One of my favorite projects when I was an editor at the Wired Magazine was the monthly back page item Found: Artifacts From the Future. Each installment was a full-page image of some found object from a speculative near future. All explanation of what the object was and how it worked had to be diegetic—i.e. the page had to explain itself entirely through context and in situ text, with no annotation or caption. This was a great challenge for me as a writer/editor and for all of the designers and illustrators and photographers I had the pleasure of working with. These pages never made much of an impact online because the fun was always in the fine print, which rarely came through at web resolution. I’m republishing them here to drill down on those cool details.
This piece ran in the June 2003 issue, and it imagined the categories of greeting cards you might find in a store in the future. This particularly entry isn’t very successful, which is not the fault of the illustrator, who I believe was my friend and colleague Ryan Vulk.
I discovered that it’s surprisingly tricky to convey the meaning of a greeting card using only the cover. Also, this page breaks one of the core rules of Found, which is that the future year needs to appear somewhere in the image. A couple of years later, I tried another approach to this format that only showed the interior of a greeting card. That one was a 150th birthday card, and the POV was of the elderly person opening it. They were surrounded by their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren and great-great-great grandchildren and great-great-great-great grandchildren. That execution was more successful…
Below is a detail of the page image and full text from the page.
Hallmark Card Categories
LUNAR INDEPENDENCE DAY
RECOVERY - TRANSHUMAN
CYBORG HISTORY MONTH
4TH BIRTHDAY - CLONE
Hallmark Card Text: RECOVERY - TRANSHUMAN
YOU WERE ALMOST PERFECT,
THE WAY YOU WERE MADE.
BUT ONCE IN A WHILE
WE ALL NEED AN UPGRADE.
Hallmark Card Text: 4TH BIRTHDAY - CLONE
Happy Birthday Super Girl!
Can't believe you're turning Four!
You're everything I was...
And so much more!