The Design Museum's Designs of the Year show (or, rather the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year as we are obliged to call it) opened last night. CR was there with somewhat rubbish digital camera in hand...

As a nominator in the Graphics section and with our Monograph included in the show I have to declare an interest, but the show was very nicely set-out. The Graphics (shown above) and Interactive work had equal billing with the more glamorous worlds of fashion, products and architecture.

Here's our Monograph of Daniel Mason's print process archive, displayed alongside the actual items that we photographed

The Partners' Grand Tour project, which dominates the end of the Graphics section

Peter Saville's sticker from our Feb 07 issue, alongside the Butt book and Varoom

Cartlidge Levene's signage for Selfridges (featured in the current issue of CR)

Saville's Kate Moss logo plus Tony de Marco's images of Sao Paulo sans advertising

We also spent time drooling over the Products section, particularly Ippei Matsumoto's Ten Key calculator

Naoto Fukasawa's Infobar2 mobile phone - why don't we get cool phones like this in the UK?

And Toshio Iwai's Tenori-On digital musical instrument - a 16/16 matrix of LED switches each of which plays a note when activated

The more serious-minded One Laptop Per Child by Yves Béhar

And the supremely clever XL XBeam spanner, which, by the simple addition of a 90-degree twist, is a far more effective tool than a regular spanner

must both stand a good chance of winning the category prizes that are announced on March 11, although the iPhone looms large in that respect. An overall winner will be announced on March 18.

We'll come back with more thoughts on the show once we've had a chance to cogitate (just how do you decide whether, for instance, the extension of the congestion charge is a "better" piece of design than Jil Sander's Spring/Summer 08 collection, both of which are nominated?). In the meantime, let us know what you think