This has probably happened to you, too: the past two days, I’ve been taking election-related pictures, and whenever I’ve gotten shots that I think are really good or unique, I soon discover that plenty of other people have taken very similar shots. Well, the amazing Joe Holmes came up with this terrific shot and no one else has it. A gem.

Paul Schrynemakers talks to Lori Richmond, Design Director of Online Editorial, and Kristen Dudish, Online Designer for the cross-media wedding brand. It’s a nice interview, but I mostly wanted to point out how impressed I am that The Society of Publication Designers, an organization that could easily succumb to the misguided temptation of turning its nose up at digital media, is making a real effort to understand and engage digital audiences. Hats off, particularly, to Paul, who has been writing about Web sites extensively on the organization’s blog.

When grouped together, this trend of omitting the title and author from book covers and deferring to pictorial language for maximum impact seems more trivial than it really is. Several of them are fairly powerful designs though. What’s more, they can be thought of as a kind of response to the text-everywhere environment of digital media: there’s no competing with the Internet for the sheer abundance of words, so marketing the idea behind a book as being so powerful and engrossing that it needs no words is a fairly shrewd strategy. From The Book Design Review, which in case you’re not already reading it, is a very entertaining blog about packaging books.

I’m still having a hard time admitting to myself that Apple Mail is my primary RSS reader now, and that I hardly ever open NetNewsWire any more. Still, this new theme from Antonio Carusone, based on his excellent design blog AisleOne, is very well done and a joy to use.

As you head out to vote tomorrow, remember to bring along your digital camera to take snapshots of your polling place. Not just for posterity, but also so that you can contribute to this community-driven photojournalism project, which is a collaboration between William Drenttel, AIGA and The New York Times. Read more at Design Observer.

Wow, the preeminent design blog is five years old! Party this Wednesday night in New York City; come celebrate and/or drown your post-election sorrows.

Another increment of finer typographic control for the Web: an apparently effective, server-side plug-in for WordPress that enables elegant and automatic hyphenation of words. “The end result is text that can be jusГtiГfied withГout ghastly word spacing.” Supposedly works with left-aligned blocks of text, too. It’s a step forward, but it may not be the full step forward some might hope for. Unfortunately, I don’t use WordPress so I won’t have the opportunity to put it into practice.