Viliam: Slovakian Short Film about Happiness & Delusion

We love doodling, paper-cutout art and stop-motion, and have a soft spot for Eastern Europe. Naturally, we’re all over Viliam — an absolutely wonderful stop-motion, paper-cutout short film by Slovakian animator Veronika Obertová.

The film tells the story of a boy who develops an obsession with doodling. After losing his parents to a tragic accident, Viliam escapes from reality by drawing his own animated world.

Part Flatland, part Lars and the Real Girl, Viliam poses, poetically, one of life’s greatest questions: Are we empowered architects of our own happiness or misguided slaves to our own delusion? And, more importantly, does it really matter which it is?

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Noma Bar’s Negative Space Illustrations

What hippies have to do with Wall Street, Iraq and the Little Red Riding Hood.

We’ve been longtime fans of Israeli illustrator Noma Bar, whose mastery of negative space — the space between and around the subjects of an image, which can frame another subject in and of itself — never ceases to amaze, adding a new layer of thoughtfulness to the classic figure-ground illusion of perception. As he recently redesigned a handful of Don DeLillo classics for Picador Books, we were reminded of our favorite Noma Bar classic: Negative Space — an anthology of Bar’s most compelling work from various high-profile magazines, commenting on some of today’s most pressing sociopolitical issues with the artist’s signature provocative subtlety.

A sneak peek of the book follows, but we highly recommend you indulge in its entirety — it’s a rare tapas bar of brain food and eye candy.

Beware The Wolves: Artwork for an article on older men who pursue younger women

Fat Cat: Artwork for an article on how CEOs invest their personal wealth

The Big Squeeze: Artwork for an article on the oil politics behind the Iraq war

Artwork for a piece on gun crime and violence

When Doves Cry: Mourning the loss of the hippy dream with white doves and a VW van

Thought-provoking and visually stunning, Negative Space is the kind of blend of aesthetics and ethics we’d like to see more of in the world.

Images courtesy of Creative Review

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Words Without Words: A Visual Dictionary

If we could re-learn our SAT words, this is how we would do it.

We love, love, love words and language, especially whenever lingo-love and beautiful design meet. So we’re all over Words Without Words by Slovakian-born, Stanford-educated, Los-Angeles-based designer Veronika Heckova — a lovely visual dictionary of words with abstract, complex or underused meanings.

The project is part Radiolab homage to words, part Johnny Carrera’s visual dictionary of curiosities, and altogether wonderful.

Thanks, Yuriy.

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