feel good anyway + they might be giants: meet the elements.

I just dweebed out on this sumpin’ awful. I feel both shame and exileration, simultaneously. Like the first time I poured vinegar into my baking-soda filled papier maché volcano, I’m about to gush forth with excitement.

Behold one of the best examples in history of how good design can take something technically burdensome and turn it into a thing of illustrative beauty. There are few things that rival the efficient usability, universal clarity, hip factor, epic design goodness, and monumental geek caché of the periodic table of the elements. Seriously. Let’s be honest; chemisty is boring and nobody but chemists would disagree. But somewhere along the line two next level thinkers named Dimitri Mendeleev and Lothar Meyer came along and laid that shit out so sweet that people not only finally understood what a noble gas was but they will proudly wear it on a tee shirt. That’s skillz. With a “z.”

elements

I had to totally wiki who those two guys were, by the way. This is an art blog, after all. I hope you didn’t think I actually knew that. But I like to give credit where credit is due, so there you go.

So, basically the periodic table is rad and now there’s a song to make it even radder. Boosted by nerd darling They Might Be Giants, whose latest DVD/CD “Here Comes Science” features the single “Meet The Elements”, this inescapably adorable video, directed by the killer Oregon-based shop Feel Good Anyway and debuted at Boing Boing, is a super friendly video intro to the elements that’s cute as a puppy and made me want to go pour something into a beaker and set it on fire. In the name of discovery! Slap a face on a little Xenon molecule and suddenly the whole nature of the universe unfolds, Stephen Hawking-style.

I appreciate the work Boing Boing put into helping create this, but skip to 0:20 to avoid the super annoying interstitial they put in after it seemed like the video was already beginning. Bad Boing Boing, Bad.