Famously beautiful ginkgo trees provide the raw materials for this falling leaf artist, which are carefully raked to create site-specific, all-natural art on the campus of Sacramento State University.

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A post shared by Joanna Hedrick (@joanna_hedrick)

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A post shared by Joanna Hedrick (@joanna_hedrick)

Joanna Hedrick works at the school and has made these creations a kind of annual tradition,providing a backdrop for photos and a unique series of installation artworks for students — a great distraction right around finals time.

Using rakes, the artist creates complex maze, honeycomb, sunshine and other shapes, generally around a half-dozen per year. The idea is simple: take something already in place, then rearrange it to make something fun, interesting and a little different. Naturally, these works are eventually blown back into more abstract configurations, but that unraveling can be fascinating to watch, too.

Known for his work on large-scale art projects, including the world’s biggest interior art installation, artist’s latest piece features over 1,000,000 square feet (100,000 square meters) of shimmering yellow fabric, wrapped around floating docks that span for miles up to and across Lake Iseo in Italy.

Undulating with the waves, the Floating Piers project lets visitors walk between Sulzano, Monte Isola and to the island of San Paolo; the floating platforms are visible from surrounding mountains as well.

Christo conceived of the idea with his Jeanne-Claude as far back as the 1970s, exploring different potential venues for its installation. While Jeanne-Claude passed away in 2009, Christo has carried on the idea, and finally found a place for the temporary work in Northern Italy.

Many works by this long-standing pair of ambitious artists were self-funded, in part through the sales of concept drawings and models in advance.

“like all of our projects,” says Christo, “The Floating Piers absolutely free and accessible 24 hours a day, weather permitting. There are no tickets, no openings, no reservations and no owners. The Floating Piers are an extension of the street and belong to everyone.” The project opened this weekend and will run for just 16 days. Images by Wolfgang Volz.

Instead of names or swatches, this series of minimalist paints comes in tubes that show off constituent colors that double as lessons about how complex hues and shades are created.

The nameless tubes are intended to eschew the use of words altogether and thus avoid existing associations, representing contents instead as a combination of three primary colors (cyan, yellow and magenta) with dots indicating relative amounts. The effect simultaneously divorces the product from names and looks in favor of a more abstract representation scheme that recalls unintuitive systems like binary.

These 2012 Kokuyo Design Awards-winning visual labels hint at contents and teach kids how to make their own mixtures. The paints themselves will be on sale later this year.

“By not assigning names to the colors we want to expand the definition of what a color can be, and the various shades they can create by mixing them” says creator Yusuke Imai, who made these with design partner Ayami Moteki (via Colossal and Spoon & Tamago).

If you have spent any time along the High Line Park in Chelsea, you will recognize this extremely prominent billboard that one artist had the audacity to climb and hack away at.

The original message (WTF is alternate side of the street parking anyway?) was selectively deleted to make way for a replacement question.

Working at night, Poster Boy risked discovery by people parking and picking up their cars in the directly adjacent lot, not to mention being highly visible from the street.

During the day, visitors sitting in the over-street theater seats within the elevated park have a direct view of this huge black-on-yellow poster. It is doubtful the change will survive long, so check it out while it lasts!

Known for his creative edits of local signage and hacked infrastructure, Poster Boy has a huge collection of photos you can browse of his work, ranging from small stickers added in unusual contexts to whole-billboard transformations.

A temporary project set in Madrid, this bright yellow artistic reconfiguration was rendered all the more engaging due to its location in a semi-dark alleyway of the city.

It was created by (fos), an alliance of artists and designers (the word meaning ‘light’ in Greek and ‘melted’ in Catalan), utilizing the front of a vegan restaurant in the semi-secluded Lope de Vega street.

A combination of sun-bright yellow tape and paint were deployed in a pattern intended to abstractly simulate the casting of light, surrounded by shadow, with a few artistic liberties taken in terms of angles and scope.

The context, mostly made of stone or painted in muted tones, made the vivid yellow intervention stand out as something extreme, drawing a great deal of attention from passers by through its stark contrasts.