Japan’s most beloved cartoon cat will take over a bullet train in her country of origin this summer, luring in locals and tourists alike with pink and white interiors and prime selfie opportunities. West Japan Railway Co. is teaming up with Sanrio to produce the Hello Kitty Shinkansen, a white bullet train wrapped in a pink ribbon motif that will travel between Shin-Osaka station in the Osaka prefecture and Hakata in the Fukuoka prefecture each day. The train will make its debut on June 30th.

The interiors include HELLO! PLAZA in the first car, featuring tactile exhibits on the various regions of northern Japan, a travel-themed presentation, a ‘rest corner,’ a video corner, a photo backdrop and a place to buy those all-important souvenirs. The second car is the KAWAII! ROOM, which is really just the passenger car with special Hello Kitty touches in pastel pink.

And yes, as you’d expect, it’s all very pink. The train will likely be just as much of a destination as a means of travel. While it’s far from the first Hello Kitty-themed train – there’s already a high speed one in Taiwan, and another at Universal Studios Japan – it’s probably the most immersive.

The purveyors of cheap-and-cheerful modern Scandinavian home goods have plied us with their glossy catalogs and Swedish meatballs, and we have responded with wide-eyed devotion. We flock to IKEA warehouse stores en-masse. We marvel at products with unpronounceable names. The most obsessed IKEA fans create fan art, write songs, beg to sleep there overnight and even get married at their stores. IKEA’s confusing instructions, unstable assembly jobs and miraculously efficient tiny spaces have inspired tributes both sincere and satirical.

IKEA Stonehenge Infographic

(image via: design boom)

Wondering, like the rest of the world, just how Stonehenge was built? Let IKEA help you out with some instructions that make the whole process no less of a head-scratching mystery than the monument itself. These satirical diagrams by Justin Pollard, Stevyn Colgan and John Lloyd require 10,000 laborers, hundreds of stones and alcoholic beverages (so that you can cope with the frustration.) Additionally, they note “If plagued by demons or suffering from pestilence, seek advice from a druid before attempting assembly.” Said druid will apparently conjure some giants to helpfully slide the monoliths in place. See the full illustrations at Design Boom.

Sci-Fi IKEA Manuals

(image via: design milk)

Want to make your own dinosaur? IKEA’s instructions dictate a material list of test tubes, syringes, special shaving cream cans, $15 million dollars, thousands of cows and a few of those handy (?) Z-shaped Allen keys. This set of sci-fi IKEA manuals will also tell you how to build your own light saber and time-traveling DeLorean.

Un-IKEA: Custom Furniture by Kenyon Yeh

(images via: trendland)

Maybe you should just ignore those instructions and use the components inside that flat-pack box to create your own Franken-IKEA design. That’s what Kenyon Yeh did for this series, putting the wood pieces together any way he felt like it and adding colorful legs. The result looks a bit like a Pixar movie set in IKEA’s warehouse, wherein all of the furniture sprouts legs and comes to life.

Oops. Help! Ads Promoting IKEA’s Assembly Department

(images via: scdesigncreative)

These hilarious images of IKEA assembly gone wrong aren’t satirical critiques of the mega-store. They’re actually real ads from IKEA Germany. The self-aware series has various furniture items spelling out the words ‘Shit’, ‘Oops’ and ‘Help’ in a bid to promote the furniture retailer’s assembly department.

Page 23: The Tragic Real Lives Behind IKEA Perfection

(images via: pagina 23)

Any fan of the movie Fight Club has never looked at IKEA catalogs quite the same way as the rest of the population. With the glossy perfection of each photographed interior comes the insinuation that a home full of these products will bring happiness. A short independent film called Page 23 delves into the murky depths of reality hidden by the bright and cheerful facade. “Advertisements usually display unruffled domestic happiness. But, as we will see in Page 23, this world looks too good to be true. Behind the beaming smile of fashion models loom adultery and the stifling daily routine.”

IKEA in Song by Jonathan Coulton

(images via: you tube)

Songwriter Jonathan Coulton wrote an ode to IKEA, telling a fictional account of the store’s birth that involves the Norse god Thor and a bunch of vikings. “IKEA: Just some oak and some pine and a handful of Norsemen.”

How IKEA Creates New Products: A Chart by Cracked

(images via: cracked)

How does IKEA come up with the ideas for all of those oddly-named household items, anyway? Cracked has the whole process from concept to store shelves, including choosing a sort-of-authentically-Swedish-sounding-name and forcing consumers to go into a dreary underground dungeon to retrieve it.

IKEA Coffins, Children & Cars

(images via: dornob)

What if IKEA sold Volvos? Build-your-own-bomb kits? Instructions for assembling babies? These funny parodies of IKEA instructions imagine all sorts of things that the store could assist us with producing in a nightmarish alternate reality. One cartoon, by Mike Sacks and Julian Sancton, even shows how IKEA could help you orchestrate your own suicide, with the leftover parts from your self-built coffin used to build a shoddy cross for your grave site.

IDEA by Escher

(images via: rock paper cynic)

Comic site Rock, Paper, Cynic combines two creators of impossible constructions in one brilliant illustration. ‘IDEA by Escher’ turns a few of MC Escher’s mathematically-inspired explorations of infinity into IKEA products. ‘Warning: This product may collapse reality as you know it.’

