There’s something magical about the nostalgia that lives in Anton Van Hertbruggen’s paintings.
The color palette seems somehow vintage, while giving a lovely feeling of summers spent relaxing and exploring the woods.
With giant wild creatures, and a sense of 1960s sensibility, we love this artist’s work.
Fantastical animals and vintage cabin vibes abound in his work.
See more of his expressive work on Instagram.
Images © Copyright Anton Van Hertbruggen.
There’s no shortage of space-related collages on the internet, it’s a popular theme that many people have gravitated toward, no pun intended.
There varying levels of quality, however. Artist and designer Frank Moth is among the best, and has been creating iconic collages that he calls “nostalgic postcards from the future”.
It’s a fitting description, as the work has a warm, vintage quality to it, with images of people in their pastimes, set against dramatic space backgrounds. They provide a great visual escape from the everyday, and inspire a sense of wonder.
Be sure to check out his Instagram page for more inspiration.
Images used with artist’s permission.
These vintage photos have a dated, faded feel to them, and showcase a family exploring an equally dated and vintage theme park in Michigan, known as The Prehistoric Forest.
Created by James Q. Sidwell, a former dinosaur exhibit designer, the attraction was decidedly low-budget and charmingly corny, but has a nostalgia-factor nonetheless. We especially love the children’s expressions throughout, where they often look hopelessly bored by the anatomically…..goofy dinos.
We’ve heard the attraction now is just a closed down overgrown forest, with the odd dinosaur carcass lying about. However these photos transport us back to a simpler, more charming time.
Builders with a larger than life dream have created an amazing robot, straight from the anime series Mobile Suit Gundam from the 1970s and 80s.
Gundam Factory Yokohama are the ambitious creators of the full-size robot. Standing 60 feet tall and weighing a staggering 55,000 pounds, the robot is able to walk, kneel, point, and turn its massive head. Further movement and mobility are promised in the future, and we imagine the robot will be a major tourist attraction in the future. Located at the Port of Yokohama in Tokyo.
First released in 1899, “France in the Year 2000“ was a series of postcards that envisioned a future one hundred years ahead. The designs and concepts are both naive and adorable, with some accurate predictions, and some very strange ideas, indeed.
We love the creative optimism in these concepts. It’s undoubtedly clear that the styling is 120+ years old, but the ingenuity and foresight in some of them is pretty remarkable.
Artist Jean-Marc Côte was responsible for these fascinating designs. We’d love to see an updated version of these, showcasing an imagined future 100 years from now. See more on Public Domain Review.
Whale Bus
School
Rolling House
Latest Fashions
Auto Rollers
Intensive Breeding
Correspondence Cinema
Air Firefighters
Barber
Electric Scrubbing
Farmer
Matches are less critical than they used to be, but we still prefer them over cheap plastic lighters. Especially when the matchboxes are as stylish as these. The Dieline has a lineup of great matchbox design, here are some of our favorites.
They range from simple dotted patterned, to ornate vintage style, to a Japanese version with individually hand-painted match heads! (Somehow we’re not surprised that one is from Japan). The burn of a match may be brief, but you’ll want to keep these matchboxes around for a long time.
We have always had a soft spot for mid-century modern design, but it’s impossible to get back to that true authenticity except through photos.
We’ve gathered some great interiors of homes in the late 1950s and 1960s, with spaces and colors and decor that really symbolize the era. There’s something beautifully nostalgic about the yellow tinge to these vintage photos, and the mood evoke. Check our much more of this era on our Pinterest page.
Get in the Christmas spirit with this collection of deeply cringe-worthy and just plain awkward album covers. Ranging from Sweden to Mexico, the Christmas hilarity is in full swing with this series, curated by Design You Trust:
We think Christmas with Kico would be quite a hoot, for the record.
Michael Fugaso’s work is digital, but he spends significant time adding texture, shadow and other elements that make the pieces look warm and vintage. Themes of travel and exploration abound. Check out his Instagram, where he shares in-progress projects and more.
