Product packages are often the design equivalent of having a hammer driven into your eyeballs. Buzzword-y text everywhere, disgusting color overload, and corny cartoon mascots. So why not strip it all away and let the product's name speak for itself?

Design firm A2591 took popular products and gave them a minimalist transformation. Each item gets two version—one with some of the orignal's elements left over, and  a radically stark iteration with pretty much nothing but the name. Beautiful typography. Simple, popping colors.

More info and photos here.

For Australia's Tron: Legacy premiere, skaters slid around Eness' interactive ramp. The effects are controlled through iPod Touches loaded with custom apps that measured air time and provided their location.

How does a person remember ads? BMW will tell you. BMW flashed an audience with a blinding light that included a cutout of their logo. When the audience was told to close their eyes, they saw the letters: BMW.

The video explains that the effect it's akin to staring at the sun for too long, when you close your eyes, you can still sorta see a spot there (or go blind). BMW used that to their advantage in their commercial.

It's creative advertising (and they say it was harmless) and the focus group seemed mightily impressed with the effect. It tied into the commercial quite nicely too, check out how it was done in the video bellow (though the flash effect doesn't work over YouTube).

What if you watch a film and whenever you pause it, you face a painting? This idea inspired Reza Dolatabadi to make Khoda.

Over 6000 paintings were painstakingly produced during two years to create a five minutes film that would meet high personal standards.

Leave the domino effect to books, people, and well, real dominoes. In Carbon Design's Domino Clock, the black dots silently switch to white dots to indicate the time, functioning similar to a digital clock.

A custom actuator was designed to power the thousands of transitions the dots make each day, and the only time power is used in the clock is when those transitions are made (kind of like e-paper devices).

The individual dominoes of the clock communicate wirelessly to correctly display the time, and they can hang on a wall or stand freely.

More info here.

Prepare for the most mind meltingly realistic CGI You've Ever Seen.

Alex Roman is some kind of wizard. I suspected it when I saw his jaw-dropping CGI mini-movie The Third & The Seventh, but after watching his new 100% computer generated commercial, there's simply no other explanation.

In the comments of the Vimeo video, Roman explains:

"Aswering your questions; yep, it's all CG -same process as T&S- I tried to put some live-footage shots but i run out of time so CGI did the trick :p. Whole production was 2 and a half months for the initial concept to the final editing; two people: Juan and me."

While Hollywood CGI is getting more and more impressive every day, you can almost always tell that it's not real. Some microscopically incorrect movement will betray the artifice of the image, or the light won't play off something in quite the right way. That is not the case here. There was nothing in this clip that raised in me even a hiccup of doubt that I wasn't looking at the world which I inhabit. The real world.

This French gym is so bizarre looking, it might compel you to do a few laps out of curiosity. But it's also highly functional—enormous windows provide lighting during the day, with a solar panels juicing bulbs at night.

The attractive compound, designed by French architect Jean Marc Rivet, also features a rooftop garden, and interiors that are almost as attractive as what's outside.

More info and photos here.

No CGI. No green screen. Just some deft camera work, 760 frames of animation, and a speeding Subaru. That's how you turn a stretch of road into the world's biggest flipbook.

This commercial for the Subaru WRX STI doesn't tell me nearly as much about the performance of the car as it does the creativity of Subaru's ad team.

For the making-of Video click here.

It's impossible not to love the series of photos of Anthony Burrill using oil from Louisiana beaches left from the BP oil disaster for his posters. From something so horrible comes something pretty eye-catching—and beneficial for the charity the profits support.

From scooping up the oil, to the gunk being used as paint in the screen-printer, the photos paint a story of the BP oil disaster six months later. Burrill said of his posters "here is a perception among many people that the oil in the Gulf of Mexico is just going to somehow disappear...For people in the Gulf, including Louisiana, the effects of this disaster will be around for a long time."

Profits for the sale of the 200 posters will be donated to the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, a voluntary organization that protects and restores the coastline. They cost $210 each (after converting from 150 Euros), which isn't cheap, but considering they're limited edition screen-prints signed by the artist and for a worthy cause, I'm sure they'll be snapped up in no time.

More info and photos here.

Salesman Pete and The Amazing Stone From Outer Space. If you have to watch a video during lunch at the office, this is it. It's pure animation bliss, with some of the most exquisite use of 3D I've ever seen.

The atmosphere, the pace, the action... and also the perfect rendering to make it look like pure airbrushed, hand-drawn 2D animation. Marc Bouyer, Max Loubaresse, and Anthony Vivien—as well as musician Cyrille Marchesseau and sound designer Mael Vignaux—should all get an Oscar and jobs at Pixar.

More videos and info here.