My friend Randi Famula made these cool coasters. They’re two kinds of nostalgia fused into one design, like so many tiny plastic cylinders under the hot iron of Randi’s creativity.
First of all: the subject. Nintendo characters from a version of Mario that was introduced in the time of our childhood. Sure, I’m only in my mid-twenties, but it’s not too early to yearn to recreate images from my innocent, idealized past, right? Does anyone else know the Greek etymology of the word “design”?
Secondly, and my favorite: the medium. Randi chose Perler Beads, a craft that many of my cohorts probably remember from around the time they were getting acquainted with those Nintendo characters. (Back in my single-digit days, I cranked out many a Christmas tree ornament with that craft.) In Randi’s design, she used the beads to impersonate the pixeled appearance of the characters on the clunky old game systems. The outcome is a design that looks more like the characters as we remember playing with them than how they’re “supposed” to look (say, for example, as they would be drawn). The clunky pixels, which were probably considered by the game designers to be the outcome of the constraint of not-yet-advanced-enough graphics technology, are actually lovingly reproduced and remembered here.
I can’t help but wonder what present-day design constraints are going to be fondly recalled in fifteen years by today’s little kids.
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