Chessboards are so dull

Some times the best designs are based on the simplest of things. For example I quite like the paintings of Piet Mondrian even though the form seems so obvious. The trick is to be the first person to think of the design.
Designer Jim Sutherland has taken a look at a normal chess board, and decided to come up with something different. While his boards still have 32 light squares and 32 dark squares, he has arranged them in a number of different ways. One design is a spiral of all black and all white squares, while others include larger chunks of white or black squares to make differing patterns.
He has a page showing some of his designs and has even built a couple of chess boards. I wonder if such designs may also allow a set of chess variants based on the colour of squares pieces can move to (ie bishops move diagonally, but must land on a square of the same colour they started on). If you visit his page you can also follow a link to another interesting chess design, the Typographic Chess Set.