As I mentioned during my slides presentation in the middle of the project, I decided to do a fully illustrated zine in my usual humorous, tongue-in-cheek style because I think it represents my style best and people seem to like it ((((:

Concept

I decided to use the Marabou Stork (aka “ballsack bird”) which I found at the Animal Resort at Jalan Kayu as the main focus of my zine. This is because when I told people that I was doing the zine on Jalan Kayu, everybody was like “ROTI PRATA” and “SHOPHOUSES!!!!” so I immediately decided I was gonna do something different because if the roti prata is really that famous then it doesn’t need a zine to tell people that it exists lol.

Process

I had a lot of crazy ideas for what to do to my zine but most of them weren’t really good ideas. Since I wanted the zine to be funny I wanted to make the content as nonsensical as possible but I was reminded by Shirley during consultation that the content still has to relate to Jalan Kayu somehow. To get more ideas rolling, I decided to just open photoshop and just freely draw the ballsack bird in different poses and situations.

While I was drawing this bird, I suddenly randomly though of the movie “Storks” and it reminded me that storks are associated with delivering babies to parents. Hence I decided to include this concept as part of my zine storyline, and created the following:

I was hoping to use these 2 pages as a spread in my zine. When I showed it to my friends it received a lot of good feedback but during consultation Shirley told me that the font was inappropriate and the spread lacked structure and hierarchy, and gave me advice on how to arrange the different elements properly. At this point I realised that to make my design more readable and cohesive, I should make use of the grid system in my zine and from here on I found that arranging the copy and images of the zine was a lot simpler.

Another one of the first spreads I came up with was the one above. The idea behind it is that I wanted to create a joke “fashion guide” for people visiting Jalan Kayu since it is somewhat considered a “hipster” area and people visiting that area would usually dress nicely. I personally own 2 pairs of crocs and I think they’re great shoes but people are always giving me shit for wearing them which was why I decided to use something that is perceived as unstylish and unfashionable in contrast to the stylishness of Jalan Kayu. Shirley suggested that instead of using photos of crocs I should just illustrate the crocs to create a more cohesive illustrated style in the entire zine.

As you can see from the 2 spreads above I decided to go for a very bright colour palette with the use of a lot of primary colours. This is because I wanted my zine to have a bold, cartoon-like look, almost like it is a children’s book but upon actually reading the zine the reader is like oh my god this is totally not for children

When I showed Shirley these 2 spreads, she suggested that my zine should also include a map of the Animal Resort or at least a sort of introduction to it since that’s where the ballsack bird resides. Hence I came up with the following illustration to use on my first 2 pages:

Throughout the entire process of making the zine, I constantly asked for feedback from my peers and kept changing my zine according to their advice and comments. I feel that this is important because as a designer/artist when we have been staring at our own design for too long it can become very mentally draining and we may start to miss out small mistakes or other discrepancies in our design. So it is always good to have someone else look at your work from time to time.

Artistic references

I did not really reference many artists or designers for this project. Since a zine is about self expression, I felt that it was more appropriate to just work in my own style in order to create a more authentic end product rather than to reference so many other artists that the zine is hardly even my own.

In my OSS post for project ego in sem 1 I mentioned several artists who heavily influenced my personal style. In the past few months I have came across more artists who I greatly admire and I guess have also served as an inspiration for this project.

Toshio Saeki

Toshio Saeki is a Japanese erotic illustrator who is known for his highly controversial and bizarre artworks. I actually wasn’t sure if I should include him in my OSS post because a lot of his work is really quite disturbing and the ones above are already some of the milder ones but I am a huge fan of the colour palettes used in his illustrations as well as the use of bizarre dark humour. The use of bold primary colours is something I also emulated in my own zine.

Joan Cornella

Last semester one of my classmates told me that my work resembles Joan Cornella’s so I checked him out and I am now a huge fan. I love nonsensical black humour and his art is just so full of it. He honestly has the weirdest brain I have ever encountered in my life and has become one of my greatest artistic inspirations.

Final Product

Here is the final product saved as spreads for your reading pleasure (: When I saved the postscript as spreads it created white boxes around all the different indesign elements which was a bit annoying because it wasn’t there in my print booklet version. I googled this and some forum said that it’s because of the PDF reader on Mac computers or something so I guess it just goes to show that sometimes life gives you lemons and things don’t go as planned but what can you do (: