Thanks to London’s evening paper wars, commuters now have a choice of two freesheets to grab absentmindedly as they head home. Last night, those who picked up Rupert Murdoch’s thelondonpaper got quite a shock.

Its front page appeared to splash on the assassination of President George W Bush. A grainy black and white photograph taking up almost the whole page showed the President clutching at his chest, while frantic aides hustled him away. Stern type below spelled out the enormity of what had (apparently) happened: George W Bush: 6 July 1946-Tonight 9PM. Heh?

This year’s D&AD Annual was designed by Andy Probert and James Littlewood, aka Design Project.

Here’s how they did it…

Richard Woods’ art shifts across the boundaries of art, architecture and graphic design, as a new, lavishly illustrated book of his work explains.

Woods’ practice ranges from huge, block-printed wall coverings to smaller sculptures and paintings, but he is probably best known for his floor works, which are installed in galleries and shops around the world as well as the homes of artists and designers such as Tim Noble & Sue Webster and Detmar & Isabella Blow.

Matt Groening’s Futurama parodies THAT Apple ad

In the liberal Pop Art world of 60s America, graphic artist Frances Elizabeth Kent quickly became a renowned figure within creative circles. She was a hugely talented designer, typographer and photographer and, uniquely, balanced her creative path with another calling – that of being a practicing nun within the Catholic church.

And yet Sister Mary Corita (as she became known after her inception into the Immaculate Heart community in Los Angeles at 18) remains an unsung heroine of modern graphic design – a reappraisal of her position as one of the US’s most strikingly original creatives is long overdue. Julie Ault, author of a new book of Corita’s work – Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita – looks set to help change this perception. Cited as a major influence on contemporary artists such as Mike Kelley and Wolfgang Tillmans, Corita’s work is also the subject of an exhibition which starts tonight – at Tillmans’ London gallery space, Between Bridges.

Last year’s D&AD Annual broke with tradition. Until then, the practice had been to hand the cover design over to either an ad agency or a design studio (they took turns) while treating the inside pages as a separate project. The result was a kind of packaging arms race where each year the challenge often seemed to be to produce the most ludicrous, overblown and often totally inappropriate solution possible.

Thankfully, sanity finally prevailed and, in 2005, D&AD gave over the whole book to Spin. The result was a beautifully-produced, conceptually consistent book which succeeded in honouring those chosen while also underlining D&AD’s charitable status.

This year, Design Project were chosen to produce the Annual. Check back later in the week for an interview with the designers on the project. In the meantime, have a look at what they did with it…