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Zine

This zine was made for a printed matter class that focused on familiarizing students with the transition from digital to physical.

Printing

January 16th 2023

This zine was made for a printed matter class that focused on familiarizing students with the transition from digital to physical. The assignment prompt was to make 50 observations over the course of a week and narrow down our favorites for a themed zine. I found inspiration in the observations from a single day when I felt mentally foggy and stuck in my own head. I edited my observations into a poem about my experience that day, which became the text for the visuals.

Digital Originals

A zine cover built entirely from ASCII characters — slashes, degree signs and asterisks — arranged into a dense texture, with “January 16th 2023” and “Monday” set in plain monospace within it.
A page titled “9 AM Is Kind of Early”: a glowing white silhouette of a figure sitting on a bed in a pink and purple bedroom scattered with star flares, captioned “It’s a new year… new goals… I am going to get some real sleep.”
A page reading “Walking in the morning cold puts me in a bad mood — It feels like the world has it out for me”, over a glowing figure on a purple and orange street scene, with “Windy Days” in distorted type at the bottom.
A page with “3 Hour Class Is Super” repeated down the left in fading pink lines beside a white silhouette in a classroom, captioned “I resist going to class at first but find a flow is reached quickly.”
A page titled “No Music On the Walk…??” over a blue night street with a house and a glowing figure, captioned “I wish I had my headphones fixed… but I guess the world doesn’t sound too bad either.”
A page reading “Today was hard but at least I made it home :)” repeated across the top of a teal and purple corridor hung with chains, with “I Am Allegedly Doing Fine” in distorted white type across the middle.
A page titled “Cooking is time consuming but rewarding”, showing a white silhouette in a green and pink kitchen scattered with star flares.
A page reading “I’m getting ready for bed and I realize I looked like shit all day… I hope no one else noticed”, with “I looked in the mirror and got scared” drawn in white line work across a bathroom scene.
A page reading “It isn’t easy being a perfect creation”, with a small white silhouette sitting beside an iridescent pool in a bright green field under a blue sky.
The zine's back cover: a border of typewriter slashes, asterisks and brackets around a numbered contents list running from “1. 9 am is kind of early” to “8. It isn’t easy being a perfect creation”, with the whole day written out beneath it and ending “I hope no one else noticed”.

In Photoshop, I chose to use an editing style that combined two concepts I felt represented my feelings that day, liminal spaces and “drain edits”. Drain is an ethereal but melancholic aesthetic that has become rapidly popular over the past decade and can include media like music, fashion and photo edits. Liminal spaces, like drain, are an internet aesthetic that fixate on empty or abandoned places appearing eerie, forlorn, nostalgic and often surreal. I felt that these two concepts could combine in the zine to represent this day as I experienced it, hazy and lost in my own thought.

Printed

A photograph of the printed zine opened flat, showing the ASCII contents page listing the eight spreads beside the ASCII title page dated January 16th 2023.
The printed zine photographed open at its first spread: the left page blank but for the cover type showing through the paper, and on the right “9 AM Is Kind of Early” over a pink and blue solarised bedroom full of star flares, a glowing white figure sitting on the bed.
A printed spread photographed flat: on the left “Windy Days…They Don’t Want To See Me Cozy” dripping down a night street in blue and orange, on the right “3 Hour Class is Super” repeated in rows across a bleached pink classroom.
A printed spread photographed flat: on the left “No Music On the Walk…??” over a blue night house lit by a streetlight flare, beside “I wish I had my headphones fixed…”; on the right “I Am Allegedly Doing Fine” stretched over a chain-wrapped corridor under the line “Today was hard but at least I made it home :)” repeated three times.
A printed spread photographed flat: on the left “Cooking is time consuming but rewarding” over a green kitchen scattered with star flares and floating knives, on the right “I looked in the mirror and got scared” over a blue bathroom scribbled across in white marker.
A photograph of the printed zine opened to its final spread: the green field “perfect creation” page on the left and a blank page numbered 12 / 24 on the right.

Laser Printed 5.5” x 8.5”