Esquire’s Augmented Reality Issue

Esquire is a men’s magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich. Esquire magazine has been a canvas for many artists and illustrators like Abner Dean, Santiago Martinez Delgado, George Petty, TY Mahon and John Groth among others. Art directors have included Jean-Paul Goude, Paul Rand, Roger Black and Samuel Antupit; also during the 1960s using the techniques of print advertising, legendary adman George Lois, the youngest inductee into the Art Directors Hall of Fame, designed clever, eye-catching Esquire covers, such as Sonny Liston as Santa Claus and Andy Warhol drowning in a can of soup to illustrate an article on the death of the avant-garde. Lois’ covers raised Esquire’s circulation in ten years from 500,000 to two million.

On the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown Manhattan rests a tribute to Esquire’s glory years — a collection of 92 covers from the 1960s and early 1970s that have become, in the museum’s words, “essential to the iconography of American culture.^‘

Today, Esquire is recognizable by its “wall of type covers”—which have inspired similar design in such magazines as New York, Maxim, and the Atlantic. The magazine has also continued its leading role in cutting edge design with its recent electronic ink (October 2008) and lift-the-flap (February 2009) covers.

To date they came up with their AR (Augmented Reality Edition) where one can   download the software to make Robert Downey Jr. pop to life and see other things in the magazine start talking and moving.  No one had taken advantage of the technology on any kind of editorial scale, until they  got to thinking…   Read more: http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/augmented-reality-technology-110909#ixzz0XmzYuqR8