John Watson has crafted a very cool magazine cover generator that combines photos from Flickr with text you enter. Give it a spin, or check out some examples. [Link via MAKE Magazine]
I have a special affinitiy for this kind of thing. I managed to talk my way into AGENCY.COM as a designer, but having no formal training, I often found myself slinging GIFs in menial graphics production. Having determined that creating the same graphical text 200 times in a row does, indeed, kind of suck, I built a graphics engine using Macromedia Generator. It let teammates or even clients themselves enter text into an HTML form, then get back a GIF. Upshot: Let the creative folks spend their time creating, instead of being a bottleneck for production. That’s the idea behind the new Variables feature in Photoshop CS2, as well as Adobe Graphics Server and Adobe InDesign Server.