In an almost flipbook-like fashion, Ellen Cantor takes us through the magic of old children’s books, using multiple exposure photography. Showing us the pages, illustrations, and back cover art, we get an overall view, almost akin to an x-ray. It’s a unique take on an old and beautiful medium. Via Colossal:
We love these geometric, minimal collages by Marcos Guinoza, bringing a surrealist sensibility to his prolific body of work. The Brazilian artist references classic graphic design and print layout in his work, but breaks boundaries into the realm of the abstract and surreal. Check our more of his work on Instagram:
All you need to do is type poolside.fm into your browser to be whisked decades back to the carefree dance days of the 1990s. A fitting poolside track begins to play, accompanied by a very fitting mashup of vintage video clips. There’s something nostalgic but also almost magical about the website’s vintage Mac OS interface, complete with throwback cursors and menu items.
Flawless executed project. Do yourself a favor, go poolside, and dial it up. Via Uncrate:
Photographer Christopher Soukup prowls the streets of San Francisco and surrounding areas at night, looking for that perfect moody shot, finding vintage and classic cars that help to set the stage for his cinematic-like photography.
He manages to find classic cars, but also vintage houses and streets that seem out of sync with the 21st century, lit by soft streetlights, fog helping to add suspense and drama. Design You Trust has an enormous catalog of his imagery, take a scroll, and step back in time for a few minutes.
“I am drawn to moments and scenes that put the viewer on the fine line between calm and ominous”
If you like 70’s New York grit and grime, fugetaboutit!
This series of decidedly 70s cars parked under streetlights in 1970’s New York is a trip down nostalgia lane. It was an era of long flat cars, past the era of clever tail fins, and into a grimier, more depressive time, when many parts of Manhattan were downright shabby, far from the high rise glam of today. Taken between 1974 and 1976, Langdon Clay has encapsulated the era pristinely, so to speak. Via Fubiz:
Collage art has had a renaissance in recent years, thanks to the instant shareability of platforms like Pinterest and Instagram. Artist Guillame Chiron has a keen eye for the absurd in his collages, bringing a sense of surreal scale and humor to life. He pulls heavily from vintage, degraded imagery from the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s, and carefully combines scenes and scale to create work that is strange and fascinating. Check out more of his work on Tumblr and Instagram. Via Colossal:
Stamps are a great window into culture, famous events, and historical works of art. Generally we see old stamps in collections or on post-dated envelopes, but when used in art pieces, they can become exceptionally expressive. Take this fun and creative series by storybook illustrator Diana Sudyka. Her creations made from gouache, ink, and watercolor are fanciful and expressive, using very old stamps as either the focal point of the pieces, or blended in perfectly with the scenes. In one, a 1952 Queen Elizabeth stamp makes the face of a walking figure in a forested scene. In another, a black panther stalks it’s prey, as a stamp with a castle on it creates a background for the painting. The work is thoughtful yet playful, and it’s clear Sudyka had a lot of fun creating the series.
“I let the stamp inform the subject matter and color palette. It’s a very intuitive process. The stamp is really just a stepping off point to get my imagination going.”
Jump into the world of the surreal with Paco Pomet, whose work is traditional on the surface, with just a hint of the surreal and absurd. His mostly greyscale paintings show scenes from years past, like Victorian portraits, land surveyors, and 50’s nostalgia. But each one has a pop of surrealist color, either an out-of-place symbol, or a bizarro jet of light overtaking a body part. The work doesn’t take itself too seriously, changing up the surrealism each time. It makes Pomet’s paintings fun and charming, versus dark and mysterious. Based in Spain, his work is on display in the US, Denmark, Spain, among others. Via Colossal:
Victoria Villasana has a great series of classic photographs that have been painstakingly embroidered, to add colorful clothing, outlines, and bursts of color.
The contrast between the vintage black and white photos with the bright and colorful embroidery work beautifully together, creating pop art that we’d love to see hung on a wall. Marilyn Monroe, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan and Frida Kahlo are just a few in the series. We’re particularly impressed by the intricacy and care of the embroidery, we’d be afraid of ripping through the photographs and ruining the effect. Via Colossal:
If I know anything about hipsters, it’s that they love vintage triangles. Say what?
I happen to know a lot of hip, young, design-y types, and the work I see coming from them is geometric, pattern-based, and desaturated, usually with a lot of scenic outdoor photography. There is a lot of cool looking stuff, don’t get me wrong. But it can be so derivative as to become pastiche and meaningless. It is sometimes as if a ‘style’ has to be applied to everything before it has relevancy, and this ‘veneer’ concept can get old and stale.
Here is a quick example of the style I see:
