I can’t believe I actually managed to finish! This zine, though fun, literally has consumed my life for the past few weeks, always at the back of my head. This has definitely been the most time I’ve spent on an assignment and it was the best feeling finally getting to vacuum all the tiny bits of paper on my floor and clear away my magazines haha.
There’s quite a bit I’ve changed since last time I uploaded. After receiving feedback from Bailey that my text was quite un-Dada, looking more like a magazine, I spiced it up by using random (and some ugly) alternating typefaces for each paragraph, to make them look as if they were different bits of text cut from a newspaper, a method used by many Dadaists. I also highlighted/underlined/circled important words with my primary colour scheme, giving the words more personality.
I decided to stick to a red, cursive type for my interview questions to give it more contrast from the rest of the pages with its elegant appearance, and enlarged my question numbers to give them more hierarchy.
Making the rest of my zine pages was challenging. Having to adhere to the nonsensical/humorous/weird/chaotic aesthetic of Dada, as well as relating my collages to my questions, as well as creating layouts that still had some structure and thoughtful design choices, was a lot to juggle. I had to think about each element of my designs extremely carefully. After a while, I started to stray from Dada and forgot to fully emulate its style, instead kind of just making collages with no style. I also started to lose creativity and found it hard to come up with ideas from my magazines. There were times where I spent hours doing things that would usually take 15 minutes. With all these slumps, I found that detaching myself from the zine and looking at other existing designs, whether that be Dada art, general designs, or zine designs, proved to be really beneficial in re-inspiring me with new ideas and a fresh perspective. Taking a break away from the zine and coming back to it another a day was also useful.
After learning all about the importance of colour in my colour & info class, I decided to stick to primary colours. Limiting my colour palette was a really good choice, where my pages altogether have a sense of harmony. As my pages have quite a lot going on, limiting my colours helped make them more digestible to view. It was however quite hard having to find specific things to collage with the added limitation of colour. Most of the time I overcame this by looking deep into my magazines, but other times I physically coloured in objects, like the red shoe on question two, or added in coloured paper, like the windows on the second last page.
Once I had all my draft pages ready, I spent yesterday sticking everything permanently down and fixing things I was wanting to change to the pages, such as rearranging layouts, adding more hand drawn aspects, changing my interviewer typeface, using the same yellow coloured paper etc. It was much easier to refine and improve my pages when I already had their general appearances figured out, where I found it a lot harder to start my pages from nothing, as more ideation was required.
Overall, I’m glad that I was able to push through any obstacles and make my first ever zine. It is such a completely different style to what I usually produce, and although difficult, it was really good to push myself out of my comfort zone and explore another style of design. This was also the first time I really delved into collaging and it was very interesting to both explore the endless ways to approach collaging and to have to somewhat rely on chance and spontaneity when flicking through a magazine. Some of my favourite aspects of my collages were non-intentional (e.g. accidentally dropping something on my page) and that’s why I love collaging: it has no rules. I’m really happy with how my zine turned out and I’m definitely going to do more collaging in the future!
