So I promised you a sight of what I made using this natty tool (now available to everyone).

There you go. I’ll just wait for your call then, shall I Mr Chambers?

If ever anything were to prove why I didn’t go into design… anyway, also of note is that the digital printing didn’t seem to be that great – there are two shiny lines running the height of my masterpiece, and also the back page ad came out a little flat. Still, for a fun gimmick, it more than served its purpose.

I also really like the final touch – that you handmake it to the last using the sticker provided, thereby covering up your own address in the process.

Pretty good issue inside, at first glance, too. Love the bound-in sketchbook, too – great concept, reinterpreting the contents in an interesting way. Would have loved that to have been bound right at the front, instead of a contents page.

I previously mentioned Wallpaper*’s ‘Design Your Own Cover’ concept, created in conjunction with their forthcoming ‘Handmade’ issue – and today, the interface to create your own cover went online, for a limited time only.

I was somewhat skeptical about how much freedom they’d truly allow. So how does it play?

In short: surprisingly well. The process begins simply enough, with a basic and straightforward payment page, following which you get your unique link into the system.

Once inside, you’re presented with a very simple and easy-to-use graphic design set up. It reminds me of something I had once on my BBC Micro – limited tools, but enough to provide a large possibility space, and surprisingly fun to interact with.

Unsurprisingly, they don’t allow you to upload your own work or write your own cover lines. Instead, your toys are three pages of shapes and icons by James Joyce, seven pages of unusual photo crops (from previous Wallpaper*‘s?) created by Hort, two pages of apt slogans by Anthony Burrill (including “I made this!”, “You made this!” and “Touch me!”) in two different display fonts and three justifications, and a series of textures and full-page patterns by Nigel Robinson and Kam Tang.

You don’t get to touch the masthead, and somewhere at the front of the image has to sit a fixed size/rotation label that reads “The Handmade Issue”. Beyond that, however, there’s a decent amount of flexibility. For Hort’s pictures, you can control the size, rotation and layered position; for the others, you can also change the colours, textures, integrate patterns and so on. You can also choose to repeat any of the selections, and include as many as you like, so giving a huge variety of options, and a great deal of creative possibility.

Early attempts came out rather Sergei Sviatchenko. This was nearly the one I sent:

I was fond of the handmade-feet playoff, but in the end, I decided that it was a bit too clean, and that maybe I should create something that better reflected the single cover line I had to work with, The Handmade Issue. That, and the temptation to play with the Wallpaper* asterisk, included in the list of possible icons, was too great to miss.

As for what I actually sent to the (presumably digital) printer… I’ll put it up here when it arrives. Or it might appear in the gallery, when that goes online soon, but I doubt it. Suffice to say, the image is worth more than a thousand words explaining why I should stick to the editing side of magazines, and leave the designing to those with a modicum of artistic talent. Ahem.

Following the creation of the cover, you’re then asked to choose which Rolex ad you’d like on the back – a neat bonus piece of interaction for the sponsor.

Overall, it’s a smart idea that is well worth a play, even within the boundaries that they set, and will most likely sell a few thousand extra copies for the novelty factor. Though surely a computer-generated cover created through an online interface is anything but “handmade”?

You can sign up and create your own cover here until 8th June.

So I’m told it hit the newsstands today. But why wait? I managed to have a play around with Esquire‘s Augmented Reality special simply by taking a blurry mobile phone camera picture of this webpage, downloading the app and then pointing my phone screen at my webcam. Works perfectly. And you know what? For once, it seems like they’ve actually done a gimmick pretty well. Great use of the cover star, certainly.

There’s another A-R page from the same Esquire that you can play with up here, which isn’t as interactive, but does include time-sensitive content – play it after midnight (and before morning?) and you get a dirtier joke. All of which shows a level of thought lacking in the whole e-ink fiasco, apparently in part thanks to E‘s partners in this one, The Barbarian Group.

Anyone got scans of the other three A-R pages?

Gimmick of the month is clearly ‘augmented reality’, aka ‘hold up your magazine to a webcam and watch something appear on the screen’. The tech isn’t new at all – the first conference on augmented reality was in 1999, while AR applications were available on PDAs in 2004, and on webcams at least since 2005. Over the past year, it’s been used in Doritos bags, on business cards and on simple printouts. Now that webcams are all but ubiquitous in new PCs and laptops, they’re finally reaching the newsstand.

Though it’s only recently hit the headlines, AR has already been featured in magazines before. Mini did it in a German magazine ad back in December, while Popular Science did it for their July cover and Kmzero’s presentation at Colophon talked about using it in the next edition of their publication ego[n].

The last few weeks, however, have seen some bigger names stride forward. Red Bull’s Red Bulletin uses it to display a video trailer of what’s inside the mag, Colors features on-page video interviews, and the Clown Prince of all things gimmicky, American Esquire has produced some interesting-sounding movement-sensitive content for its next issue.

Magazines love it because it forces you to buy the physical object in order to see the content. Advertisers love it because you get to interact with their brand by moving a piece of paper, in a way that feels like magic. Readers, however, may find their arms tiring almost as quickly as their excitement.

Of course, I’ll have a play with it, and let you know what it’s like, but the inconvenience factor suggests that it isn’t designed to integrate print and digital as effectively as the Amusement RFID issue (which unfortunately loses points for needing a specialised RFID reader, but you can’t have everything. Yet.)

One question about augmented reality in print still bothers me, though – for those of us with laptops, how do we hold it close to the webcam and yet not mask the screen?