Your first assignment asks you to create a small publication or fanzine based on your interest in books and their design. It allows you to introduce yourself, and your interests in book design, so that your tutor can get to know you and your work better.
Your fanzine can be digitally printed, photocopied or handmade. Aim to design a sixteen-page simple folded and stapled A5 fanzine, though you can add more pages, or change the scale, if you want to. You can use any medium or materials to generate your artwork and make your publication. You may want to work much larger and reduce your artwork for the fanzine. While visually it doesn’t have to look like a punk fanzine, try and embrace the lo-fi ‘cut and paste’ attitude, so you’re making the work relatively quickly and not too preciously. Be creative with this task both in terms of the content and how you choose to present it, this could extend to challenging some of the assumptions about what a fanzine should look like, or how it’s made.
Use the work you have produced so far, in the earlier exercises, as a starting point for your content. Not all of this material needs to be included in your fanzine. You may want to develop new visual ideas, or add to the work you have already produced.
As a guide, your fanzine should contain the following elements:
Introduce yourself – say something about your relationship with books. Why are they important to you? Communicate this through writing and images.
Your creative process – how do you like to work creatively, what sort of process do you follow to research and generate ideas, and what are your preferred mediums to work in. Say something about you as a creative practitioner and your approach.Show your approach to book design through your design decisions and the hands-on sense of immediacy and energy that is an attribute of fanzine design.
Looking at books – present the most interesting books you’ve looked at, or those you find influential as a reader, designer or both? Present a selection of books, or focus on one particular example to present in more depth. Think about how you can present these books, and your reflections, in visually engaging ways.
Global influences – which books with a wide reaching scientific, artistic, historical, political, geographic, fictional, poetic, religious or other impact have you chosen. Present them along with a brief rationale as to why, or how these books have affected you personally. Again, can your designs echo the ideas in these books in anyway?
The future of the book – where do you see the book heading? Show and tell. Try and summarise your thinking into a series of short statements, quotations, images or ideas. Be creative in how you approach this.
How can you creatively respond to one or more of following book related sayings – Bookworms, A closed/open book, The oldest trick in the book, You can’t judge a book by its cover, In someone’s good/bad books, or, by the book. Use your fanzine to present your ideas. Can any of your images, text or ideas also feed into your cover designs?
After reading this brief I initially found it quite a daunting and immense task to undertake. I decided to begin breaking it down and to respond to each of the book elements.
Introduce yourself – Books are important to me in three major ways that I can immediately identify. Firstly, there is the pleasure of escapism that good fiction can induce. Secondly, there is the connection that you can feel when reading a book. This might be a connection to the story, characters, place or the writer and his voice. This could apply to both fiction and non-fiction. Lastly, books are an important source of knowledge that my natural curiosity leads me to. This is especially true of non-fiction but can also apply to fiction. Some other aspects that I love about books is the discovery of new and exciting vocabulary but I suppose this relates to my third point about knowledge. One other point of interest is the sensory nature of physical books that can excite so many of your senses. Going forward, I need to communicate this through writing and images.
Your creative process – I like to balance a methodical approach with intuition and reason with emotion. I generally begin by breaking down larger components into smaller ones to make it more manageable. I try to find key words and generate ideas through spider diagrams, thumbnails or mood boards. I research and let it lead me wherever it will. This part often feels like an adventure and is very enjoyable as it often turns up unexpected results. Photography is my favourite visual medium but I also experiment with minimalistic illustrations. I prefer to work digitally. How I show this and couple it with the ‘hands-on sense of immediacy and energy that is an attribute of fanzine design’ is an interesting challenge.
Looking at books – This relates to exercise 1. There are some more books in my collection that I would like to add as interesting from a design point of view. The Penguin Classics series, The British Library’s Tales of the Weird series and The Scarfolk Annual. I need to think about how I present these books and my reflections in visually engaging ways.
Global influences – This also relates to exercise 1 and I need to approach it in the same way as the previous section.
The future of the book – This section will connect with my research for exercise 2. Again, how do I visualise this?
How can you creatively respond to one or more of following book related sayings (oldest trick in the book) – I liked my work on this in exercise 5 regarding the big bang theory. I am open to revisiting the other ideas as well. Can any of my images, text or ideas also feed into the cover design?
I felt like this was now the right time to create a spider diagram.
This provided me with some ideas for each section of the zine.
