Illustration

Retro Bitmapped Portraits

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.

Pop Culture

Forceful Self-Promotion

H-57 Creative Station, a multimedia design agency in Milan, Italy, created this clever self-promotion campaign making the faces of Star Wars characters completely out of type. The typographer is Matteo Civaschi, who also creative directed the campaign with Gianmarco Milesi.

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