This week a select group of WIRED magazine subscribers will be receiving a customized issue with a picture of themselves on the cover. A few months back they asked readers to send digital portraits, and the first 5,000 qualified submissions would be printed on covers customized for the subscriber. The photo is placed over an illustrated snapshot of Google maps. Fascinating idea, smooth execution and cross promotion with Xerox. Oh, and the WIRED/Xerox team was also on site at this year's TED conference to take portraits of attendees to use for the custom covers...
Last October C2:Mavericks helped design and produce the Pop!Tech 2006 Artifact, a 300-page documentation of the conference that was designed on site and customized for each of the 500 participants (via HP's Indigo press) with their first name on the cover and a Google Earth snapshot of their home on the last page.
Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of WIRED and author of The Long Tail, was a speaker at the conference and took a moment to meet Brian and I and the rest of the team at the Artifact workstation. After explaining the concept of the project and the integration of Google Earth, he nodded slowly, squinted, and gazed off into distance of the upper left corner of the room.
"Interesting," he whispered. "Very interesting..."
(Ok, he didn't say that, but he could have thought it.)