Tablets, iPads and eReaders are so ubiquitous, nerdy owners are employing extreme acts of graphic personalization to imbue their devices with unique geek chic.

Faaaalkooorr!! Almost every child of the Eighties holds a special place in their heart for The NeverEnding Story. The 1984 film spawned a pair of sequels and a TV show, cementing its hold on once-youthful imaginations and imbuing all who watched with the urge to ride a giant flying dog – OK, “luckdragon”, whatever.

Fans of the endearingly clunky, West German-produced fantasy film have grown into jaded adults but as Falcor famously advised, “Never give up and good luck will find you.” Yeah, tell that to Artax. Anyway, you can look up that and more on your tablet, ideally if its encased by a NeverEnding Story iPad / Tablet / EReader / Kindle Cover. Note the faux Auryn medallion affixed to the cover. Hey, it’s better than Nothing.

Hit The Button, Frank

Designed ideally for an Apple product like a Macbook or iPad and size-customizable by the seller, this MST3K adhesive vinyl decal features the familiar – to those in the know – silhouettes of Tom Servo, Mike Nelson and Crow T Robot in full-on movie-riffing mode. Now that Mystery Science Theater 3000 has been revived for a new run on Netflix, your robot roll call is as timely as ever.

Ultimate Zelda

The Legend of Zelda is one of Nintendo’s most successful gaming franchises though considering it debuted way back in 1986, it’s had plenty of time to accrue legions of devoted fans. This “Ultimate Zelda Fan Package” from Etsy seller SkinzNhydez includes a Zelda book cover, Zelda wallet, Zelda iPad case, even a Zelda belt buckle. All you need now is a girlfriend named Zelda… oh, wait.

Time McFly’s

Channel your inner Biff Tannen with this Back To The Future 2 iPad case, featuring the cover of Gray’s Sports Almanac 1950-2000: the book that brought our heroes from BTTF2 so much Griff, er, grief.

Seller Firebox kindly advises potential purchasers that while “this book tells the future,” it’s “not to be used to create a series of paradoxes that destroy time.” Besides, since November 8th of 2016 we’ve already been living in the darkest timeline, amiright?

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Cover Ups Geeky Ipad Tablet Ereader Case Covers

In Soviet Russia, accident prevent you! That’s the message rendered in classic commie-propaganda style via these thirty soviet accident prevention posters.

Graphic workplace accident prevention posters are nothing new, neither are they the purview of any one nation. That said, this selection of vintage Soviet accident prevention posters reflects a period in Russian history that was drenched in blood, sorrow, violence and loss – and not only on the factory floor.

Oleg Atbashian, a former citizen of the Soviet Union who moved to the United States in 1994, doesn’t recall ever seeing these horrifying-to-the-point-of-being-comical posters. Atbashian worked as a metal worker apprentice at a large Ukrainian factory when he was a teenager and later, as a visual agitprop (agitation and propaganda) artist specializing in posters directed at construction workers. Atbashian was in the right place; just at the wrong time.

Indeed, Atbashian’s USSR of the 1970s was quite a different place from the fledgling “communist paradise” of Lenin and Stalin. “They (the posters) reflect the zeitgeist of a completely different, less sensitive generation of Soviet citizens,” explains Atbashian, “who were so used to being disciplined, humiliated, and terrorized by the authorities that the least of their concerns would be to question some silly presumptive posters that described them as a herd of bumbling idiots being gored by machinery.” Geez Oleg, tell us what you really think!

Just as the communist system of government represented a clean break from the Czarist regimes which preceded it, graphic art in the nascent Soviet Union aspired to blaze a new trail in lockstep with the policies and philosophies of the Red Revolution.

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Blood Red 30 Vintage Soviet Accident Prevention Posters

Tokyo seems inseparable from the banners, billboards, logos, slogans and other flashy neon alerts, except when seen through the lens of this French graphic designer in a startling black-and-white image series turned into a alternating GIFs.

Tokyo No Ads by Nicolas Damiens illustrates just how shocking the contrast is, particularly when switching back and forth between before and after versions. Each of the seven scenes here was meticulously edited with attention to every last pixel of graphics.

To outsiders, Japan’s capital is nearly synonymous with signage saturation, so stripping them away changes the character of the place dramatically. Promoting everything from TV shows and movies to local shops and businesses, it is almost impossible to find a place in the city not showered in advertising. Perhaps the biggest surprise: the landscape almost looks more alien without its characteristic adverts.

Like braille for the seeing, this 3D-printed text raises off the page to add an extra dimension of physicality and meaning to its subject matter, the end result resembling a cityscape made of typography. The ‘Textscape’ project by Hongtao Zhou includes actual braille, as well as various languages and alphabets, calligraphies and number systems.

The intent is to connect the text to its visuality in architecture, landscape, portraits and ‘abstract matters,’ profiling it in a way that can be consumed both literally and intuitively.

Says the artist, “Printing technology was first created in ancient China to reproduce text using woodblocks, however today’s definition had been widely adopted in 3D printing, an additive process more often to create objects instead of duplicative text.”

In this project, the text itself retains a legible meaning, while other letter-centric works often focus solely on the beauty of the typography. One example is Jaume Plensa’s monumental typographic sculptures. See 12 more works of typography art.

Arguing that design is more art than science, this stunning short video provides a rapid-fire visual tour of principles all aspiring designers should keep in mind.

Matt Greenwood ties each example into the next, speeding through basics like lines and planes before covering balance, scale, texture, symmetry, then contrasting rules with randomness and much more.

It might not teach you to be a designer in less than a minute, but it does provide a dazzling introduction to basic concepts, showing and not just telling with useful and compelling (if quick) examples.

About the creator: Matt is a “freelance art director & motion designer based in Toronto with over 10 years professional experience. Working with After Effects, Photoshop, illustrator and Cinema 4D, [he] create[s] styleframes, storyboards, hand drawn illustration, 3D animation, matte painting and compositing for both broadcast and film work.”

If you are into speed-learning new things (and have a few more minutes to spare), you may also want to check out this 15-minute Animated History of Western Architecture as well as this short 100-second animation of 26 famous buildings.