Alicia Prieto for October 24th

It was enjoyable to put in so much work for such a small book! It truly made the biblical pamphlets people shove into my hands so much more appealing (in a way.) It was interesting to see the process that it took to design such a zine, and I liked the hand made feeling and the portability. I see myself making more of these zines and spreading them out throughout the city, forgetting them on the subway for people to read.

I found that all of the zines in my zine collection were very interesting. I spent time with each of them to get a feeling for people’s interests. I enjoyed the diverse topics people covered, from physical objects like the beara beara bags, to consumables like bubble tea and coffee, to time periods (the 90’s) to metaphysical concepts such as the major key and the Good Vibes zine. I felt that the books that were designed to be black and white worked the best, as well as the ones that went for bigger, bolder design to communicate information effectively. The thing that did not work in these zines was designing for a “regular” page. Until I ran a test, I did not realize how truly tiny the space I was working with was. I was happy with the way my zine turned out, because I planned ahead for the trimming of the book to be part of my overall layout. I could not find an overall motif, however, I did notice that most of the books were designed vertically, and only one book was horizontal. I found that the horizontal layout of the emotions book made sense, since it would be have been more disjointed to fit the sign language hands on separate lines.

Seeing the interview book and the coffee lovers 101, I feel like next time around I would love to do something more informational. To me, the zine format was perfect for an informal instructional guide, and I found them to be fun and interesting to follow along. I also wish I had designed in color, just to see what would have happened! I designed in black and white because I wanted to have more control over the output, and I found that it worked the way I wanted to because there was no information loss during the photocopying process.