As a zine enthusiast – I’ve printed several before – I was quite lucky to have gotten the chance to make one for the class. That being said, I really wanted my zine to stand out from everyone else’s, hence the usage of coloured paper. I figured it would be boring if all our class zines were black and white. In addition, it’s way more fun to choose which colour zine you want – I am a huge advocate for personalization whenever possible.
With the knowledge that I would be using coloured paper, I tried to design the zine in a way where the paper itself could also shine through; to accomplish this, I left the back page fairly blank. Personally, I prefer back covers for zines that are more empty, as they make it feel more like a book, but the colour shining through was a definite plus.
I decided to focus on 4 typefaces in particular, since I didn’t want to condense too much into such a small zine. I chose the Romain du Roi, along with three transitional typefaces that followed. Since the subject is typography, there were a limited number of illustrations I could do to represent things (aside from drawings of the type-founders themselves), so I ended up focusing on type and layout. I painstakingly copied letters from the typefaces by hand to form my titles, while also typing each paragraph in the typeface it talked about (Romain du Roi in Times New Roman, Baskerville in Baskerville, etc).
I would give myself a 10 on this project. Typically I don’t like to self-grade and give myself high marks, but I worked quite hard on this (especially on handwriting the letters), as well as researching a ton and making sure the text wasn’t too boring. I really put my best effort into this zine, and I hope it shows.