Hasta La Ideas

Our subscriber copy of Wallpaper* magazine’s August edition (The Handmade Issue) arrived in the post today – sporting a front cover that we designed ourselves here at Creative Review…

Regular readers of this blog might remember that just over a month ago we posted about Wallpaper* magazine’s nifty online app developed specially to allow subscribers to the magazine to design their own front cover using a variety of graphic assets supplied by artists including Anthony Burrill, James Joyce, The Hort, Kam Tang and Nigel Robinson.

Using the app, here’s the design we submitted (using graphic elements created by James Joyce) to be printed on our very own subscriber copy of the magazine:

You’ll notice that on the submitted design, we placed a graphic label that says ‘The Handmade Issue’ top right of the cover design – under the masthead. This was mandatory – you had to place it somewhere on your cover design. Today it became clear why.

What we couldn’t work out originally was how Wallpaper* were going to make sure every subscriber taking part got the right cover. It turns out that the label device is used for the address details that you had to enter into the site when creating your design, so that they were printed out on the cover and were visible through the clear polywrap that the magazines were sent out in.

Oh no, we thought, we don’t really want the address label visible on our custom cover! But Wallpaper* had thought of that…

Included in the polybag was a sticker to place over the address in order to make the magazine design exactly as we’d designed it. Clever!

Above – our self designed cover in the flesh. Below, two more copies that came to our office – although neither subscriber in these cases had actually designed their own cover. These ones were randomly generated to ensure each cover (whether designed by the subscriber or not) of the August issue is unique.

The user could even choose from a choice of nine Rolex ads to appear on the back cover…

Hats off to Wallpaper* for making this work. We only have two minor gripes – that the graphics on our cover have a rather nasty drop shadow that wasn’t visible when we did the original design and that the address label is still visible through the sticker, making it look a bit untidy. But, having looked into the logistics of doing this kind of thing ourselves, we know how difficult it will have been to pull off, so congrats to everyone involved.

To see the gallery of submitted user-designed covers, visit wallpaper.com/custom-covers/gallery#4714401.1