Jurong. It is just so far. The extreme west end of Singapore and the place everyone calls “Pulau NTU” because that is just how far we are away from everyone. But it is also where my uni life began.
In my opinion, this was a rather challenging project just to come out and develop a concept that I thought would capture the essence of Jurong, show my exploration and at the same time not be a commercialised zine.
I struggled quite a bit because I was not alway certain with what I wanted to do with my concepts. I kept changing and switching back and forth with the concepts because I was not very satisfied with one. However, I really did enjoy looking at artist Kate Rabbit’s work especially her collage series which incorporated everything I wanted for my zine.
It had the flora aspect which I could incorporate from my research in Jurong, the illustrations which I could include my architecture concept (Mimi’s advice after I showed her my inspirations as she said I needed something that is representative of Jurong) and the photography which was my personal aspect.
FINAL
Cover page
My first attempt at the cover page is seen as the featured image for this page at the top. I quite liked it but I felt that the words was not as visible as my second attempt which is the one that I used in the end and is pictured here. I arranged the flowers in the shape of the whole Jurong as I felt it best captured the essence of my zine along with the title (I mainly featured the opposite ends of Jurong for this zine).
Introduction
This acted as a brief summary of my zine and what to look forward to. I added the scotch tape to create a scrapbook vibe, including the black highlighted “journey” part. The black highlighted part reminded me of childhood whereby my mum to have this small handheld manual name printer. It was not like the digital kind from Brothers where you can simply key in the the words you wanted to print. The one from my childhood had the alphabets and symbols in a circle and you had to rotate it till you reached the alphabet you want before pressing down the handle to emboss it. Then the whole steps repeats for the next letter and so on. It also had a typewriter font on it thus I chose a similar font for it too.
Page 3
This served as my “trail” as the places that I will talk about in chronological order. I started with the East which is the Ng Teng Fong Hospital and Chevrons then proceeded to the West which is ADM and Safti. I illustrated all the structures using the pen tool on Adobe Illustrator.
Page 4
1st entry and the flowers do have symbolism to it which I specifically chose. The Frangipanis represents death which I thought was apt for my finger as I couldn’t use it for months and till now it does not bend properly. The rest of my pages follows the same structure which is the word entry, location then flora and personal pictures. I tried adding more illustrations similar to Kate Rabbit’s style but it would look quite cluttered.
Page 5
Again, the flowers has symbolism. The orchids represents love and happiness while the hibiscus mean joy, seeing beauty and finding a reason to celebrate the simplest of joys. The reason why I did not include the flower symbolism is because it was more of a personal thing and I felt that it was not necessary for the zine. Also, the flowers here are vibrant and colourful to allude to my emotions of happiness and nervousness during the event. For the personal picture here, it was trimmed in a very messily way as based on Kate Rabbit’s work not all of her pictures were trimmed properly. It also adds to a more scrapbook vibe.
Page 6
This personal picture was roughly cut out too for the same reason as I explained above and it created a more casual and playful mood which added to this theme of the page. Here I did explain the flower symbolism because it had a connection to my friends’ personalities.
Page 7
Similarly, I did explained the symbolism of the flowers as I wanted to clear any misunderstandings for Chrysanthemums. In some cultures, Chrysanthemums are used during funerals to represent death and purity but they also symbolise happiness as explained.
Page 8
This page was covered in grass to connect to the cover page.