Making a Zine

This week’s task, making a Zine (digital or paper) from personal networks and / or within the university.

Step One: Using the comments box below, organise yourselves into six teams. Then make your groups official.

Step Two: Establish a team leader. This is not everyone’s ideal role but it may be a useful experience for some.

Step Three: Using the dedicated group discussion pages, establish a theme for the zine and create a call for participants: a one-sentence objective you would like people to carry out. Keep in mind your respondents may not have much time to participate, so instructions should be clear and achievable

Step Four: Share the call for participation and collect contributions.

Step Five: Collate images and arrange into a zine. There are no restrictions as to size, style or format for the zine. You might wish to use free versions of online tools, and also wish to produce variations of your zine, if that is appropriate to the concept.

A group formed, and an online discussion ensued via both the Falmouth Canvas workspace and WhatsApp. Right at the beginning of the task, several good themes were suggested – and given that it was Father’s Day weekend, Ashley’s idea prevailed – Dads.

When discussing how to source this, Gem wrote a FaceBook post which I and others unashamedly appropriated.

***Call for help with my MA photography work***

“Please take a photo today of something or a place that makes you think of, or in some way reminds you of your Dad, and share a few words about the photo.”

(The photo will be used to form part of a zine for a group project.)

Thanks so much, and sending love to all the fathers, and all those who’s fathers are no longer with us today.

The result surprised me.

People were very willing to share their stories, some quite personal and emotional. Many spoke eloquently of lost Fathers, and had poignant stories of character and remembrance. Sincere thanks to all who took part.

Everyone contributed a picture, a couple specially taken for the project.

In shades of Ed Ruscha, this led me to create a small Zine, Fifteen Fathers. I used first names only to preserve anonymity. Fifteen stories were posted.

Here are a few spreads from the Zine.

I collated the stories and images from Facebook, and used Apple’s Pages to create an A5 size magazine. This was exported into Acrobat, set for reduced res images and double page default view with cover. I used a hand coloured image of my own Father, now 91, on the cover, without comment.

None of the images are edited, although I did have to shorten some of the text.

You can download my personal Zine here – Fifteen Fathers

Of course not all of these stories will appear in the group Zine. But, never having made a Zine before, I was quite pleased with the result.

At last night’s team webinar, we had 7 participants, each contributing between 3 and 6 images. We agreed to use images without people, to create a theme, with a  similar layout per page to that I had chosen – first name, image, story. And we agreed to call the Zine ‘Dad.’.

The process was collaborative at many levels – in choosing the theme, working through the criteria and image choices, and outlining the design.

And it was participative in that the entire contact came via crowdsourcing on social media.

Huge fun, and thanks again to all who took part.

You can download the group Zine here – Dad. A Curated Look at Fathers

Alison Price
Ant Prothero
Ashley Rose
Ella Rivet
Danny North
Gem Toes-Crichton
Mick Yates