The “Hope” series of Barack Obama campaign posters, created by Shepard Fairey, was voted winner of the Brit Insurance Design of the Year 2009 contest organized by London’s Design Museum, reports Bloomberg’s Farah Nayeri. The poster beat ninety runners-up. The panel judges said in an e-mailed release today that the poster “breathed new life into a form that had lost its purpose” and that it “came not from a marketing campaign, but as a self-initiated fundraising campaign.” Fairey, the poster’s designer, is being sued by the Associated Press over claims that the stylized image copied an AP photograph. The complaint was filed earlier this month in federal court in New York. Awards were also given out in individual categories. The fashion winner was Italian Vogue’s “Black Issue,” dated July 2008, which pictured four black models on the cover and was devoted exclusively to successful black women. The other winners, with categories in parentheses, were the New Oslo Opera House in Norway, designed by Snohetta (architecture); the Myto chair, seamless engineered-plastics seating designed by Konstantin Grcic (furniture); Make Magazine, the first US publication to focus on home kits to make technology projects (interactive); Magno Wooden Radio, made of local, sustainable materials in an Indonesian village and designed by Singgih S. Kartono (product); and Line-J Medellin Metro Cable in Colombia, cable cars designed by France’s Poma and used to convey people living in the hills to the city (transport).