I was pretty stoked for this zine project, because I have an undying love for handmade zines and magazines in general. It was even better because Shirley allowed us to use personal works for the contents of our zine. Right off the bat, I thought about making a travel zine. I’ve been wanting to compile my travel photos somehow, instead of having them sit in my hard drive. This was a good chance to actually make something presentable (and hopefully pretty) out of them.
My zine is a photo log of my trip to Sydney right before I entered ADM. I often look back at those eight days fondly. It was a such a good trip, with just the right amount of down time and adventure. The zine is split into three categories:
“Listen to the sea” — photos of the ocean
“Take the open road” — road tripping
“Appreciate the silence” — nature
They represent my favourite parts of the trip.
I wanted to maintain a clean, understated feel with a tinge of wanderlust. I went with a muted pink as my main colour, and made Quicksand my main font, a san-serif typeface with cute rounded edges.
Process
I made a vector illustration of the opera house, and three simple icons for the inside pages.
Icons representing my different spreads
Experimentation for opera house vector
Finalised vector
I spent a lot of time on the opera house vector, because I couldn’t decide on the colours. After experimenting with different colour schemes, I decided to keep it simple with shades of purple, as pink and purple are analogous colours and I thought they looked quite nice together.
While arranging photos, the three column alignment helped a lot! I made the photo arrangement of the three spreads different, so that the photos didn’t look too static. There are short blurbs on each spread, featuring some anecdotes from the trip.
The layout utilises two main principles of design: directional force and emphasis. In each spread, there is a main photo surrounding two to three smaller ones. It guides the readers’ eyes, telling them where to look first.
V1: Words were arranged vertically, Shirley said it was uncommon to arrange it this way unless it was Chinese characters. I also felt that the icons looked a little odd at the bottom.
V2: I changed the orientation of the words and moved the icons to the blurb section. I also made the text slightly smaller.
Final
Overall, I’m pretty happy with how this zine turned out. It’s a nice way to end the school year, utitlising skills and design principles we have learned during these two semesters in 2D. :>