Another fun but related aside: I used d3 to help generate layouts of tightly packed circles, which are then used as the animated background in my agency's 2013 holiday poster.

Generator: http://2013.poster.thirteen23.com/generator/

Poster: http://2013.poster.thirteen23.com/

I just wrote a little bit about building the generator: http://thirteen23.com/garage/2013/02/building-our-bubbly-pos...

This is pretty cool. I'd be interested in reading a blog post about how you did this, pitfalls you encountered, etc.

Thanks! There's a barebones colophon in the HTML source, and I've published the source code [1], but I do intend to write up sometime soon.

[1]: https://github.com/thirteen23/2013-holiday-poster

Beautiful work! Love the shining.