Ben VanderVeen is the founder and editor of Moss & Fog, one of the web’s longest-running visual culture destinations. Since 2009, he’s been finding and framing the most beautiful, surprising, and thought-provoking work in art, architecture, design, and nature — reaching over 325,000 readers each month. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
His Brushstrokes in Time series starts with a recognizable world: a rain-slicked city street, a desert at dusk, a cobblestone bridge catching early light.
Then a thick, sculptural stroke of oil paint tears across the canvas, splitting the scene open.
Behind it, or within it, a different era bleeds through. The brushstroke is at once a mark of the artist’s hand and a rupture in history.
What makes these paintings land isn’t the concept alone. It’s the specificity of the collision. Ambarzumjan isn’t just juxtaposing old and new, he’s questioning what connects them and what the hand that changed everything actually leaves behind.
His stated intent is to explore how nature’s transformation over time tracks against humanity’s influence. That framing keeps each piece tethered to something real, even as the imagery tips toward the surreal.
The work lives in that gap between documentation and imagination. Oil paint doing what photography can’t.
Typography usually starts with ink, pixels, or type design software.
HELLO
In this case, it starts with river bends, salt flats, mountain shadows, coastlines, islands, and agricultural grids.
For Earth Day 2026, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey launched Your Name in Landsat, a simple interactive that spells any name or phrase using satellite images from the Landsat program.
EARTH
You type in a word, and it returns a vertical string of image tiles, each one resembling a letter found somewhere on Earth.
LOVE
The effect is part science archive, part accidental alphabet. A looping river becomes a “G.” A lake edge might stand in for an “S.” Irrigated fields form rigid strokes, while deserts and deltas create softer, stranger shapes. The letters are not designed so much as discovered, pulled from the planet’s surface like found objects.
Landsat, a joint NASA and USGS program, has been observing Earth since 1972, creating the longest continuous space-based record of the planet’s land surface. Scientists use its imagery to track everything from forest loss and urban growth to water use, agriculture, wildfire damage, and coastal change. In this interactive, that same vast archive becomes something more personal and immediate: a way to see your own name assembled from pieces of the world.
MOSS AND FOG
Each letter tile includes information about where the image was captured, including coordinates, so the tool doubles as a small geographic scavenger hunt. What looks like a beautiful abstract mark is, in fact, a specific place with its own climate, geology, and history.
It’s a clever use of public science data, but also a lovely visual exercise. From orbit, Earth is full of accidental lettering: rivers writing in cursive, farms drawing right angles, islands punctuating the sea. NASA and USGS have simply gathered those marks and handed us the keyboard
Revisiting these dramatic, oil paint-like images are the work of photographer Christy Lee Rogers, and it took us a moment to realize what we were even looking at.
Submerging models in flowing fabrics underwater (at night!), she is able to light the scene and create these stunning images that look almost like a Caravaggio painting.
We love the way the fabric and textiles blend together, creating such fluidity. We’re also impressed by the technical feat of pulling this photoshoot off, with people holding their breath, and interacting with one another in such an environment.
Check out the beautiful images below, as well as a short making-of video that shows the process. Via Colossal:
“these final images represent a soft and peaceful place that I imagine exists, where you can be free to let go and experience the beauty surrounding you.”
In the tiny town of Kagatika on the island of Paxos in Greece, a 400-year old ruin has been reinvigorated by an art installation by design duo Quintessenz.
The simple, colorful tapestries span the entire rainbow, and breathe life into the ancient structure, which served as a factory back in the 1600s.
The way the wind moves the tapestries give them a sense of life, almost like a digital installation.
The overall effect is lovely, definitely more than the sum of it’s parts. Via DesignBoom:
Natural light and wind add to the beauty of this installation, bringing a kinetic movement to the colors that feel alive.
The vibrant tapestries contrasted against the ancient building has a certain amount of poetic quality to it.
Swedish artist Eric Rohman created thousands of movie posters, using bold shapes, sparse color, and cinematic restraint to define a striking era of Scandinavian graphic design.
Some buildings have a design brief, this one started as a memory.
Way back in 1969, a young Moroccan businessman stood at a NASA facility and watched a Saturn V being prepared for launch.
He never forgot it. Decades later, that moment became the Mohammed VI Tower — 250 meters of quietly rocket-shaped ambition rising from the banks of the Bou Regreg river, which is now the tallest building in Morocco and the third tallest on the African continent.
