YouTube’s 100 most popular videos of all time get boiled down into simple red icons in an eye-catching new poster.

Toronto designer Ibraheem Youssef and his friend, art director Paul Parolin, compiled the cross-genre list of YouTube’s most-viewed clips at the stroke of midnight as 2011 dawned. Their stark and arty representations of the videos followed a five-hour marathon during which they watched the top 100 clips in one shot, Youssef told Wired.com in an e-mail interview.

Youssef, 29, said certified YouTube junkie Parolin hatched the idea. “He is obsessed with checking the Top Today videos on YouTube every morning on his iPhone,” Youssef said.

Sketches show the YouTube video icons as a work in progress. (Click for high-resolution image.)

Since it takes time for a new clip to crack the top 100 most-viewed videos list, Youssef and Parolin were able to do the bulk of their more than 60 hours of brainstorming, sketching and rendering in advance.

As they New Year dawned, the pair finalized the order of the list and finished their poster, creating an arty and creative snapshot of YouTube’s history.

The poster was something of a labor of love: The pair wanted to pay tribute to YouTube, which has revolutionized the way the world views videos in the past five years. Youssef said he appreciates the website’s global scale.

“I love watching random videos from other cultures that I don’t understand,” he said. “Ignorance is beautiful.”

Parolin, 27, who works for Toronto ad agency The Hive, said he loves YouTube’s immediacy and honesty.

“It’s the best TV I’ve ever had,” he said.

The hardest icon to create, according to Youssef? The tiny cheerleader outfit that captures the spirit of No. 74 on the list, My Chemical Romance’s “Teenagers” video, which has been viewed more than 63 million times on YouTube.

Youssef and Parolin’s two-color, 22-inch-by-30-inch YouTube: Top 100 Videos of All Time Tribute Poster, “lovingly silk-screened by hand on a 24-bond, 100 percent cotton archival paper,” is available for $50. It’s a limited-edition run of 400.

Sketches show the YouTube video icons as a work in progress. (Click for high-resolution image.)

See Also:

• Minimalism Heroes Turns Superheroes Into Icons
• Feb. 15, 2005: YouTube and Your 15 Minutes of Fame
• Retro Posters Show Off Superheroes' Home Cities

Authors: Lewis Wallace

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