The final draft is super satisfying to me! I really enjoy the finishing touches and the final design. I really like how I began the whole thing and ended up with what I have now. The designs look really pretty and I think I answered all the feedbacks I received from everyone and Mimi. I worked on making sure that each pages are very easy to identify and look at. The colors are not much more visually appealing. There is a focal point which is the cat, the color is much stronger than the rest and the cat is outlined with purple. For sure everyone will look at the cat first and then the background. I will explain more but here are the zine I have finalized!

This is the cover and the back page. What is happening here is the designs are spread on A3 and the riso people will trim them to A4 and fold them into A5 at the final stage. I figured since I already use the cat as the main narrator of the story, she needs to be featured on the cover page. She is “looking” for answers which is the whole purpose of the story is to find out who did it and what to do afterwards. The last page will be the protesting signage that the people protested on the last page. However, this will not be in the perspective of the cat! I really enjoy these pages because now I am doing it for the right reasons haha!These are the second and third page. I did not change anything for the second page because I already really enjoy the fact that the words are so big. It attracts attentions and make people wonder who is the one saying the line. A lot of people might think that its the girl who is holding the cat in the HDB but its actually the main cat. But the reason why I decided to have the color so bright is because the color resemblance the color of my main character! Now that the colors of the main cat and the building are so bright and everything in the back has a much lower opacity, people can focus on the story and the words and the secondary stuff at the back will just ties everything together! 

For the second page, if you can see from my part 2, it was super messy and there were so many things going on and everything was not well composed. There was no breathing space for The Eye and everything was just mushed together. I took away the KTP Hospital and continued the trees to go higher. Then I added the text. I feel like this page is so much better than the previous version. There are so much breathing area, the colors, you can focus so much on the cats then you will look for the text and eventually you will see the grim. I focus on the word “friends” because I figured these cats were probably friends and thats why the killer shouldn’t have done it. I also took away the bush cover 1/3 of the dead cat as I thought that it was cover the tail and people will not be able to identify it as a dead cat.

For the mid zine spread, I kept the same design as I thought it was already telling the story properly, the only few issues were the text being too much and the colors were too extreme. I lighten the colors in the background, A LOT! Turned them all pink, but I kept the purple for the knife because I felt like there is still a need for the emphasis on the knife because the cat is running away from the cat. I kept the cat to be the main focus point for this spread and kept the color and the outline. Everything else are secondary but there are two levels of secondary. The knife then the background. The story is that she is running away from all the places in Yishun that the cats were murdered to the Yishun Park. The structure on the top right is the structure at the Yishun Park where people go up and look at the lake and the scenery. At first I thought the road next to the cat’s face will be too distracting for the people, but then because of the purple outline and the lightness of pink, I think it will be okay!

For the final pages of the zine I kept everything the same because everyone’s feedbacks for this page was that this page is the most well composed and well thought out. So I kept it as it is BUT simplify the colors again. I make sure the secondary at the back are there and that the focus is on the cat, the girl, and the text. Automatically everyone will look at the girl because she is in the centre of the zine, so my challenge is how do I make sure everyone focus on the cat and the text before the girl. I made sure the girl’s opacity is much lighter than the cat and the secondary subjects at the back are the lightest of them all.

So now that I have finalised all the design it’s time to send for printing. Before sending for printing, everything needs to be turned into greyscale and the pages need to be placed in the printing way so when they are folded into a zine the pages become seamless. We were taught inDesign however as risograph works much better with photoshop, I will be using photoshop for the printing process. Here are what I sent to the risograph printing shop:

Everything has turned into black, white, and grey and as I have mentioned before, they are for the shades of each colors. The crop marks are necessary as well, this will help the riso people when they are trimming the zine.

Overall, I really enjoy the process of this project, I wasn’t feeling it when I was designing my first draft because I thought the colors were so awful and I got even more upset when I found out that I have been doing riso wrongly. But to see the final design and the colors worked out so well together, I am really happy with my final results! What I have learnt most for this project is showing your process to your professor and your classmates every week and getting the feedbacks and work on them. If I would have just done it and submit it will just be base on my perspective. With the comments from others I am able to push my designs so much more and the aesthetics of this zine has improved so much from the first draft. I am really proud of my final design and will be sending it for printing today. I can’t wait to see the final printed out version in riso printing! Very excited! The first time I saw risograph I fell in love with the colors and the way it is being printed!