This is pretty nice. Not a big fan of the typography at the bottom myself, it seems a bit too overdone with the two different colors and styles. I suppose rich black is not used because it might interfere with the details of the shape?
would something like this be hand-placed at all or does the computer figure everything out according to some fractal grid
It's most likely computer-aided. It's pretty insane to do something like this without computer help these days, since it's become pretty easy with tools like
Scriptographer.