Architects Rafael de la Hozand Hakim Benjelloun designed the 55-story tower to sit between Rabat and the historic city of Salé, and the form earns its metaphor. It doesn’t wave at rocketry from a distance.
The building tapers deliberately upward from a broad podium base, grounded and coiled at once. Its north facade looks out toward the Bou Regreg and the ancient Hassan Tower minaret, a 12th-century landmark that has watched this city for 800 years. The conversation between the two feels less like contrast and more like continuity.
The south face is a photovoltaic double skin: solar-generating, thermally protective, doing real work while also looking like a building that means business.
The north face is glazed with decorative metal fins. Two entirely different facades, one coherent object. That tension is where the design lives.
Inside, Pierre-Yves Rochon drew on white marble, bronze, brushed brass, Cordoba leather, zellige tiles, and wood panelling, a material language that roots the building in its place without making a fuss about it.
The mix of uses runs from a Waldorf Astoria hotel and offices to residences, a conference hall, restaurants, and a panoramic observatory at the summit where, on a clear day, the ramparts and kasbahs of both cities spread out below.
Eight years of construction and roughly $700 million later, the building is open. The Saturn V that inspired it flew to the moon. This one stays put — which, given the view, seems like enough.
There is a voice most of us associate with the first time we truly saw the natural world. Not just glimpsed it through a car window or a classroom slideshow, but felt it for real.
The weight of it. The strangeness. The astonishing, improbable fact of it all.
Born on May 8, 1926, in London, Attenborough has lived longer than almost any institution he has documented.
He has watched coral reefs bleach and recover and bleach again. He has filmed species that no longer exist. He has stood at the poles and watched the ice retreat.
And through all of it, he has continued to show up, camera crews in tow, with the curiosity of a child and the patience of someone who has learned that awe is a more powerful teacher than fear.
His brother, Richard Attenborough, also made a huge name for himself, becoming a star of movies, and a director as well.
A Career Built on Wonder
Attenborough joined the BBC in 1952, at a moment when television was still a novelty and the natural world was largely unexplored territory for broadcast.
What followed was one of the most remarkable careers in the history of media.
Life on Earth in 1979 set a new standard for nature filmmaking, reaching an estimated 500 million viewers worldwide and reframing the documentary as something cinematic, urgent, philosophical.
Via BBC
It was the beginning of a beautifully told franchise of understanding.
The Blue Planet, Planet Earth, Our Planet, A Perfect Planet — each series pushed the technology further and, more importantly, pushed audiences closer to a truth that scientists had been documenting for decades: the natural world is not a backdrop to human life.
It is the condition of it.
What makes Attenborough singular is never just the footage, it’s the framing. He understands that people do not protect what they do not love, and that people cannot love what they have never truly seen.
So he shows them. Baby elephants. Mantis shrimp. The synchronized ballet of starling murmurations. He makes the planet legible, and then he makes it feel fragile, and then he makes it feel worth fighting for.
David Attenborough with mountain gorillas, on location during filming for BBC ‘Life on Earth’ series, 1978. John Sparks
The Weight He Chose to Carry
For most of his career, Attenborough was careful to let the images speak. He trusted the audience to draw their own conclusions.
But as the evidence of climate change became undeniable and the window for meaningful action began to narrow, something shifted.
Image via Netflix
In his 2020 film A Life on Our Planet, he called it his “witness statement”, a personal reckoning with everything he had seen change in nearly a century. It was not a lecture. It was not a polemic. It was a man standing honestly in front of the camera and saying: I have watched this happen, and I believe we can still change the ending.
He has since addressed the United Nations. He testified at COP26. He has stood alongside world leaders and spoken plainly about what the science demands. For someone who spent decades deliberately staying outside the political frame, it was a profound act of commitment. He decided, at an age when most people have stopped deciding anything, that the stakes were too high for neutrality.
Via Brittanica
What He Gave Us
There is a generation of biologists, conservationists, climate scientists, and environmental activists who will tell you that Attenborough is the reason they do what they do.
Not a textbook, not a professor. A voice on a television screen describing the life of a humpback whale with such precise and unguarded reverence that something clicked into place.
Huw Cordey/Silverback Films
That is a rare kind of influence. It does not work through argument or data or policy. It works through feeling. Through the sudden, unexpected sense that the world is more astonishing than you realized, and that this astonishment comes with responsibility.
