This beautiful coin won a Dutch contest to design a 5 euro commemorative coin. The winning designer, Stani Michiels, (actually, it’s more the winning architect) has a nice detailed process story about the winning design. The stunning thing for me was that the entire process of designing the coin was all done with free software — Python, SPE editor, PIL, pyCairo, Gimp, Inkscape, Phatch — on an Asus Eee PC that ran Ubuntu.

Absolutely stunning work and a glowing tribute to the versatility, quality and cost of Linux in a ‘production’ environment. If only Linux and most other free software were easy enough for more people (like our parents) to access and use on their desktops, the world might be better, freer and less energy-hungry than it is now.

[Via Design Oberserver]

Ink Tape is a font designed by Merci Bernard, an art director from France who has a nice collection of work.

Amazon.com introduced Windowshop.com last week, their take on a virtual ‘window shopping’ experience. It lets you zoom and pan through Amazon content, like their best seller lists in music, books, video and other categories. One would guess their inspiration was the Cooliris application, but Amazon’s Windowshop seems tame in comparison. It seriously lacks the ‘wow’ factor of a slick psuedo-3D environment that Cooliris has.

With shiny, image-driven interfaces popping up everywhere, 2008 might be remembered as the year of the visual search. If visual search breaks into the big-time, Gesture based navigation might be the next big thing that may follow into the mainstream.

A great response to an article on plain packaging to strip the ‘glamour’ from cigarettes for ‘new’ smokers.

One of the more technically advanced gadgets in its day almost 70 years ago, the Jaeger LeCoultre Compass looks as like a very, very polished piece of workmanship. It cost about £40 pounds in 1937 but today, this timeless beauty can fetch about US$2,000.

[Via oobject]

Self-dipping chicken nuggets are but one of the attractions at the new Banksy installation in New York which is contained in a store called The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill. Videos seem to show a great deal more detail, especially the animatronics.

[Via Wooster Collective]

Order, download, browse and enjoy the new site.

See more beautiful and unique silkscreen prints, posters and stuff from Phineas Xavier Jones.

[Via Gizmodo]

The Quad is a fantastic, modular shelving system which can store many different-sized objects and looks wicked too. The great part is you can actually stack them to create a bigger unit. The not-so-great part (for boys and girls on a budget like me) is that it costs US$2,000 a pop.

The Design Observer asked ‘what would you do with the domain name designersforobama.org’ and Aaron Perry-Zucker answered with a Threadless-style Obama poster/visual communications site.