Game Informer has an interview with the art director where he talks about how the art in Skyrim will differ from past titles:
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/01/26/the-art-of-skyrim.aspx
Here are the important parts if you don;t want to watch the video:
Art director Matt Carafano has called Bethesda’s approach to Skyrim’s landscape as “epic reality”, highlighting the new title’s visual departure from previous Elder Scrolls titles.
“With Skyrim we’ve come up with something we call internally ‘epic reality’,” Carafano said in a video posted on Game Informer.
“What that means to us is dramatic views wherever you go. With every landscape or region of the game we try to make it look amazing and unique. … Definitely the landscape is something we’re pushing, to get you that sense of epic reality.”
Carafan also commented on the franchises successive thematic makeovers. “With each game, we try to really reinvent the series, and really take it a huge step forward in just the visuals, graphics everything about the game,” he said.
“A lot of that is a direct reaction to the previous game. Oblivion was more kind of standard European fantasy, and with Skyrim, we wanted to do something more. That same feel wouldn’t fit for this game. We wanted to do something that [if] you were living in Skyrim, it is different. It is the home of the Nords. Everything is based off them.”
In a game as large as the open world RPG The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, comprehensive menus are a necessary evil. Though they may not be pretty, players need a way to easily manage items, review skills, and map out directions to their next dungeon crawls. The menus in Oblivion functioned, but they were essentially a cumbersome medieval equivalent to Excel documents. For the sequel, Bethesda is striving for a friendlier user interface.
Rather than refine the pre-existing menu system from Oblivion or Fallout 3, Bethesda decided to toss them on the scrap heap and develop a new, streamlined interface. Searching for inspiration, the team kept coming back to Apple, and for good reason. Over the last decade the company has revolutionized how consumers interact with software and hardware moreso than any other tech outfit.
”You know in iTunes when you look at all your music you get to flip through it and look at the covers and it becomes tangible?” game director Todd Howard asks. “One of our goals was 'What if Apple made a fantasy game? How would this look?' It's very good at getting through lots of data quickly, which is always a struggle with our stuff.”
Like in Oblivion, pressing the B or circle button opens up the menu system. Instead of returning you to the last page you visited as it did in Oblivion, Bethesda now presents you with a simple compass interface that offers four options.
Pressing right takes you to the inventory. The interface is a clean cascading menu system that separates items by type. Here players can browse through weapons, armor, and other items they gather during their travel. Instead of relegating players to looking at an item’s name and stat attributes, each possession is a tangible three dimensional item with its own unique qualities. Thousands of items are fully rendered, and players can zoom in on or rotate each one. You can even get an up close view of the flowers and roots you pick for alchemy. “It becomes an interesting time sink,” Howard says. “You can look at and explore every single thing you pick up.”
Pressing left from the compass gives players access to the full list of magical items, complete with breakdowns of how the spells operate. As we mentioned in the Building Better Combat story, the world of Skyrim features over 85 spells, many of which can be used in a variety of ways.
In Oblivion, players could map eight items from their inventory onto the D-pad for easy access. Given the new two-handed approach to combat in Skyrim, Bethesda didn’t want to limit players to eight items. Instead, pressing up on the D-pad pauses the action and pulls up a favorites menu. Anything from your spell library or item inventory can be “bookmarked” to the favorites menu with the press of a button. How many items appear on that menu is up to each player. Bethesda isn’t placing a cap on the number of favorite items, so theoretically you could muck it up with every single item you own. Though you can choose how many items appear, you can’t determine the order; items and spells are listed alphabetically.
Pressing down in the compass menu pulls the camera perspective backward to reveal a huge topographical map of Skyrim. Here players can zoom around to explore the mountain peaks, valley streams, and snowy tundras that populate the northern lands. Pulling the camera as far away as possible gives you a great respect for the size of the game world. From the map view players can manage quest icons, plan their travel route, or access fast travel.
Finally, pressing up in the compass menu turns your gaze up toward the heavens. In previous games, astrology played a large role in character creation. Though Skyrim abandons the class structure in favor of a "you are what you play" philosophy, Bethesda is preserving the player’s ties to star signs.
Three prominent nebulae dominate the Skyrim heavens – the thief, the warrior, and the mage. Each of these represents one of the three master skill sets. Each nebula houses six constellations, each of which represents a skill. As in Oblivion, every player starts out with the ability to use all 18 skills – any player can use a two-handed weapon, try alchemy, or cast a destruction spell (provided you find or purchase one). As you use these skills in Skyrim, they will level up and contribute to driving your character's overall level higher.
Every time players rank up their overall level, they can choose a supplemental perk ability for one of the 18 skills. For instance, if you fight most of your battles with a mace, you may want to choose the perk that allows you to ignore armor while using the weapon. As in Fallout 3, several of the perks have their own leveling system as well, allowing you to choose them multiple times. Once you choose a perk, it lights up the corresponding star in the constellation, making it visible when looking up to the heavens while interacting in the world.
“When you glance to the sky after you’ve played the game for a while, what you’re seeing in the sky is different than what somebody else is seeing based on the constellations,” Howard says.
iTunes menu...please no. 