We talk a lot about content in this space. About images that stop you. About the kind of beauty that makes you pay closer attention to the world. Attenborough built a life around exactly that instinct, and applied it to every ecosystem on the planet, and kept doing it for a hundred years.
One Hundred Years
The milestone itself almost defies comprehension. He was born three years before the Great Depression. He was a teenager during World War II. He made his first nature broadcast before color television existed. He made his last major film series in his late nineties.
BBC Studios/Alex Board
He has said, with characteristic understatement, that he hopes he has been “useful.” The word lands quietly, the way Attenborough’s words always do. Useful. As if he merely helped a few people find their coat. As if he did not spend a century teaching the world to grieve and marvel at the same time, and to understand that the two feelings are, ultimately, the same.
Happy 100th, Sir David. We have been paying better attention because of you.
We’ve long been fans of art and motion graphics that convey a mood versus always needing a strong narrative.
Indeed, these “experiments” often allow artists and designers to explore the crevices of their imaginations in a way that a traditional story might now.
Plateaus have their own planes
That seems to be the case with Argentinian 3D artist and designer Ezequiel Pini.
In his carefully sculpted and crafted worlds, we see visions of nature and built environments, but in artfully unreal ways, responding to physics, light, and gravity in ways that just aren’t possible.
Few artists could say they made a living from movie posters alone. Eric Rohman did, thousands of times over.
Born in Nyköping in 1891 and raised in Helsingborg, Swedish artist Eric Rohman became one of the rare figures in early 20th-century design who could make a living entirely from posters.
His output was almost unbelievable. By his own estimate, Rohman produced around 7,000 posters during his career, many of them for film. In the late 1940s, he was reportedly turning out four or five posters a week.
Rohman’s path into poster art was helped by circumstance. His brother managed a major Swedish cinema chain, and the demand for film advertising was constant. But Rohman’s success came from more than access.
He had a remarkable ability to reduce a film to its essentials: a face, a gesture, a mood, a splash of color.
A Master of the Essential
Rohman’s style was direct, graphic, and wonderfully economical. He often worked with just a few colors, using strong silhouettes, expressive faces, flat planes, and dramatic negative space. His early work made use of linocut printing, a process that favored bold forms over fine detail.
The result feels surprisingly modern. Many of his posters from the silent-film era look almost like contemporary vector illustrations: clean, immediate, and full of visual confidence.
Rohman didn’t over-explain a film, but instead distilled it.
His best posters have a sense of urgency and elegance. They’re not overly fussy. They are built to stop you in the street, make you look twice, and pull you toward the cinema.
Critics, Collectors, and Legacy
Early Swedish film posters were not always treated kindly by critics, who often dismissed the medium as rushed, disposable, or lacking artistic value. Rohman’s work helped prove otherwise.
Today, his posters are admired for their bold composition, Art Deco influence, and unusually modern graphic sensibility. Collectors often point to his 1920s and 1930s designs as some of the most beautiful examples of Swedish film-poster art.
Rohman died in Stockholm in 1949, but his work still feels alive: cinematic, efficient, stylish, and unmistakably handmade. In just a few shapes and colors, he could conjure an entire world.
Artist: Eric Rohman Born: 1891, Nyköping, Sweden Died: 1949, Stockholm, Sweden
There’s a longstanding tension in superyacht design: the purer the sailing pedigree, the more the interior suffers.
Wind-driven vessels demand wide side decks for crew movement and sail handling, eating into the beam and, with it, the living space below.
For decades, owners who wanted grandeur chose engine power. Those who chose sail accepted compromise.
The A100 concept, developed through a collaboration between Van Geest Design and Rob Doyle Design, proposes a different answer.
At 100 meters, it’s one of the most ambitious sailing yacht concepts ever conceived. Its central design move is architectural: reduce the side decks, free the beam, and let the interior breathe like it never has on a sailing hull.
A Main Deck Designed for Living
On a traditional sailing superyacht, the main deck is largely given over to function. On the A100, it becomes the primary living floor.
The owner’s suite claims a significant portion, flanked by a central lounge, formal dining, and a room that flexes between library and private cinema.
Walls of glass keep the horizon always in frame.