What If You Lived at IKEA? By Christian Gideon

(images via: christian gideon photography)

Photographer Christian Gideon explores the question, ‘What if you lived at IKEA?’ in a spontaneous shoot that turned the store’s pristine whole-room displays into real temporary living spaces, guerrilla-style. Gideon shot his models pretending to shower, sleep, cook and gaze fondly at stock photography families in various IKEA environments.

PI-kea Bot on Futurama

(image via: you tube)

Maybe in the future, IKEA will still be making ‘Affordable Swedish Crap’ like Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth’s SuperCollider. In this episode of Futurama, the ‘Pi-kea robot’ makes a special delivery of some high-tech equipment and the assembly process is exactly what you would expect.

IKEA Facebook Fan Sleepover

(images via: digital buzz blog)

Some people love IKEA so much, they want to stay there overnight. Seriously. IKEA sanctioned a Facebook Fan Sleepover for 100 people at the Essex IKEA store. They even showed a movie and offered massages and manicures. Contest winners who attended the sleepover chose their own bed linens to use for the night. and take home. The event was created after officials at the store stumbled upon a Facebook group called ‘I Wanna Have a Sleepover in IKEA’ on Facebook.

First-Ever Wedding in an IKEA

It’s not art or design, but this is definitely the ultimate expression of IKEA fandom. Two self-professed ‘superfans’ became the first couple to ever get married inside an IKEA store. The Maryland couple went on a date at the College Park store, and exactly two years later, they returned to exchange vows. IKEA allowed them to use the space at no charge. See photos at WTOP.

Scaffolding is rarely attractive, but Google might just change that perception with a 450-foot mural by Brooklyn design studio Dark Igloo that wraps around its building in New York City. ‘Chelsea Illustrated’ doesn’t just hide the scaffolding that covers the building, it tells the story of the neighborhood in bold, graphic cartoons.

Google has created an interactive website that takes visitors who can’t see the mural in person – and even those who can – through each illustration, providing tidbits of information about the cartoons. Chelsea’s got some great stories, the website says, starting with the fact that the neighborhood is named after the estate of Clement Clarke Moore, a professor of literature at Columbia University in the 19th century.

Other Chelsea institutions included in the mural include the National Biscuit Company truck from the 1900’s, meatpacking street style, and before-and-after images of the High Line, which is a public park built on a historic elevated freight line. It includes images of notable residents, and important works of literature and music that were written there, including Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’.

Google purchased the building for 1.9 million dollars in December 2010. The scaffolding is up for a routine inspection. Dark Igloo also assisted with the branding for the 2012 Bonnaroo Music Festival. See more of their work at their Flickr stream.

Most artists would not dare attempt to recreate timeless works of art such as the Mona Lisa. Sagaki Keita, however, is not most artists. His incredible recreations of classic art are impressive when you first see them but absolutely mind-blowing when you take a closer look. These awesome works are not just simple straight-on reproductions of famous art pieces; they are composed of thousands of teeny-tiny other images.

(all images via: Sagaki Keita)

Taking a close look at Keita’s art reveals that every image is composed of tons of simple cartoon-like doodles. Every tiny picture is like a work of art on its own, but when combined they come together to represent the light and dark shades of the overall image. Not every piece is an homage to a famous work of art; Keita creates plenty of originals as well. (Click each image for a larger version.)

Each of the tiny images uses a specific balance of shades and shapes that contribute perfectly to the bigger picture. The smaller pictures are sometimes goofy, sometimes sinister, but always perfectly rendered.

It boggles the mind to consider how Keita composes the larger image by combining all of the smaller images in a precise pattern and a carefully considered structure. The whimsical nature of the small pictures belies the amount of care and thought that has to go into arranging them in just the right way to form the bigger picture.

Sagaki Keita lives in Tokyo and composes his illustrations entirely in pen and ink. His signature combination of small, fun drawings and the fine-art overall pictures is a delicious slice of creativity.

Do you ever feel like you’re adrift on a sea of corporate branding, intrusive advertising and omnipresent logos? Advertising has become so ubiquitous that we’re now seeing high schools and Little League teams sporting the logos of companies big and small. French animation collective H5 took on the disturbingly ever-present corporate branding phenomenon in this short called “Logorama.” Warning to sensitive readers: the film contains a lot of profanity along with some violence and a little cartoon nudity.

Logorama from Marc Altshuler – Human Music on Vimeo.

The film features an alternate-reality Los Angeles where absolutely everything – people, buildings, cars – is made up of logos. The directors could have simply shown us 15 minutes of animated logos and we would have still been impressed, but they instead take us through an epic crime story with a surprising ending. Part of the fun is watching it over and over and spotting new things every single time. The film is positively stuffed with brands, mascots and logos that will make you alternately laugh and cringe.

H5, the studio behind the project, consists of François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain. Their exceptionally well-produced short was introduced at Cannes in 2009 and opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. It also took home a 2010 Academy Award in the category of animated short. It’s not hard to see why the film has won such popularity and admiration: it is a biting satire on the brand-obsessed modern America with a fair amount of humor thrown in.