'We All Have 20 Minutes in Common'

A rep from French agency La Chose is using Facebook to share its latest work for news publication 20 Minutes. "On a tous 20 Minutes en commun," or "We all have 20 minutes in common," uses the tendency to lift newspapers to our faces to turn our own bodies into promotional frames. (Do people actually do this with iPads? Unlikely. But maybe they'd do it just for the pleasure of the effect, the way smokers occasionally enjoy lifting cigarette packets with rotting teeth to their mouths.)

The facial mosaic thing isn't original, but it does bring to mind the trend Alexandre Oudin kicked off of creating a mosaic photo effect on Facebook profile pages. If you dig that shit, here's a tutorial (and app) for producing the same.

Speaking of Rejuvenating the Glossy...

...there's more than one way to skin a cat, and they don't all have to be digital. BONUS -- in this case, an advertiser's responsible.

For client BIC Uruguay, agency TBWA works with print mag Freeway to create an edition entirely in ballpen. It's beautiful; you can almost smell the ink! But maybe that's the pop music workin' its magic on me.

The work reminded me a little of this Mexican Scribe ad, where a boy's entire world is remade in notebook paper.

Will Augmented Reality Rejuvenate the Glossy?

It's my belief that there'll always be room in the market for a high-quality, well-designed print publication. Some reasons why:

• Reading habits are different online vs. offline. Online we skim and multi-task; offline we absorb longer paragraphs and deeper reporting (think investigative news stories). This could change with the technological progression of tablets, but there's still a long way to go in that arena.
• Online isn't the best place to appreciate an aesthetically-pleasing high-res graphic spread. Our experience of ads and art changes from medium to medium; pick up a copy of Monocle or Vogue, then ask yourself whether the images pop the same over the 'net. (Maybe this will change when everybody has a monitor at home that's the size of a plasma-screen TV. But that's not happening tomorrow either.)

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