It can be easy to forget to look up. Nowadays there's so much at about eye level or lower to keep your typical day neck-craning free. Between the cool weather, bustling city and mobile content beamed directly into my eye holes I forget the beautiful celestial canvas always hanging above, though it may often be blotted out by light pollution in these parts.

I could never say it better than the great Carl Sagan but stars have been a great source of inspiration and comfort for humans going back decades. It saddens me to know that many people will never appreciate the skies. Many couldn't even if they tried due to the city glare hiding the skies most stunning aspects. One of the most striking, and elusive, is the faint band of the Milk Way. It is only when you've seen this that you can fully appreciate the night sky for the number of stars we can't even make out in our local system. Branko Bistrovic captures this primal fascination with the sky perfectly in this piece "A Hunter by Day, a Stargazer by Night" (sadly his website seems to be down but you can peruse his portfolio at CG Society).

Starry themes appear throughout human creativity. The emptiness, the potential and the stark beauty of stars is endlessly stimulating to the creator. I have to admit that sometimes I get overly distracted by the razzle dazzle javascript or HTML5 of many of the websites I feature here, possibly discounting pure visual design at the expense of interaction. But we shouldn't discount those sites that rely simply on stellar design...pun intended. If anything we should celebrate them; good design is not a gimmick and can lead to a timeless useful piece. The design agency Tui's own site is a great example of such a site with a spacey twist (plus I like how they spell twitter as "tuitter").

The site's slick clean design with a diagonal pattern finish accompanied by a vivid color palette make for a crisp site. I only question the use of pure white for the main content backgrounds as this not only outshines the gorgeous background that so captivates the user upon landing and constant content but also makes each page have a highly different content and contrast volume (compare Homepage to About or other internal content-filled pages). Perhaps a semi-transparent gray or another off tone would compliment the other elements dark aesthetic better and lead to a greater balance across the site by in large.

Obviously when it comes to video, we're actually quite space obsessed. The inky void of space is fertile ground for the imagination to fill with whatever creative strokes we wish. One of the earliest films, A Trip to the Moon, celebrated mankind's obsession with the eternal night sky. And as our understanding of space continues to accelerates beyond belief, this passion outpaces it leading to all manner of creations, from the silly to the serious. However, in my mind you can't beat a good surreal sci-fi animated music video. The fact that it's dub, a favorite genre of mine, doesn't hurt either.

The Sketching Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Mondays, containing the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker as well as his inspiring artistic finds of the week.