Introduce yourself – This section could work around the four areas I identified: Escapism, knowledge, connection and sensory. Escapism could visually reference dreams, freedom and perhaps some books I like where that is a key feature. Knowledge should work around science and philosophy as this is what I read the most in terms of non-fiction. I just need to find some visual symbols for this. Connection should reference characters, story, place and writer and visually illustrate this. Also, the sensory appeal of physical books for me and in particular, sight, touch and smell.
Your creative process – To simplify I have broken my process into four key areas which mirror each other. Methodical, intuition, reason and emotion. Being methodical is largely about breaking down a task and so I believe building blocks or bricks are a very strong visual metaphor. Intuition leads to the unexpected and feels like a trail, so this is how I want to visually illustrate this area. When I think of reason I can’t help but think of the iconic ‘The Thinker’. I have made a connection between emotion and faces and colours so I think this would be a good route to take.
Looking at books & Global influences – These sections are somewhat linked. From a visual point of view I thought it would be good to generate some words around the books I chose as a way to communicate. A few ideas: Mr. Men = shapes and colours, The Odyssey = ship, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory = golden ticket, 1984 = big brother.
The future of the book – I had little to add to this when I brainstormed but hopefully I can generate more ideas shortly.
The oldest trick in the book – I want to follow the work I have started with this exercise because I thought it was quite strong. I need to see how it can be incorporated.
Mood board
My mood board is dominated by photographic incorporation into design as well as simple shapes.
Research
Following on from my mood board I decided to research some of the designers that stood out the most for me.
Armin Hofmann
Armin Hofmann was a big driving force in the Swiss International Style which favoured communication, clarity and simplicity. Hofmann is known primarily for his posters – he considered the poster the most powerful form of design communication. I was drawn to his work because of his use of photo-montage, photo-typesetting and the asymmetry. His designs are very bold and striking and I actually think you could even say they are proto-punk in how demanding of the viewer’s attention they are. There’s definitely a sense of urgency in his work.
This is perhaps one of his most well known posters. As a poster for ballet you can see the urgency of communication in his work. Not only has he chosen a ballet dancer but a grainy one in motion to communicate the art of ballet even clearer. Clarity is an integral part of the Swiss Style after all.
Again, Hofmann masterfully communicates the central idea in the poster – music. He has done this with an ear and bass clef montaged. I am also drawn to the asymmetric layout. All of this work is very striking in black and white.
Max Huber
Another designer who made his name in the mid-century. Huber employed a joyful use of colour in his work which really makes it punch out of the page in a different kind of way. It is often said that Huber’s work is dynamic and movement based and I think this is a fair analysis.
A montage of colour, photography and typography. This design is interesting because each component has transparency and this creates less contrast but more ‘flow’. The unusual angles of the type also create a sense of anarchy.
This design is a more conventional ‘cut and paste’ style where each part of the design is strongly defined. This design seems to have more of an immediate appeal than the previous. I thought the juxtaposition of colour and monochrome was also quite interesting.
Willy Fleckhaus
Will Fleckhaus was an innovative designer from post-war Germany. He is most well known for his work with the magazine twen as art director. There’s certainly something about his work that shares a common ground with Armin Hofmann’s work. It’s bold, there’s plenty of contrast and there is a ‘proto-punk’ energy in the designs. I suppose another similarity he shares with Hofmann is a dedication to a chosen medium. Hofmann mastered the poster whereas Fleckhaus has mastered magazine design.
Fleckhaus’ work is simple and provocative. One thing that you immediately notice is that he allows image and type to take up huge amounts of space and yet, there is also ample space.
This double page spread illustrates the point about image size and space even better. Unusually, the type is set into a column and the heading broken up. Definitely a subversive energy here and a sense of urgency.
I then looked at two zines that I collect to see if they can teach me anything else.
Weird Walk & Hellebore zine
Weird Walk is ‘A journal of wanderings and wonderings from the British Isles’. Each issue uses a two tone colour scheme except for occasional photographs. This create a lo-fi aesthetic which is further emphasised by the use of grain in the photographs.
Hellebore is ‘A summoning of ancient terrors’. It shares an awful lot in common with Weird Walk. It also uses a predominantly two tone system of colour with grain images added.
I think both of these zines try to create a DIY aesthetic with their use of few colours and grainy images. It works to great effect with the content they have and the audience they are trying to reach.
Initial thumbnails
My initial thumbnail sketches have thrown out some ideas to develop. Some that stand out in particular are:
- Juxtaposing escapism in the sky as a cloud with grounded knowledge.
- Symbols for how I connect to books and the sensory aspect.
- Similarity in shape between the thinker and a path to represent intuition.
- Methodical integrated into building blocks.
