The Art of Zine Aesthetics - What looks good?

(This took place before our "place" lecture, but posted out of the draft written on the date later on, similar to some of the previous posts) 

 Arranging the examples out before we decided to dice them all up.

Making notes on what goes where, apparently.

The point of the exercise: 

Ryan and Marchin's exercise with the books, articles and ephemera examples was confusing at first, but once we understood the true purpose, it was an important task, that got us thinking about the outlook of the products we intended to make. 

we each brought in an item that was personal to us, but not on any particularly high scale. It could of been a wrapper or a Zine, or even an antique book, however it had to have some kind of connection. 

We laid the work out across the floor, and certain members of the group were asked to photocopy as much as possible, then arrange it all together, in terms of "what looked similar" or "what went well together" in terms of visuals. 

There were also four tables of pre-photocopied material we had to cut up, arrange and label, in terms of what worked and what didn't. 

Our Result: 

 A newspaper style zine we crafted from other articles. It turned out pretty well. 

The groups arranging the content 











We ended up learning how to craft something that (although was completely confusing) showed a running theme, and still worked as a visual item. 

It further proved my point into how our zine's rough and rebellious aesthetic needed to be showcased out in the final product. 

Drawing from the 70s punk themes, I've gathered from this particular exercise that we could respond to our current theme with answers that were a mix of confusion and literal drawing, since it would still retain a personal charm, yet also look appealing to those who valued it as a personal item, almost on an auto-biographical level. 

Overall the morning went well, and not only got us thinking about construction and aesthetics, but also how we actually "saw" the content, and what we are visually gaining from it, in terms to it's cultural significance as part of a zine. 

I kind of wish we had more of these sessions, since it got us all working with different people on a much more involved scale, instead of jumping away to work in our enclosed groups. 

The particular Graphic Novel I brought in was this old 80s Hellblazer Series that I love reading. 

It's artwork is vast, dark and has a whole heap of great writers and artists involved. 

Sadly it didn't make the big photocopy the group made. But it was their loss.  The comic and the zine are very closely related, and since comic art is my main artistic ambition, normally it would be a perfect point to further that. 

However that just seems too obvious, and possibly won't work with the rest of the groups visual languages. 

Again, the sketchier  the more it could be a statement about zines themselves, being a "quick" and "one time only" publication.