Earlier this week, we took a look at some of our favorites from the iF Design 2012 Gold Award-Winners in the Product Design category. Here we have a selection of a few standouts from the other three categories, communications, material and packaging.

Communications Design was the second largest category, though it garnered only about a third of the entries as the Product Design category (1,054 vs. 2,923), with 275 earning the coveted iF label, of which 30 were gold winners.

The Product Interface subcategory saw a predictable range of several touchscreen implementations. We liked OYSTAR's "One HMI" is a single touch-based Human-Machine Interface "control concept and software design for 12 technologies, 36 machine types and 3 monitor sizes."

Print Media ain't dead yet: 11 of the 30 gold winners fell into this subcategory. Nevertheless, decodeunicode had an obvious digital age appeal for those of us who nerd out over well-designed reference materials. (Viewable here; hopefully they'll translate it into English soon!)

Similarly, HCBCzwei Verwaltung UG & Co. KG's 'crossmedia' winner for HOCH III marked a mash-up of Eastern and Western influences; the concept for the three-floor café/bar/club in Hamburg represents minimalism that might be home in either hemisphere.

The jury team deemed the Audi booth at CES to be "brash and self-confident," garnering a Gold Award in the Corporate Architecture - Exhibition/Tradeshow subcategory.

Playframe's interactive Material Library (Materialbibliothek) for Austrian lumber company Egger combined two kinds of tactility—that of wooden pieces and glass touchscreens—to nice effect.

As for materials, just over a quarter of the 97 total entry pool made the cut; out of those 27, the jury selected five Gold Winners, including BlingCrete. While the aptly-named building material might not work for all applications, the "embedded glass microspheres" certainly go a long way towards illuminating their rather more brutal concrete substrate.

Lastly, 53 of the 248 entries in the Packaging category earned the iF label, though there were proportionally fewer gold winners: of the five, Festina's packaging for a diving watch expressed both luxury and whimsy.

Again, you can see all of the winners (Gold or otherwise) in iF Design's excellent online gallery.