Thoughts on layout/paper
I am happy to work with the suggested size of A5 with 16 pages. I have a mental image of the sections and corresponding page numbers. I want to stick with double spreads for each section to define them and allow enough space. It will be as follows:
Page 1 – This is obviously the front cover.
Page 2 & 3 – The introductory section needs two pages.
Page 4 & 5 – The section on my creative process.
Page 6 & 7 – Looking at books that have been personally influential.
Page 8 & 9 – Books with global influence.
Page 10 & 11 – The future of books.
Page 12 – 15 – Four pages for the section on the Big Bang to allow space for the idea I was working on.
Page 16 – The back cover.
I have selected a 130gsm smooth matt paper that is targeted at brochures. This seems like a popular weight for zine production.
A change in tempo
At this stage I was going to rework my sketches and try to pad them out more. This is when I thought back to the brief and in particular the sentence:
try and embrace the lo-fi ‘cut and paste’ attitude, so you’re making the work relatively quickly and not too preciously.
I felt like I was beginning to get bogged down in theory at the cost of spontaneity and experimentation. As I was going to be working digitally I felt that the most sensible thing to do was to begin working on the zine and experiment as I went along.
Working digitally
I ended up sourcing a lot of my images from my own photography collection, when I couldn’t do this I used free stock images mostly from Pexels. The process in Photoshop usually involved selecting what I wanted, processing into black and white and adding grain. Once imported into InDesign I sometimes transformed and distorted the perspective to fit into the document. These images were used for backgrounds and I added grain to give them the lo-fi look I needed.
This was actually the visual style that I used most of the time in this zine. The only exception were some other images that I applied a cutout filter to as a way of stylising them as illustrations. I applied some more effects in InDesign such as shadows, glows and feathers when I felt it was necessary to do so but I tried not to go over the top so the design could retain a DIY aesthetic. As for the typefaces I settled on Futura PT for the headings and Mrs Eaves OT for the body text. I was thinking back to Willy Fleckhaus and Armin Hofmann in terms of bold readable heading type and they were also influencing the black and white design I was embracing. Throughout the zine I tried to experiment with my text layout by using different alignments and shapes.
With this first spread you can see that I continued with the idea of juxtaposing ground and sky for knowledge and escapism as well as using symbols for the connection and sensory part.
I hadn’t forgotten about the possibility of working with colour and had tried to incorporate it into my designs but it never cut through with the same striking energy that the black and white version did. Keeping it black and white also kept it more in line with a DIY feel from my perspective.
Not all of the ideas I had made it into the design. For example, in the development stage I wanted to reflect The Thinker with a path cut out in a similar shape. It didn’t work out and a photograph of a path proved adequate anyway.
I kept the building block idea and the faces for emotions. As I wasn’t working in colour I needed a different visual to symbolise emotion and I found a photograph of a fountain in my collection that really worked well.
I will let the rest of the spreads speak for themselves and the choices I made.
The cover
I had not forgotten about the front cover but I knew it would be best to let the content of the finished zine dictate what the cover would be. I used the same style I had used in my zine. How best to sum up the zine with one image? A blend of my face and a book of course!
Printing problems
The biggest problems I encountered were actually in the printing stage. I was pleased to see that there is an option to print the booklet in InDesign. However, I just couldn’t get it to print double sided in the correct way. So I improvised and printed single sided and then glued pages together. The quality of printing on the selected paper wasn’t great due to printing lines which is down to my home printer. With two pages stuck together it was obviously thicker than I had intended. On the plus side it gave it a more homemade look!
Summary
As I progressed further with this assignment I found it more and more enjoyable. I felt like the most productive time for me was when I began working digitally and fluidly after I reassessed the direction in the brief. Having said this a lot of the ideas and research I collected were very useful and informed and impacted my final design very much. The printing stage was problematic and is something I could improve upon.
Resources
Designers Journal. 2012. Heroes – Armin Hofmann. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.designersjournal.net/jottings/designheroes/heroes-armin-hofmann. [Accessed 28 March 2020].
PETROLICIOUS. 2014. Dynamic, Rational Style Characterizes Max Huber’s Designs. [ONLINE] Available at: https://petrolicious.com/articles/dynamic-rational-style-characterizes-max-huber-s-designs. [Accessed 28 March 2020].
It’s Nice That. 2017. Design, Revolt, Rainbow: the pioneering work of graphic designer Willy Fleckhaus. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/willy-fleckhaus-design-rainbow-revolt-graphic-design-180717. [Accessed 28 March 2020].
Daniel's OCA Blog: Book Design 1 