Week 9 | Graphics

This was the fourth and final week of the graphics unit in our course and being the final week we needed to have produced a finished Zine by the end of the week so that we can take part in a group crit.

I had decided how i wanted my Zine to be bound so I went about collecting as much tracing paper as i could so that I had enough. I then began to cut the tracing paper to the size of my pages which was a move id later come to regret. The issue was that, due to time, I was going to photocopy onto the tracing paper and for me to do that I needed a paper size of a4. I had loads of tracing paper pages cut down to almost a5 which was a waste because it meant they couldn't be printed on and therefore I couldn't use them.

This meant I had to get even more tracing paper and make sure I had them cut down to a4.

With that all out of the way I needed to assemble all of my pages together on a computer in order to print them. I amassed all of the memes I had and along with the facts I began to create each page. Now the easiest way for me to do this was by using Photoshop. I created a canvas that was the size I wanted, imported the memes I wanted to use as well as the facts/figures and then I had to save the file as a Jpeg image so that they didn't take up much space and I could print them easily.

In the end I managed to create 16 pages with content and then a start and ending page. I sourced all of the facts I used with website links on the back page to credit where I got my information from.

The pages printed nicely and looked very slick and clear. The black ink looked especially great against the translucency of the paper.

After printing came the tricky part. It was tricky because I hadn't anticipated how many pages I was actually planning to make when I was gathering book binding ideas. I hadn't planned for the Zine to be so thick. The idea was to simply staple it at the top which seemed simple enough except for the amount of paper the staple had to actually travel through.

To solve my problem I had to use almost six staples through the Zine to overlap and staple groups of pages together. It worked but it wasn't very attractive.