As many know, I'm a huge fan of thew works of M.C. Escher. We even did a marketing piece recently where we purchased the rights to use one of his works.
One of the many great techniques that Escher employed in his illustrations was one called The Droste Effect where recurring images within images get smaller and smaller seemingly to infinity – something like placing a mirror in front of a mirror. This technique is named after the Dutch company maker Droste Cocao who famously used this visual effect on their packaging in the early 1900's.
Enter the digital age and we open up a whole new realm of possibilities with optical illusions. I'm reminded of the great work that HP has done is the past couple years with many of their "Pictures" spots.
Now here's one that's particularly well done. It was used for the music video for the Wild Beasts' single "Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants" and it's mesmerizing. If you start to feel nauseated, please, look away from your monitor and the feeling will pass.
Check out a great collection of other Droste Effect works here.
- Rich Gould
- Rich Gould is co-founder of Razor Creative, a Moncton based marketing, branding and design agency that was acquired in 2016. Besides that, he's a Superdad, an illustrator, hockey coach, ivory tickler and offbeat drummer.