Shepard Fairey’s Obama Is Time‘s Person of the Year

In the event that your holiday celebrations have kept you from newsstands and other non-UnBeige media outlets, we thought it prudent to alert you that Barack Obama has been named Time‘s 2008 Person of the Year. And not just any Obama—Shepard Fairey‘s illustration of him, an update of the iconic campaign poster that Time managing editor Richard Stengel calls “the great populist image of the campaign.” As for Fairey’s latest cover creation, Stengel describes it as “a rich, multilayered poster that echoes but then expands on his original.” The cover is also a nod to the issue’s theme of “citizen art”—the millions of representations of Obama created by ordinary people (and then, frequently, posted to Flickr). Time mined 100,000 such Flickr images and highlights Obama-themed art that includes an Obama photo mosaic (made up of thousands of tiny portraits of those who attended a campaign rally), Obama’s head made out of Legos (Legobama?), and our favorite, artist Zilly Rosen‘s Obama comprised wholly of cupcakes (below).

Photo: Shasti O’Leary

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.