This week we celebrated Photoshop’s 25th birthday, Pancake Day and revelled in the joy that we now know who killed Lucy in EastEnders. Here’s a round up of some of our favourite creative inspirations from our celebratory week…
1. 25 years of beautiful, fake images brought to you by Photoshop
Happy 25th Birthday to Adobe’s much loved digital imaging software, Photoshop. Now, whenever I’m feeling old, I can seek comfort in knowing that Photoshop has been around for longer than I have. We’re enjoying Matt Novak’s homage to Photoshop and his collection of his favourite Photoshopped images. The CCTV camera outside George Orwell’s house is one of our favourites, with George Bush not far behind.
25 years of beautiful, fake images brought to you by Photoshop via gixmodo.com
2. Pancake art
A nice topical one for this week. On Tuesday we all gathered in the kitchen for a mid morning pancake. As much as we enjoyed being able to bring our Nutella and maple syrup jars into the office, our pancakes were nowhere near up the the standard of Nathan Shields. Meet super-dad, maths teacher and pancake artist Nathan Shields who certainly wins the award for most creative design for a pancake. His Disney princess collection is particularly charming, as is his African animal series.
Pancake art by Sainpancakes.com
3. Largest ever image of Andromeda M31 Galaxy
In late January NASA released this stunning high definition image of the Andromeda M31 Galaxy. It’s been described as the “sharpest large composite image ever taken of our galactic next-door neighbour”. The image itself has a resolution of 1.5 billion pixels (1.5 gigapixels) and has a storage size of 4.5GB. What you’re looking at is a 48,000 light-year long stretch of galaxy and over 100 million stars. I don't even think i could imagine what 1 light-year looks like, let alone 48,000, i've only just mastered kilometres. Take a look at the zoom-able version of the image here.
Sharpest ever view of the Andromeda Galaxy
4. Mind-bending optical illusion paintings
We love this series of 25 images by Canadian artist Rob Gonsalves. His paintings are drawn from his interest in drawing from the imagination and "magic realism". His paintings are utterly breathtaking, we really could never tire of looking at them (except maybe one or two, which we can't decide whether we find fascinating or creepy).
Mind-bending optical illusion paintings via wherecoolthingshappen.com
5. Design of the Year 2015
The nominees have been announced for this year's Design Museum ‘Design of the Year 2015’, and they’re all amazing. It’s hard not to feel inspired by such creativity. We were going to pick out one category and highlight a few of our favourites, but in truth there’s so much captivating work (some you might recognise from our previous blogs) that we really couldn’t pick a favourite.
Such lies.
We were trying to be impartial, but obviously we’ve picked our favourite. Taken from the ‘Fashion’ category, our winner goes to Kate and Laura Muleavy’s series of Star Wars-inspired dresses. Not sure how we’d accessorise a C-3PO dress though…
Design of the Year 2015 via designmuseum.org
Drop back in next Friday to see more inspiration from our design team. In the meantime, head on over to the Jigsaw24 shop to take a look at great deals and prices on design and publishing essentials. Found something you think should have made it into the list? Pop it in the comments box below. For all the latest news and tips, follow @WeAreJigsaw24 on Twitter or ‘Like’ us on Facebook.