If someone had told us that we would fall in love with a poster that featured a heart motif we would have laughed and referred them to our 8-year-old niece. That was before we discovered Boy Sees Hearts ingenious and spontaneous works of art, which changed the way we saw hearts forever.

If someone had told us that we would fall in love with a poster that featured a heart motif we would have laughed and referred them to our 8-year-old niece. That was before we discovered Boy Sees Hearts ingenious and spontaneous works of art, which changed the way we saw hearts forever.

Made up of hundreds of randomly occurring heart shapes that Boy Sees Hearts creator Eric Telchin has snapped on his iPhone and not altered or retouched. They’re edgy, clever and fresh—all adjectives we never thought we’d associate with something as clichéd as a heart. Telchin didn’t either, until he saw his first heart in a puddle of melted Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge ice cream on his kitchen counter. Amazed, he grabbed his phone and snapped a pic.

Suddenly, he was seeing hearts in the most unexpected places and taking photos of every one. A year later, he made his first collage from the hearts he’d collected—The Skull. The reaction, he says, has blown him away. “After viewing Boy Sees Hearts pieces, people are inspired to view their world through different eyes,” he says. “People think the pieces are gorgeous, but what’s most incredible is how it encourages them, in their own lives, to see the ultimate symbol of love within something as mundane as a crumpled napkin or a crack in the sidewalk.”

Now that, we thought to ourselves, is the kind of heart we can get behind. And he’s created this design exclusively for AHAlife. Heart you Eric.