Oliver Jeffers - A Special Lecture

Background: 

Born in Australia, but from Northern Ireland, the super creative Jeffers visited us and gave a lecture on his work, and how he progressed to where he was today. 

His range of books have been slowly built from a visual language progression, through his university training, inspirations from the everyday, and his burning desire to further himself and try new things. 

The examples above were featured in his talk, as he showed us various tips, and how he works. 

His range as a painter however is broad, and the way he interacts with colour, and puts it to use in a visual story, is something I want to try to capture myself, in my Zine work. 

The way the characters interact with a background, the use of line art and simplistic colour, make a bold impact in their own right. 

He told us to not give up, and to remember that no idea is original, alongside other tips such as not fearing space, (something I do alot) 

I hope that my work style can take a good lesson from what he taught us, and that i'll be able to fully master composition arrangement.

I believe that the key thing to take from his talk was to not be afraid of the blank space in an image. How could it possibly aid the work? what chould go there? where could my work branch out to? and to whom?

The Idea - Brainstorming Session

When we sat and planned our ideas, we began to rotate the brief around specific keywords that could prove handy, when thinking of a theme for our Zine project. 

The Planning:

Keywords: 

Starting with broad expansive words, such as "pattern" or "love", we quickly became massed with words, and possible ideas of interest. This spanned into a "Zine-a-week" theme, regarding one of those words, and how we personally react with the subject matter. The "Eyebrows" were going to be our first random keyword zine, featuring various drawings of... you guessed it, eyebrows. However due to time constraints and planning, we felt that this particular subject was a little too sparse and simple for the overall goal, and decided to move onto a more solid content idea. 

Format: 

Print and layout are very important for us overall, and we stormed several ideas out in terms of production, such as different methods of binding, and ways of printing, such as Risograph and Lino methods, to keep our pictures in a similar unity. An A5, stitch bound Zine, would be ideal to present our ideas.

Zine decisions: 

From what I personally gathered from our brainstorm, we aim to produce a form of A5 publication, that is sticking to a broader subject of place, particularly a trip to given locations. We can use the trip to gain a personal recollection through photography,drawing,digital adjustments.  

My personal response is something that I would like to form in tribute to the old zines of the past, a form of visual "mash up" or along those lines. 

Further Zine Based rules and ideas will be decided in due time. 

"Temporary Hoarding RAR" - Punk Fanzines

A research session into the fanzine popularity of the 80s was an interesting point to explore how these Zines were formed, years back. 

Examples: 

Front Cover

interviews and fan letters

Johnny Rotten Interveiw

Cover art

Anti Police collage

Anti Capitalist montage

 These particular examples used a large mix of photocopied images, photographs, and newspaper/letter text to create their outlook. Bold messages and a strong fanbase was born from the punk movement, which is clearly reflected in the mash up designs. 

The halftone pattern used, alongside the type was like an early photoshop mashup, almost like a pinup of various events at the time. 


Personally, I love this mashup of angles, colour, texture, and type. I think I feel inspired to take a further look into this style of visual collage, almost tributing the work that the old punk zines worked hard with, to deliver a strong message for their fans and feelings alike.