The latest Game Informer podcast has Tood Howard as their guest. (I'll let you know later today if it is worth listening to. Sometimes these dev interviews turn into "we're not really talking about that yet" hopefully, since he's el jeffe over there he'll make some news).
Today, we're pleased to present a special edition of the Game Informer Show, in which Bethesda's Todd Howard answers questions we solicited from our community of online users. It's nearly an hour of freewheeling discussion, we put your queries to Howard, who gives some revealing responses -- while still leaving more than a bit of mystery surrounding the game. Some of the topics covered include the game's combat system, spells, factions, and the powerful dragons that reign terror over the world of Skyrim.
Okay, I finished listening to it, it certainly is worth downloading. His PR people must have been screaming, he answered almost every question. Too many to enumerate, but the three first things I heard that was interesting to me (before I stopped keeping a mental inventory):
- The consider this a sequel to BOTH Fallout 3 and Oblivion.
- Horses are not for sure yet. They are in at this point, but htey have to be better if they are to keep them.
- No dragon flying, they are your most severe enemies.
"- The consider this a sequel to BOTH Fallout 3 and Oblivion."
Lol, how does that in any way work?
You'll have to listen to find out. But I'll let you cheat and tell you that he says it's a "sequel to Fallout 3 in that it's the next game that we are making". Seriously, listen to the podcast, it's only 45 mins or so, and well worth it.
So what he's saying is that they're only capable of making a single game, which they're not even capable of improving. (Each game is progressively worse, amirite?) So therefore all Bethesda games are a sequel to their first (and best) game?
Yeah, like the Rocky movies.
That makes sense then!
There have been some stories floating around about new images and new information about classes etc.. but it's all old news. The images are the same as the ones taht game informer had a month ago.
EDIT: and just when I finish typing that NEW SCREENS EMERGE from this german gaming site: http://www.pcgames.de/The-Elder-Scrolls-5-Skyrim-PC-128680/News/The-Elder-Scrolls-5-Skyrim-Drachen-Riesen-und-mehr-Neue-Screenshots-veroeffentlicht-811029/galerie/1486902/#?a_id=811029&g_id=-1&i_id=1486902
TEN NEW SKYRIM SCREENS
http://bethblog.com/index.php/2011/02/11/nothing-says-i-love-you-like-a-screenshot/
And five concept art bits:
http://bethblog.com/index.php/2011/02/11/skyrim-concept-art/
Those screens aren't new. At least not all of them! They look better than the mag scan versions fo them, though.
The link to the story did say not all of them were new. I felt ripped off though, they said "ten new screens"
It does look pretty fuckin' good though.
aspro said:The link to the story did say not all of them were new. I felt ripped off though, they said "ten new screens"
It does look pretty fuckin' good though.
That's what I mean! They're not very good at counting. 
Please come back Aspro!
Please!
That's one epic sneeze.
NostrA-CHOOOR!
NOTRE DAME!*
A Dutch magazine has provided another info dump on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, touching on graphical upgrades, the size of the game world, and the ever-fascinating dragons.
The Skyrim feature, which originally appeared in Dutch Power Unlimited and includes an interview with producer Todd Howard, was translated and compiled in a post on Neogaf.
Graphics
Howard told the magazine that Bethesda had specific goals in mind for updating the series’ graphics in Skyrim.
“We primarily look at how we can improve facial expressions and animations, graphics-wise,” he said.
“We are working at pop-up issues, and we want to make sure that the graphics of the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 are alike. All three will look just as good, aside from the higher resolution and the anti-aliasing of the PC of course.”
But the inventory menu has also enjoyed a bit of a polish, with flash-based previews allowing you to rotate and examine every single item in the game from weapons and armour to accessories and ingredients. Occasionally, this feature will be the basis for puzzle-solving.
The series’ famous collection of books and texts makes a return as readable 3D models, rather than the flat text walls of earlier games.
World, Story, and Mechanics
The “low fantasy” world of Skyrim is “approximately” the size of Oblivion’s, is equipped with fast travel for previously visited locations, and contains five major cities and 130 dungeons, each featuring a greater variety of traps and puzzles.
Although there is no level cap, each of these dungeons will lock at the level of your first visit, putting an end to limitless easy grinding. In any case, as perks are restricted, no one character can obtain them all.
The main story jots up at around twenty hours of gameplay, while side quests can provide hundreds of hours. To reduce the feeling of guilt and distraction when side-questing, the game’s overall plot will be less prominent than Oblivion.
Nevertheless, dragons are not rare – and every dragon you take out will make your character more powerful, adding a piece of its soul to your own and unlocking further dragonborn abilities.
Miscellaneous
Todd Howard has confirmed that the Xbox 360 version of the game will not support Kinect, and that the fan-favourite Dark Brotherhood makes a return.
Contrary to statements made in Game Informer, Howard denied the possibility of combined magical effects.
Bethesda’s Pete Hines has commented that future Bethesda titles will take advantage of the advances of Skyrim’s Creaton engine.
Thanks, TheDutchSlayer.