Cover Story

I just got a magazine out of the mailbox and it feels like a breakthrough.

How many catalog, magazine and book covers do you suppose you have looked at in your life? And how would it be to invent a radically different “cover” for anything you read?

The January 2001 cover of Wired magazine is revolutionary. You can play with it. You can feel it.

Like many major revolutions, this one starts small: one cover. But the tiny change may turn the tiny trick of instantly setting your product apart from the competition.

I subscribe to Wired, although I had begun to call it “Tired” because it didn't seem to keep up with the thrill quotient. Fast Company took center stage.

But not this time. The January cover is a color I don't recall seeing before — a kind of uneasy green that's trying to be Prada but is still stuck in a pre-Martha Kmart. It gets your attention. So does the word DESIGN, printed backwards. (A whole issue devoted to design — now one of the hottest topics in American business!) And so does the instruction, “Touch me all over.” Touch what? What's “me”? The magazine?

Yes! Touch it. I did. You would. Wherever I touched it, the color blanched, leaving my fingerprint or hand print. Something about my hot body impressed itself on the paper. The longer I left it, the more the color bleached. And it snapped right back. It was a special effect, but it wasn't electronic. Was it the paper? The ink? How much did it cost? Who cares? Something was happening between the magazine and me. I was playing with a magazine. This magazine made me play with its cover. I took this new toy to my desk.

How often do you come face to face with a genuine innovation in a common object?

Here's a huge story about a genuine innovation, a tiny idea that changed the world forever. It started with a problem and a search for a solution. One of the workers in the mucilage department at 3M in Minneapolis sang in the church choir and was working on a problem. The problem was marking off the hymnal pages for each service without folding the pages in the hymn book. For 18 months, this man — patiently — experimented with various glues until he arrived at the one that could be affixed and removed. He worked 18 months perfecting the little devils. He persuaded the assistant to the chair to pass them in to her boss. She also sent samples to the executive secretaries of the other Fortune 500 companies, for the real test.

This small idea worked. (3M was to call this small idea Post-it^® notes.) It brings 3M more than a billion dollars yearly, last time I checked.

And isn't the secret of great merchandising buried in such small but critical surprises that engage the reader/viewer/shopper? Magazines and store catalogs, for example, have always had printed paper covers with a few incidental variations in color, quality and size, but generally no surprises. Oh, Neiman Marcus can produce an outsized, die-cut, embossed, stamped, hugely expensive “book” “magalog” “catazine” that looks gawjus and offers sable coats and Fabergé eggs. But this ain't makin'the mob feel interactive.

NEST, an unbelievably overpriced home fashion vanity project, does try for novelty. This squarish magazine comes zipped into a plastic armor, which is virtually impossible to open but does engage you in the event. This strange, self-conscious magazine is probably limited to 90 copies in New York (90 percent addressed to 10028), four copies in France and 17 in L.A. But this is only a change in format, whereas the interactive cover of Wired is a change that will unleash a new wave of creativity.

Wired will hit millions, and millions will play with the cover.

Doesn't that fulfill the first, prerequisite requirement for any visual endeavor: Does it stop you? Do you see it? If not, it might as well continue to exist only in its imaginer's mind, saving him a lot of work.

First, hit the customer. Make him stop what he's doing. Engage. What a brain booster for any designer after countless millions of magazine covers, catalogs, display windows, ads, commercials, visual manifestations of virtually any kind at all!

Much of our genius lies in engaging the attention, the time and interest of an inattentive, time-starved, uninterested ordinary soul — a viewer, a reader, a stroller, a passerby. That's our aim.

This magazine does it.

Peter's current activities include presentations to ICI Paints, The J. Jill Group in Boston and the San Diego Radio Broadcasters Association. A videotape of Peter's inspiring keynote address to R.A.C. 2000, entitled “It's About Time!,” can be ordered from the Retail Advertising & Marketing Association (RAMA). Phone: 312-251-7262; fax 312-251-7269; Internet: www.ramarac.org. Comments? Contact Peter by e-mail at: jasminehill@thegrid.net.