Below and Beyond
The lower deck hosts guest cabins alongside a dedicated diving room and storage for water toys, jet skis, e-foils, the full vocabulary of contemporary ocean recreation. The upper deck carries navigation and steering stations alongside lounge areas suited to yoga, stargazing, or simply watching the sea move. At the stern, a beach club spans the yacht’s full width, where the line between vessel and water nearly disappears.
Two Masts, One Button
The A100’s sailing system relies on two freestanding DynaRig masts, a configuration found on only a handful of the world’s most extraordinary sailing vessels. Curved yards support multiple sails across each mast, and the entire rig deploys and adjusts electronically. Wind handling at this scale, reduced to a single touch.
The emphasis on sail over engine also reflects a broader shift in how the most ambitious yachts are being conceived: wind as primary force rather than aesthetic flourish.
Scale in Service of an Idea
Not every 100-meter concept justifies its dimensions. The A100 does. Every meter of length serves a spatial argument: that sailing and generous living are not opposites, that the constraints of wind-powered design can be reframed as opportunities to rebuild the yacht from the deck down.
If built, it would rank among the largest sailing yachts ever constructed. For now, it’s one of the most compelling visions of what that could look like.
Dutch artist Henk Loorbach noticed this grim trade-off and did something quietly devastating with it: he started building bugs from the stuff that’s replacing them.
His series Litterbugs transforms beachcombed bottle caps, fishing line, and stray straws into fragile, eerily convincing insect sculptures.
The pieces don’t try to hide what they’re made of. A straw is still a straw, a cap still a cap.
But held together just so, they become something that looks like it should be pinned in a natural history museum.
That’s the twist, and it lands. One world is fading. The other just keeps accumulating.
What Happens When Machines Become Objects of Wonder
There’s a particular joy in objects that feel like they were dreamed up rather than designed. The 3D digital works of Chinese artists Gao Yang and Kisame (Yu-Lei Wang) live squarely in that territory.
Created for the WOW Design Competition, their series imagines a collection of fantastical machines that don’t quite exist anywhere, but feel like they should.
Each piece pulls from a different corner of material culture: the satisfying density of vintage electronics, the primary-color confidence of a well-loved toy, the tactile complexity of something built by hand over many years.
Dials, cables, vents, ports, and panels accumulate into objects that reward a long look. The color work alone is worth the visit.
What makes the series linger is how freely it borrows. Soviet synthesizer, Nerf gun, boombox, scientific instrument.
These things are in conversation with each other, collapsed into single forms that feel both nostalgic and completely invented.
There’s humor in them too, the quiet kind that comes from things being slightly more elaborate than they need to be.
One of the most memorable scenes in the whole Star Wars trilogy was on the forest moon of Endor, when Luke and Leia were speeding through the giant redwood forest.
Leia speeding through the forests of Endor on a speeder.
The iconic speeders from Star Wars have remained science fiction, until now.
Polish inventor Tomasz Patan has created something called the Volonaut Airbike, a flying motorbike that looks strikingly like the one out of Star Wars.
Just now out of stealth mode, Volonaut’s Airbike is remarkable for its size, power, and maneuverability.
Able to carry one rider at speeds of up to 200 kph (124 mph), the small craft is unique because of its compact design, and lack of exposed propellers.
Below is a teaser video, as well as the original launch video, showcasing the Airbike’s smooth operation.
“This “superbike for the skies” is powered by jet propulsion and is designed to carry one person with speeds up to 200km/h or 124mph.
The Airbike’s proprietary stabilization system enhanced by a flight computer provides automatic hover and ease of control for its rider.
The unique riding position with unobstructed 360 degree view helps the rider to quickly become one with the flying machine and provides the sensation of complete freedom.”
-Volonaut
In the teaser video, we see the Volonaut Airbike hovering above the ground and streams in this mountainous terrain.
Tomasz Patan is the inventor, and he was a founder at Jetson, a company making EVTOL aircraft.
No word on when we might get to ride on something like the Airbike, but it certainly feels like the era of flying cars is coming to fruition.
This week we looked back at the history of claymation, that wonderful art form that brings an imperfect tactility and range of emotions to film and tv.
We also introduced The Atlas, and a brand new way to explore Moss and Fog articles from around the world!
Diving into the world’s deepest lakes, exploring the history of Claymation, and more.
There are faster ways to animate a film. Cleaner ways, too. But claymation still offers something rare: texture, imperfection, and the visible trace of human hands.
