A marketplace tile is a rectangle, yet collectors describe it with words invented for wire racks: foil, virgin, incentive, newsstand. Those words survive because the art departments painting Marvel-themed NFT comic variant covers still quote the old trade dress even when no staples exist.
Foil, on paper, was a physical layer. On a file, it is usually a highlight pass. The spotlight writer’s task is to say which of those two things a reader is looking at. If the highlight sits only on a logo, the analogue is a stamped masthead. If the whole costume sparkles uniformly, the analogue is closer to a chromium gimmick than to a 1:25 retailer sheet.
Virgin covers remain the clearest borrow. Remove the title, and the painting has to carry recognition. NFT portrait crops push that logic until a new reader cannot name the book without a caption. That is not a failure of the artist; it is a reminder that shop racks used lettering as wayfinding.
When we write a weekly card in London, we keep one paragraph for the digital object and one for the paper memory it is trying to trigger. Mixing those paragraphs produces the mush that makes every cover sound like “a variant.” Separating them lets a collector file the tile next to a real floppy without pretending they are the same artefact.