The jury has spoken, and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum has just announced the winners of the 2008 National Design Awards, which gives you just over five months to figure out what you'll wear to the October gala. This year's "Design Mind" award recipient is none other than Michael Bierut, a "visionary individual that has affected a shift in design thinking or practice through writing, research, and scholarship" if ever there was one. Meanwhile, we're thrilled that our tireless campaign to see the 2008 NDA for fashion design in the hands of Ralph Rucci has succeeded (although we would have worn Rucci-designed frocks for the duration of National Design Week even if the award had gone to someone else). Meanwhile, Scott Stowell of open takes the communication design category. "I'm deeply honored and shocked and thrilled," notes Stowell. "I'm also relieved that we don't have to keep it a secret any longer! Whew." Below, the full list of winners and finalists:

Lifetime Achievement: Charles Harrison

Design Mind: Michael Bierut

Communications Design: Scott Stowell

Fashion Design: Ralph Rucci

Landscape Design: Olin Partnership

Product Design: Antenna Design

Last Thursday, visual culture and design magazine Print triumphed over the likes of Metropolis and Aperture to win the National Magazine Award for general excellence in the under 100,000 circulation category. On the occasion of the bimonthly magazine's tenth nomination and its fourth win, the American Society of Magazine Editors lauded Print's "expansive view of its subject, its relentless curiosity, and its determination to look at design not in a vacuum but as a crucial gateway to popular culture, the environment, even politics."

How did the Print team celebrate its win? "After the show was over at Jazz at Lincoln Center, we collapsed at the bar next door at the Mandarin Oriental," says editor-in-chief Joyce Rutter Kaye (pictured above, with outgoing ASME president Cindi Leive), who adds that there was much giggling at the sight of associate editor James Gaddy's onscreen appearance during the awards show. "He was the cover model for our March/April 2007 New Visual Artists issue, which was projected about two stories tall in a spinning graphic," adds Kaye.

As for the spiderlike award itself, it has already had some adventures of its own. After joining Kaye in a cab ride home to Brooklyn last Thursday, Print's Ellie traveled by tote bag to Park Slope's PS 321, "where it journeyed through the halls and rested beneath a third-grade desk during 'Parents as Learning Partners' time, going completely unnoticed despite the high concentration of media-employed parents in the building," Kaye tells us. "It then took a Q train ride to the office where it happily joined our other three Ellies on top of our set of bookshelves." Now it's now back to business as usual at Print as the staff closes the August issue and judges the Regional Design annual. But the memories are still fresh. Adds Kaye, "I still have an unwashed champagne glass sitting on my desk from the pre-Ellie celebration in the office Thursday night."

Our sister blog FishbowlNY twittered the night away at the National Magazine Awards ceremony (a final, koan-like post found them at the afterparty "standing alone at the cheese bar"), and we're pleased to report that UnBeige favorite Print magazine won the Ellie award for general excellence in the under 100,000 circulation category, joining more widely circulated general excellence winners National Geographic, The New Yorker, GQ, Backpacker, and Mother Jones. Meanwhile, Wired triumphed over a slate of nominees that included last year's winner, New York magazine, to take home the award for design. Below, we've highlighted in yellow the winners among the design and photo category nominees. The full list of winners is after the jump.

DESIGN: Good | GQ | New York Magazine* | T, The New York Times Style Magazine | Vanity Fair | Wired

PHOTOGRAPHY: Gourmet | GQ | Martha Stewart Living | National Geographic | New York Magazine | W

PHOTOJOURNALISM: Aperture | Mother Jones | National Geographic | The New Yorker | The Virginia Quarterly Review

PHOTO PORTFOLIO: New York Magazine | Newsweek | T, The New York Times Style Magazine (two nominations) | Vanity Fair

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Calvin Klein Collection creative director Francisco Costa, whose spring '08 aqua column dress we hope that the Easter Bunny is just extremely delayed in bestowing upon us, is the recipient of Philadelphia University's 2008 Spirit of Design Award. He'll be presented with the award tomorrow evening at the school's annual fashion show, which showcases the work of fashion design students and draws an audience of thousands annually. The theme of this year's show is "Eco Couture."

"Costa's work is beautifully rendered and uncompromising," says Clara Henry, director of the Fashion Design Program at Philadelphia University. "He takes a minimalist approach by defining shapes through skillful tailoring and attention to line. He is truly an inspiration to our student designers." Costa, himself a juror for this year's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards, worked for such fashion houses as Gucci and Oscar de la Renta before designing his first Calvin Klein Collection (for spring 2004). He was named Womenswear Designer of the Year by the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2006 and was recently nominated again for 2008. And we can vouch for the fact that he is much friendlier than the stern/quizzical official shot above might suggest.

