Portfolio 1: Introducing yourself Zine

Assignment Brief

This first assignment is about introducing yourself so that your tutor can get to know you, your interests and your work better. This assignment is not submitted for formal assessment.

What was the last book you read? What was the first book you read? What’s your favourite cover design? What are your ‘top ten’ titles? Our relationship with books is highly individual.

Introduce yourself to your tutor by reflecting on and explaining something about your relationship with books. Communicate this through the hands-on sense of immediacy and energy that is an attribute of fanzine design, and use the fanzine model as a vehicle for your content.

Design an eight-page simple folded and stapled fanzine that says something about who you are, your interests in books and your wider cultural influences or interests. Use text and image material you have generated in the earlier exercises as content for your fanzine, create new content, or use a combination of both.
You can use any medium or materials you want to. You may want to work much larger and reduce your artwork to submit it.

Keep notes to accompany the making of the ‘zine in your learning log. These notes could cover why you decided to portray what you did, what you included and what you omitted.

For discussion of Fanzines see Fanzines Post

For discussion of the books that have influenced me most see Influential Books

All the images and pages were done as artboards in Adobe Illustator.

My Fanzine Title

This title page draws rather too obviously on Russian constructivism – it was one of my first attempts at Design.

My Fanzine P1

This page follows most closely my list of childhood books. I initially tried putting in some photos here. But decided I preferred the cartoon-like style. I experimented a lot with fonts, but with hindsight and the skuills I now havce I could develop this further, and make things more playful through using type on a path.

My Fanzine P2

Based on the book ‘Yoga, Tantra and Meditation’ with its mix of yoga and New Age sex. As in the previous, and facing, page I wanted to maintain a light line. I had fun experimienting with this one.

My Fanzine P3

The focus here is on feminism and adolescence. Again I wanted to make this quite humorous. For the book cover I experimented with different black and white filters and finally decided on the graphic filter. I like this effect – it makes the torso look shiny and also shady.

My Fanzine P4

In this image life got more serious – my travels and living with very poor people and leftwing movements in villages in communist West Bengal led to a strong political commitment that the world could, and should, be different. Whilst waiting for my doctoral research visa the only books I could afford from the town bookshop were huge tomes of Marx and Lenin subsidised by the Soviet Union.

My Fanzine P5

The final pages focus on where I am now and what I want to do. This page uses drawings from change visions of farmers in Uganda, drawn as part of trainings I give. I am not sure about the grey backrgound to the images on the left – the grey does create balance. But this page could be much improved with the digital skills I now have.

My Fanzine P6

This final image uses images from a logbook collage from work of Dan Eldon. I need to consider Copyright issues here and how far I would need to alter of make a less recognisable montage.

The back cover I reversed the front one.

 


Posted

in

by

Tags: