Today’s Plan:
- Semester Map
- Menu Project or Book Project
- Zine Project
A Pretty Realistic Calendar
- Week One: Flyer Fix (intro Photoshop, basic layout, contrast, padding)
- Week Two: Flyer Fix / Brochure (intro InDesign, laying type, margins, repetition)
- Week Three: Brochure (con’t)
- Week Four: Music (color, typography, more practice with Photoshop-especially layers)
- Week Five: Brochure revision
- Week Six: Menu Project OR Book Project (near impossible typography challenge; working with columns in InDesign OR learning how to thread a very long document in InDesign). ALSO: What is a Zine? What would your zine be about?
- Week Seven: Finish Menu / Book [chapter: hierarchy and visual flow]
- Week Eight: Zine
- Week Nine: Zine
- Week Ten: BREAK
- Week Eleven: Crucible Project
- Week Twelve: Crucible Project
- Week Thirteen: Crucible Project / Go West Project
- Week Fourteen: Go West Project
- Week Fifteen: Go West Project
- Week Sixteen: Final Exam Day [there is a final exam. you get an A if you show up and do it]
What to Do Next?
Perhaps a choice?
- The book project
- A Media Kit Project for a non-profit organization (see Casa content). Spring 2023 research.
Book Production Project
Book Production Project
For the next few weeks, you will be using InDesign and Photoshop to design, arrange, flow, and produce a book of poetry from an author in public domain (note: a few people have asked if they can produce a volume of their own work; I don’t have a problem with this, although you might end up working alone). I’ve selected poetry because it requires far more attention to layout and typography than a regular text.
You will be working in teams of two for this project. We will form those groups either at the end of class today or at the beginning of class on Thursday. Each group will select a poet and produce a book of approximately 30 pages. In addition to poems, each book must include:
- A front and back cover design
- A title page
- A copyright/copyleft page
- A preface [you are responsible for writing the preface, it should be at least two pages. If you run out of things to say, you can flow some Lorem Ipsum.]
- A table of contents
You might include other pages–for instance, part of an introduction by your author. You should include page numbers. You might also want to think about the design of your pages and whether you can include simple illustrations (strategically, perhaps not on every page).
As with our first project, we will do research into poetry editions in order to inform our design process. This will involve both digital research (into the covers for previous editions, Amazon can help here) and physical research (going to the library and looking at previous editions of the poems, getting measurements of page size, checking out typography first hand).
You can find full .txt files of poetry in public domain at the Gutenberg Project. Here’s a small list of the many authors the Gutenberg project includes:
You are not tied to this list; I only ask that the poet you work with is in public domain, as are all the files stored on the Gutenberg website. Essentially, you will likely have to work with authors who published prior to 1920. In the other class, I have a few people who are working with the bible (specifically, the songs of Solomon).
Finally, I have a creative writer in the other class who is creating a volume of her own work, and another person who is creating a volume of a friend’s work. I have no problem with that so long as the author provides you permission.
WTF is a Zine
WTF is a Zine?
As I’ve previously indicated, next week we will begin working on the Crucible Fall 2021 Design project. I will provide more concrete details for the project on Monday, but here’s some preliminary info:
- For this project, you will have the option of working individually or in teams of two
- You will develop a front and back cover for the issue, using student submitted art
- The aesthetic, stylistic inspiration for your design should be influenced by the zine
So that last one leads us to the question of the day: WTF is a Zine? Kenneth Burke would remind us, via the properties of identification, association, and the negative, that such a question also asks us WTF is(n’t) a Zine? Such is any ontological project haunted: to seek what something is, its properties essential and inessential, we inevitably bound upon its boundaries, borders, limits.
And so I turn to Google, contemporary arbitrator of the market’s interminable wrangle:
Okay, so what adjectives can we already use to talk about zines?
Some more resources:
- BinderyMike, which takes me to Zinester Directory
- From directory, catalogue
- From directory, see potatofuzz as well [juxtaposition of clean, typeset poems and chaotic drawnings
- Let’s Talk about Zine Aesthetic
- Let’s talk about “literary magazine non traditional layout”
Shared space: What is a Zine? Google Doc.
