Now that Bitcoin value went ~10 times higher than it was half a year ago, is there a hope for new, lower denomination physical bitcoin designs? It would be nice to have 0.5, 0.1, 0.05, 0.01 denomination bitcoins too.

Not sure if its appropriate, as I dont want to hijack this thread, but I was thinking the exact same thing for quite some time and finally decided to go for it and produce 0.1 BTC coins:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=182979.msg1912084Any questions or comments about that please post in the above thread and not here.