Although I think I will go away from the multiplexed display for the final design, I still thought this was a neat little prototype build. For the final display, since it will be large, and I think I have settled on using PCBs and SMT LEDs for the digits, I'll keep with the shift register Idea, but have a transistor per segment so I can just shift data across the display instead of trying to multiplex it. I just put up a short blurb about the board over at my blog site.

http://burnt-traces.com/?p=394