So I decided to base my new zine concept on the fact that not so long ago, there used to be a school in Jalan Kayu and of course, it was named Jalan Kayu Primary School.

Right at the start, I decided that I wanted to use a more retro style, which led me to look for imagery that I could emulate and adapt for my own zine.

I looked up old Singaporean school textbooks…

… old photos of Jalan Kayu and its environs……..

After that, I thought of a couple of potential concepts for the content of the zine itself:

• A school publication, could be a yearbook…..
• …or maybe a student’s handbook…….
• …or it could be a sort of old school textbook that a student of the time would experience and use……

I decided to use the school textbook as the overall concept for my zine and to use the style of a simple English reading book for its content.

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Some guidelines that I stuck to for this zine:

Colour scheme: A cheap colour scheme (i.e. greyscale content) with pastel colours of an 80s feel, not too clean nor minimalist

Typography: Slightly distorted by still simple serif typeface for the body text as if taken from an old textbook

Cover design: Emulate a 1980s Singaporean school textbook

Internal layout: Simple layout without too much variation, something not too modern

 

Remember how I wanted to complete my zine using prata as the key theme from Jalan Kayu?

After spending days and weeks thinking and thinking and thinking and thinkinggggggg, I finally came to a decision that it felt a bit too frivolous and I wanted to do something a little more meaningful with regards to Jalan Kayu as a place.

With this notion, I went on to do more research on the place and found that there used to be a school in Jalan Kayu during its kampung days – Jalan Kayu Primary School.

Unfortunately, the school closed down in the 80s, so there I was, limited to online sources as the only place for me to glean something about it.

(You can find out more about the school yourself as its alumni have a Facebook group! https://www.facebook.com/groups/19956218133/)

I decided that this was a useful place to restart my investigation (with two weeks to go…) and went ahead with it…