It’s bad form, I know, but I can’t stop doing my own awesome assignment for Animating Magazine Covers. Although I blame this one on Paul Bond, whose animated cover of Parenting featuring a heart-to-heart between Jack and Danny Torrance inspired me to go back to this animated GIF by IWDRM and put The Dude on the cover of GQ. I mean let’s face it, he deserves it, man.

What I love about this take on that assignment is it uses pre-exisiting GIFs to culture jam pre-conceived ideas and expectations of a particular magazine’s agenda. And given how many magazines there are, there could potentially be an endless supply of inspiration. I guess the tabloids are next 😉

I started remaking this poster as bava art, but then I realized that nobody fits this poster better than the great Stephen Downes. Nobody more prolific, nobody more willing to speak his mind, and nobody less afraid to piss other people off! NOBODY!

All that said, nobody could be further away from the Facebook idea of corporate control and lock-in, which I guess is the joke.  I’m gonna file this under the “If movie posters told the truth” design assignment, but that isn’t exactly what this is. Anyway, this was too much fun to make.

I bring you this so I can share the tutorial for creating an animated magazine (or movie poster) that is to soon follow. This is a brand new ds106 design assignment, and you can find it here. Now back to polishing off the tutorial—it’s actually a lot easier than you would think. The original magazine cover is here if you would like to do a little comparison.

Update: Video tutorial for this assignment posted here.