'Tis the season of awards and celebrations and conferences and any other reason people can think to get together. Via Archinect, we found out about another one: the European Centre for Architecture, Art, Design and Urban Studies and The Chicago Anthenaeum have announced their picks for Europe 40 Under 40, an award given to both young designers and architects plying their trades in Europe. Bustler has the whole list of names, as well as a ton of images of the various winners' work and it's all just spectacular. The only thing we're curious about is why this is a co-award with a Chicago-based organization and has a jury consisting entirely of people in New York, but is only about young designers and architects working in Europe. But maybe we're just suffering from too much patriotism. Excuse us while we straighten out our lapel flag pins and give it some serious thought.

"Good morning Matt, and good morning to you," as the Today show's Ann Curry would say in her trademark blend of early morning chipperness and seriousness befitting international headlines. Tonight at New York's Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Curry will stay up later than usual to present the 69th annual Overseas Press Club Awards, honoring the finest in international journalism.

Our focus, of course, is the photo- and graphics-related awards. Photojournalist James Nachtwey, who has received more OPC Robert Capa Gold Medal Awards than any other photographer since the award's founding in 1955, will be on hand to accept the organization's President's Award, while Getty Images earns three of the four photo awards: John Moore wins for best published photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise for "The Assassination of Benazir Bhutto"; the award for best photographic reporting from abroad in newspapers and wire services goes to Paula Bronstein of Getty for "Death in Karachi"; and the feature photography award goes to Getty's Brent Stirton, shooting for Newsweek, for "Slaughter in the Jungle," a cover story about a family of gorillas that were murdered in the Congo.

Staving off a Getty shut-out, Cedric Gerbehaye of Agence VU and Newsweek, wins for best photographic reporting from abroad in magazines and books for "Congo in Limbo," shot in 2006 during the Congo's first free elections in four decades (it was a big year for the Congo in pictures!). Meanwhile, Clay Bennett of the Christian Science Monitor will take home the Thomas Nast Award for the best cartoons on international affairs, and the OPC's website award goes to The New York Times (a winner in five other categories, for reporting) for its online feature "Assessing the Surge: A Survey of Baghdad Neighborhoods."

Earlier this month, while we were nibbling chocolate-dipped strawberries with bagless vacuum magnate James Dyson and a crew of up-and-coming industrial designers, the Rhode Island School of Design was celebrating the 2008 recipients of its annual Athena Awards. In a bash hosted by writer and Studio 360 creator Kurt Andersen (himself the recipient of a RISD honorary degree) at the New York headquarters of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, RISD honored eight individuals for their achievements in the arts (they're all pictured above, with the award presenters).

Among this year's honorees: glassmaster James Carpenter (for excellence in design), Ayse Birsel (for excellence in furniture design), and Roni Horn (for excellence in fine art). TED Conference curator Chris Anderson received the Athena Award for Arts Patronage, and departing RISD president Roger Mandle and his wife, Gayle, were honored with the Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf Award for Lifetime Achievement. After his contract expires this July, Mandle is headed east--way east--to serve as executive director of the Qatar Museums Authority, the organization overseeing the building of the I.M. Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art in Doha.

Elsewhere in the world of starchitecture, while Renzo was busy talking about sad and disturbing things, Richard Meier must've been living it up, as he was just awarded the Gold Medal for Architecture by the American Academy of Art and Letters (which is just about the coolest award you can get, if just so someone like Meier can legitimately be able to say, "Well, as a man of arts and letters..."). Along with Meier were a whole slew of other winners, from Yo-Yo Ma and Salman Rushdie taking home Honorary Memberships to a slew of other miscellaneous people winning things like awards for light verse, musical theater, various types of art and Neil Denari, Jim Jennings, James Carpenter and Kenneth Frampton, each of whom took home a cool $7500 and four Academy Awards in Architecture (which we're guessing the whole group quickly spent on cocaine and strippers with Calvin Trillin and William T. Vollmann, who also won their share of cash and prizes).

On occasion, we're considered design experts. Of course, the emphasis should be placed with "on occasion" and "experts" in as much as all those "experts" on television news programs are "experts." But the specifics are neither here nor there, as with the Logo Design Love Awards, we were asked to step in as one of the esteemed judges, to look over all of the logo entries they received and pick our favorites. Yesterday, the blog's host, David Airey, started off the big awards ceremony with the people's choice awards, voted on by readers of the site. While we picked very few of the winners selected by the general public, we're looking forward to seeing what our fellow judges chose as their picks for each of the ten categories, as well as we experts' top three picks for the best of the best, both of which should be released today and tomorrow.

Tomorrow may be opening day of Milan's Salone Internazionale del Mobile, but we're already looking ahead to June, when Design Miami/ Basel will host its third global design extravaganza in Switzerland. The show will feature brand new work by each of the just announced winners of the 2008 Design Miami/ Designers of the Future award. Below, we offer a handy breakdown of the five chosen ones.

Martino Gamper