As part of their continuing efforts to make endless re-releases of classic books at least somewhat interesting, Penguin has lately been experimenting with different cover design strategies. Across the pond, Penguin UK has hit on an ultra-minimalist approach: no cover at all. That is, they're releasing six classics with shrink-wrapped blank white paper covers, the idea being that you, the creative consumer, will draw your own cover. Artistes can then submit their cover designs for display on Penguin's website. For the next cycle, the pages will also be blank, allowing you to give The Picture of Dorian Gray that happy ending you just know Oscar Wilde would've wanted.

Inspired by last year's tome on 70 years of cover designs at Penguin, this Flickr gallery attempts to collect examples of the last few decades' worth of Penguin/Pelican jackets. If anything, the starkly crude, mod, and/or trippy designs are testaments to doing a lot with relatively limited graphic resources. Of course, you've also got plenty of purely objectionable cases of crap abstraction for abstract subjects, such as the coma-inducing Psychiatry To-day.

Font obsessive Ironic Sans mines new minerals from the vein of Gothamist blog parody humor, even though we do a little secret cutting every time we read the phrase "istaverse." Observe the various logos created for Ist titles covering fictional cities. If there really was a Bedrockist, perhaps we could thrill to posts like "What's Fresh: Mammoth."

Our only interest in Web 2.0 is that it gives us whole new versions of things to crap on, but somehow this farcical revolution has infected even the rarefied realm of logo design. Most of the suggested Web 2.0-ified logos in this thread on design-nerd hive Yah Hooray are predictable takes on media or Internet companies; common themes include gradient color, roundness, hovering, reflections, and the sarcastically permanent suffix of "Beta." Still, who could resist the updated PBR logo at right? Lowbrow-loving hipsters might squeal, but that nostalgia trip is only going to get you so far in our brave new 2.0 world.

New social site People Aggregator goes public tomorrow. But since the usual screenshot clearinghouse, TechCrunch.com, only posted a partial shot of the site, I figured you deserve a peek.

Oh, how our mouths were watering after reading Gabe Sherman's dispatch on the Observer's Media Mob blog yesterday afternoon, and not just because its headline alluded to smoked fish. Starting with today's issue, Sherman reported, the Observer would look different. A smaller trim size! (Like The Washington Post!) Five columns instead of six on the front page! A brand-new frontpage design! It is all being done, as it will soon be done at The Wall Street Journal, to save some money on paper, of course. But, still, "it gave us a face-lift," editor Peter Kaplan lemons-to-lemonaded, "that we needed." A face-lifted Upper East Side-bred beauty? This we'd have to see. And so we found ourselves out of the house uncharacteristically early today, purchasing an Observer at the corner newsstand. (Couldn't begin to tell you the last time we did that.) We gave it a good look. And we reached a verdict: The new Observer looks just like... the old Observer.

Profound — and, granted, profoundly inconsequential — sociomediacultural thought of the day:

Do something smart this week — or drink someone's free beer.

What San Franciscan design couple agreed a little fun outside the marriage doesn't have to be under the table, as long as it's above the waist? Two pretty techies in their 30s told all to New York Magazine last November — except their real names.

A six-man panel redesigned Craigslist for SXSW. The new design is gorgeous, slick, and almost as small as the original. Until the panel posts it at Design Eye, you can see it at panel-member site Just Watch the Sky. Right now, they're taking questions about the design at their panel. And of course Craigslist founder Craig Newmark was invited onstage to share his reaction.