I can't comment on Varini-like approaches, but I also happened to like the TSP work. Other works that are also visually pleasing I would like to mention are:
+ Artistic word cloud, in particular Tagxedo (my creation, see http://www.tagxedo.com/gallery.html for some examples). You can create a word cloud using any shape as the outline.
+ Roger Alsing's genetic algorithm work on using triangles to represent any images (e.g. Mona Lisa) http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolut...
+ Artistic word cloud, in particular Tagxedo (my creation, see http://www.tagxedo.com/gallery.html for some examples). You can create a word cloud using any shape as the outline.
+ A variant of word cloud is what I'd call "Shape cloud", which is to use a lot of shapes to form a cloud of a particular shape (see some examples here: http://blog.tagxedo.com/a-creative-abuse-of-fonts-words-and-...). A famous example is a cloud of Google's products in the shape of Darth Vader (http://erictric.com/2010/03/09/is-google-trying-to-take-over...). Another example is Steve Jobs' portrait using Apple's product (http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/picture-incre...), but this Jobs' portrait is closer to Photomosaic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photographic_mosaic), which is also another fascinating idea from ages ago.
Incidentally, I think the TSP technique can be trivially improved by coloring the edges and vertices, say, using averaging.