I haven’t been in a comic book store in at least seven months. I get pubs electronically on my iPad now. I just happened by a comic book store last week, in Chicago’s Loop, and was drawn in. It’s a different experience.

Electronic everything is turning whole industries and business models on their heads. It happened to music. Publishing is the latest. But just because songs, stories and images can be served up on a screen and delivered much like their printed or published counterparts doesn’t mean that the entire experience is duplicated.

Browsing is different than searching. Searching is “need it today,” task oriented, goal-focused — all on the act of getting or acquiring, comparing or contrasting.

Browsing is different. It’s the longer, meandering road to the same destination. But along the way it introduces nuance, context, and the serendipity of discovery. Things look different when categorized in ways the don’t bend to the whim of user-generated search results or keyword association.

Magazine racks have context. Book stores have ambiance. Clothing displays create connection in ways that disassociated products do not. A thin layer of rich, nuanced, personal experience can often get stripped away if a brand isn’t careful. It takes smart people to understand the value of that experience and know when it can’t be replicated.

After nearly two years in hiatus, the iam8bit art show is back, with a high-profile gallery opening next Thursday, August 11th! This show will be one for the ages, and definitely worth checking out. Started by our friends at iam8bit in 2005, the art show has featured hundreds of artists’ interpretations of their favorite 1980s video game heroes, heroines, villains, and damsels in distress — and this show should be the best yet.

Peep the awesome poster art above, created by our buddy Dave Crosland.

Also, the new iam8bit book, which we designed and co-published, will be officially released at the show.

Take a look for more info on the opening, and the evening’s festivities, which will include all-night ambiance by DJ R-Rated. Both Jason and Tim will be in attendance, so come down and join us for the festivities!

Video games are no longer a niche market. They’re big business, having long-since eclipsed Hollywood blockbusters in revenue. Culturally, we’ve grown used to video game franchises with their own storylines, plots, and characters — a complex web of merchandising, marketing, and gameplay.

It’s easy to forget that these paths were forged by a cast of simple, clever little characters of ’80s videogames. Their screen time may have been short, but Pac-Man, Q*Bert, Mario, and many other characters were bursting with personality, fun, and an ethos that we wanted to capture in the book, SUPER iam8bit: More Art Inspired By Classic Video Games of the ’80s. With our client-partners and co-publishers, iam8bit, we designed the entire volume, helped curate the mass of excellent artwork, and launched our creative imprint, Plastic Highway.

For more details about this project, power up to our iam8bit portfolio page.

And if that’s not enough ’80s video game goodness for you, be sure to check out iam8bit’s 5th art show in Los Angeles, where the book will be officially released and available for sale.

Some projects fall outside of the realm of client work, and at Hexanine, we do some of this to keep ourselves sharp, to pursue unique interests, and to grow our capabilities. We’re launching a creative imprint called Plastic Highway as a place to showcase creative efforts that exist at the intersection of art and pop culture. Check out our portfolio entry for more on the identity we designed, and watch this space for an upcoming announcement on the first project released under the Plastic Highway banner.