pencil and watercolor drawings come to life, so that viewers feel like they’ve stepped into the pages of a traveler’s diary. Dubois undoubtedly achieved this using a rotoscoping technique in Adobe After Effects — a process of drawing masks, animating the path and then using the masks to define a matte.

For a questionnaire from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Dubois says that it took him three to four years to complete the 12 minute animated film. For Dubois, his most memorable moment came when screening the film to the villagers where the story takes place. “This village is very remote,” Dubois explains, “so I rented a bus to take everyone to a theater in the closest town. When we got there, the projector was not working. We had to wait 45 long minutes. I had taken the Malagasian musicians to the movie as well. They did not understand that they were going to see a movie, but they thought we would record more songs. So they brought their instruments and started playing. It was amazing! Everybody was dancing in the theater! Finally, we got the projector fixed and we were able to see the movie. Everybody was extremely moved. It was the first time they ever saw a movie, and the movie was talking about them…”

The winner of the Animated Short Film category will be announced at the Oscar ceremony in Los Angeles on February 27th. Here’s a clip from “Madagascar.”

Lately Brooklyn -based illustrator and author Andy Rash, who usually draws in a more traditional style, has come out with a series that is a throwback to the crude bitmapped video game art of the 1980s. Rash calls this style “Iotacons” – iota means an extremely small amount. Full body portraits of politicians and pop stars look like they were constructed out of Lego bricks or mosaic tiles. What fascinating is that even distilled down to a few dozen pixels, these figures are recognizable as individuals and as personalities. We can pick out specific members of the U.S. Senate (below), the Supreme Court justices (above), the Allied-Axis leaders of World War II, the Beatles, and all of the Star Wars characters. It’s all very retro and fun, and it reminds us how far digital technology has come since the days when we only had pixelated images to work with.

Fernando Volken Togni, a 27-year-old designer from Porto Alegre, Brazil, illustrated this series of colorful drawings for Qatar Airways’ Oryx Magazine. Each illustration presents 24-hours in the life of a world-renowned city by presenting iconic scenes of the city through an assemblage of pictograph-style shapes. Togni also expresses each city in a different color palette to convey its cultural uniqueness. Especially when viewed in an international airline magazine, this illustration says a lot without the use of a single word – or the need for translation.

In-person portfolio showings used to be the way that illustrators and photographers got their work in front of designers and art directors. No longer. Now design firms only want to view portfolios online. Often illustrators and photographers don’t even know if their work is being viewed. It’s a case of “don’t call us; we’ll call you.” But some illustrators are finding a way to draw attention to their work by creating online presentations that entertain and amuse. This one by Elwood H. Smith communicates his style and humor and makes designers look forward to seeing more.

Teachers often write important points on a whiteboard to emphasize things they want students to remember. This is even better.

The Royal Society of Art (RSA) in London has collaborated with illustrator Andrew Park to animate talks given at RSA. This video takes an excerpt from Daniel H. Pink’s lecture on “Drive: The Truth About What Motivates Us” and visually brings Pink’s key points to life. In addition to “Drive,” Pink is the author of “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” — both recommended reading.

Yes, this video is long (10 minutes), but Pink, as always, has thought-provoking things to say, and Park’s sketches are fun and fascinating to view.

USA
This take-off on the famous painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware during the Revolution against Britain alludes to the fact that Team USA will face a formidable challenge in the opening group stage matches against England. The team USA boat bears the nation’s motto “E Pluribus Unum,” Latin for “Out of Many, One.”

Denmark
The heist film “Ocean’s Eleven” inspired this poster showing coach Martin Olsen and the team from Denmark ready to steal the trophy.

Since last spring illustrator Craig Frazier has posted a new drawing online each week, inviting @Issue readers to submit a caption to explain what’s going on. Readers emailed him more than 8,000 captions during the course of his Drawords project from places like Slovenia, Paris, Dallas, Scotland, Estonia, Milwaukee, Australia, San Francisco and Trenton. “The project has been a testament to the power of the Internet to create a forum for worldwide participation on a single creative endeavor,” he says. Craig personally reviewed every submission to pick the week’s winning entry and “almost selected” winners. “I looked for wit, subtlety, surprise, and particularly insight into the drawings that I, frankly, didn’t see,” he explains.

For us, Craig’s project proved that when designers and writers bring their own unique perspective to a topic, the result can be more imaginative, quirky and stronger. Interestingly, the frequent similarity between “almost selected” entries also showed us that certain themes are universal and that humor and wit know no cultural borders.

Drawords is now available in book form at www.craigfrazier.com. In thanking readers for their entries, Craig adds “I hope this project brought a moment of frivolity, if not creative challenge, to you – I know it did both for me.”