"One morning I woke up and I spread out all the magazines I was subscribing to which included Playboy, and National Geographic and a couple of others. When I opened them up, the things that popped out was the first one, Playboy, was the fold-out; and then National Geographic had something that showed the new stadium being built by some athletic team. Then there was another one with a fold-out. Of course, the way we work is something triggers a thought, and what triggered in me was if all of them are doing expensive, full color fold-outs, why doesn't MAD Magazine do a cheap fold-in? MAD was black and white at that time.
I thought about it for a moment, and then I looked in the newspaper and there was a story about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and Eddie Fischer and accusations that Elizabeth Taylor was going from one guy to another. I thought, "Well, that might make a fold-in. I did something very simple, which was to put Elizabeth Taylor on the left side, and Richard Burton was somewhere in the middle, but on the right side, there was just some young guy. The question was something like, "Who's going to be Elizabeth Taylor's next?" We thought it would be Richard Burton, but if you folded it in, it was just that guy on the right side, and it says, "some guy in the crowd." That was the gag. I took it into the editor, Al Feldstein. I said, "Al, I've got an idea that strikes me funny, but you're going to reject it because if you printed it, it would mutilate a page in the magazine." He looks at it. He says, "I like this." He immediately jumped up and ran into Bill Gaines, and then came back to me and said, "Bill said, 'Lets do it. If the kid folds the page, and he feels he's ruined the magazine, he'll buy another magazine for his collection.'" Ever the money man.
I did it, and that was it. It was a one shot gag. A couple of weeks later, Feldstein rushes up to me—I happened to be up at MAD at that time—and said, "Where's the next fold-in?" I said, "Al, there is no next fold-in. That's it. It was a one time gag." He says, "I want another fold-in."
"
This is such a great example of how CSS is often overlooked. Very impressive. I learned a lot from reading it.
I bet if you had asked how to do this on StackOverflow without any prompting about language, you would have seen a LOT of javascript Me included.
EDIT: I literally just went to a project I'm working on and removed a piece of JS code that animated a feature because of what I learned from this example.
It's incredible how much you can achieve with using web platform features directly and using the minimal amount of JS possible. Pseudo elements, draggable="true", CSS animations... the list goes on and on.
Of course, the real trouble starts when you need to support older browsers and you realize you need to polyfill or change your strategy.
All of the peer answers are excellent, here are my $0.02:
As a design principle, it makes sense to use/re-use the capabilities of a component, rather than an agent acting on that primitive. For example, HTML already has a built-in CSS engine that can animate. Re-writing the animation in JavaScript is redundant and adds more code, which means more bugs, more size, more maintenance, etc.
Consider this example in C: using printf("%f", val) versus writing your own convert_float_to_characters_to_stdout(val) function.
There are cases where you may want to do the latter because printf is a very large function for embedded controllers and sometimes excludes format specifiers to save space, especially %f. But normally you just use what you are given rather than re-inventing the wheel.
The halves don't line up, and then when it's done the right half flashes back to a random portion of the image, and then when you move away to "unfold" it's missing a chunk in the middle.
No matter what possible specialty you pick, there is probably someone better at it than you.
But only you have the exact mix that makes you... you.
Just focus on what brings you joy, and appreciate the skills you do have today. I'm sure you could figure CSS out if you decided it was your main goal.
There are certainly people a lot better than me when it comes to CSS. Some of the dynamic aspects of CSS (i.e. anything that contains a "duration" for instance) seems somewhat unnatural to have in the CSS, but that might be taste.
I once worked for a company large enough to have its own designer who created the designs in Photoshop. Then we had another guy who created HTML templates + CSS from it; then all I had to think about was the back end code, those were the days. Now I'm a one man band struggling with some of the instruments :-)
These were great growing up. The March Madness one made me laugh. It's good to know that these things still give that effect. Will almost certainly be lost to future generations.
Awesome (on MacOS Chrome)! Really neat what you can do with CSS. And thanks for the shoutout for Al Jaffee!
BTW: Does anyone know if there's an archive of the german mad magazine ? The translation is an experience in itself, and while I found a commercial CD with all the mad archives in English, nothing for German.
Can someone explain exactly how this is work is working? I realize it's using CSS transforms but I can't visualize it in my head from reading the code.
I built the renderer and thus page turner mechanism for Wrap [1], which kind of reminded me of this. It was interesting to build it and I learned a lot about performance optimizing CSS. Apologies if it sucks now as I haven't been involved on the project in many years.
No. The whole idea of the fold-in was to be the opposite of a fold-out (playboy). In MAD, the folded out asks a question or poses a riddle. Folding-in provides the answer and laughter.
Except in this image, isn't the folded out view much more interesting, ie more of a surprise? I thought the idea was to have a juvenile joke, but the hammock coming out from tri-fold and the cake appearing from the cauliflower-haired old man appears to be the surprising part.
Anyway, the text is a little off for me - the letters clash NO, AM, FO, IN (almost the whole I is gone) - but it appears to be the underlying thing is just an image, so is the image off. A ½px margin sort of fixes it.
The way it works in the paper magazine is that the image is printed on a single page, and you receive it unfolded like any other page. (That's why there are instructions on the top right about how to fold it. If it came pre-folded, you wouldn't need those instructions.)
So the format of the joke as used in the magazine is that you see the unfolded version first.
Anyway, in the one you're talking about, if you read the top-center text, it talks about what the artist gets to do for his birthday. As he blows out the candles on the cake, he wishes he could spend his birthday on the beach. The joke is that he actually celebrates it by trying to think of something to draw, i.e. he has to work.
These are wonderful! I resubscribed to MAD Magazine a few years ago when my oldest son was able to understand the humor. The fold-ins were his favorite part. What an amazing run for Al Jaffee and MAD magazine--truly a part of history.
We can fix the lining up issue by deleting the spurious <br/> tags in the DOM, but then a new issue emerges where once the animation is complete it snaps back to only showing the left half.
Me too. I grew up in Germany and on one of our trips to the US (late 70s maybe) we discovered Mad Magazine. My dad decided we all needed a subscription - he was always trying to find ways for the kids to brush up on their English. So for many years we had Mad Magazine mailed to us in Germany. We tried not to mess up the page for the other readers in the family.
Al Jaffee just retired at 99! Here's article on his retirement, which is also linked to from the original site: https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/06/06...