Hand-crafted, three-dimensional rendering of the famous interface. Pretty charming.

Video preview of a first-person “painting game” set in an abstract, featureless environment. Players must “splatter” black paint in order to make their way to their destination. No idea if the game play will be any good, but aesthetically it’s gorgeous:

Yes, I’m a sucker for black and white.

Your chance to weigh in, courtesy of Mr. Essl.

It’s remarkable how this politician has inspired the world of design: an enterprising freelance graphic designer created these twenty-four illustrations of President-Elect Barack Obama and packaged them as a TrueType font, free for download.

Just one of many forthcoming graphical immortalizations of this man, I’m guessing. Unless he disappoints in a major way.

“[The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center]’s work with IDEO comes as businesses increasingly tap the design world for fresh ideas on management. Some are struggling with new business models and unexpected rivals; others seek new approaches to old problems.” Heaven knows I hope this is in actuality a legitimate trend, but this article reads more like a press release from the remarkably effective IDEO publicity machine than accurate reporting. Not a single additional design firm is mentioned.

Though I’m not quite as enthusiastic about the design of the identity as a whole, I think this is probably one of the best new logos of the year.

Hinrichs is one of my design heroes. If you can find it, his regrettably out-of-print book “Typewise” is essentially a full year᾿s worth of an undergraduate typography course encapsulated into 160 pages.

Several series of airplanes and related imagery. Fans of big toys, you will enjoy these.

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.