Inspiration for our first front cover

Simple and easy to the eye, these covers immediatly grabbed my attention. Introducing an element of illustration in early to our zine, black and white illustrations placed on top of a bright, pop out colour really makes them stand out and gives the cover a fun element. If the cover appears fun and attractive, then the reader will immediatly be attracted to the zine and it is then they are introduced to read more of your work inside. :)

More totally inappropriate shoes

We all must be aware of Naomi Campbells infamous stumble on the catwalk in a pair of ridiculously high platforms! If supermodels can't hold themselves up in the beauties then who is the public to stand a chance with them??

Beauty is pain?

New fashion skates? Shoes are never failing to add the shock factor and this pair just prove my point exactly!

Pricing

After receiving a lecture on the introduction to zines at the beginning of this project, we were informed that the average price for a zine out their in the market is £4-£5.
From looking around at prices of magazines in the current market, it seems that most gossip glossy's such as Cosmpolitan, Glamour  and Company magazine are all retailing at around £2-£3.

However, because our whole zine is made up of hand drawn illustrations on each page, we feel that our zine owns a much more personalized and collectable feeling about it, and so therefore felt it would be acceptable for us to price our final zine at £4. We hope this is a hit with any possible fans we manage to attract at the London Zine Symposium and our hard work gets rewarded with our work finally getting out into the wide world.

Shoes. Shoes. Shoes

Because both me and Nat agreed that shoes are a nightmare when it comes to looking glam for a night out, this subject matter is going to appear in our top 5 annoyances within fashion without a doubt.

These shoes just prove how us women would easily be persuaded to buy a pair of shoes just from looking at them and thinking WOW. Don't get me wrong, these shoes are absolutly amazing, however i would not like to even attempt walking a pelican crossing in these as i think i'd need three sets of red lights to even just get half way across!

Promotion of Zine- It's a Knock Out Collaboration

Because we want our zine to be a fun and humorous read, we wanted to reflect this in our communications campaign aswell. By creating a 'Its a knockout' inspired event in Nottingham this coming summer, we feel it is the perfect event to match the zines essence of a humorous way to de-stress and de-clutter you annoyances.

Teams could be grouped according to similarities of annoyances, i.e the tangled wires team, the empty turned on plug socket and the chav despisers, and all groups could battle it out in a variety of stress relieving fun activites.
On the day we could supply a giant white board where members of the public can contribute what annoys them and this could inspire content for future editions. Designated interviews could also be present on the day to interview those who have interesting and unique annoyances which we could also run articles and features on in up and coming zines.

Charlie Brooker

Charlie Brooker is a Guardian columnist. He currently writes Screen burn, a G2 comment piece every Monday and he produces, writes and presents Screenwipe for the BBC


With the same humorous and witty tone of voice we're aiming for in our magazine, we decided to take a look into some samples of his work for inspiration for how to voice our opinions on annoying things in society today to our target demographic.

He keeps his sentences short and to the point to get the humour across quickly and prompt as to not dampen the humorous point he's trying to make. The tone he writes in is exactly how you would imagine him to speak it to you in person, which almost makes you feel more involved in the text as such. He is also a fan of using brackets to include his own thoughts and rhetorical answers from points he makes, which re-assures us he too has the same thoughts as us and he has answered our questions for us.

Take a look at his work further!


http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/charliebrooker

A little about Typo.

Typography design is becomming more and more common these days and equally as important to all brands, sometimes it is there to tell a story and sometimes because it just looks nice.
Here are a few i've selected from the 25 inspirational typography designs...

We could imply a tagline for the zine and take inspiration from this image and design and layout the words in a similar way as to provide a quirky and edgy look to the zine and provide some interation with the reader as they get to read on a variety of angles to read the full message.

To add an artistic flare to a magazine, inside or on the cover, it could be an idea to crinkle some paper to add some texture and then splat some paint over it before then scanning the final paper into photoshop to apply text and design on top.

Again lying out text at a variety of angles adds interest to the page. An idea taken from this image is we could create an 's' and 'c' created through words summing up the zines essence and what it stands for. I also like how this typography combines an element of illustration within it too, by adding this i find it gives a personalized, hand finished touch the image, which is definitly to be considered when planning the content for our zine.

Experimenting with different opacities against a coloured background is a great idea and change from using different colours, as it keeps the overall selected one colour and provides text around the page in a variety of diferent shades, almost providing a mysterial appearance.

We could create our front cover using the words 'Spring Clean' and using them how they have used 'cut your love' here and arrange them to create a shape which has relevance to our magazine content, perhaps a main feature in the magazine could influence the shape.

A nice touch to have the title of an article featured in the middle of the main article rather than the standard stereotype top.

Pile of Typo.

A great idea for a front cover-

To have a pile as shown on the economist here made up of the letters spelling 'Spring Clean', this could be a witty resemblance to a pile of rubbish that is waiting to be cleaned up and de-cluttered, just how the magazine aims to de-clutter readers annoyances by voicing them and letting them know they're not alone and can enjoy a giggle at them instead of being uptight.

Final Badge Designs

Our final product- free promotional badges for Spring Clean Zine.

Typography

For the 51st Grammy Awards, the Recording Academy hired TBWA\Chiat\Day to produce a series of typographic illustrations of different musicians to promote their event early 2009. The artist's that were selected for the Grammy typography were Stevie Wonder, Rihanna, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Coldplay, Thom Yorke and Lenny Kravitz.
With each of them  asked to provide a list of at least 15 songs that inspired their own creativity, in return, each song title provided was turned and created into the graphic design, with the words creating a colourful swirl around the artists heads.

To adapt this to our magazine, we could perhaps write our title for our front cover, with each letter made up of words that describe what annoys us, i.e tangled wires, chavs, bad weather... to produce the title 'Spring Clean'.

FREE BADGES

mock up of potential free badge design for university term 2.

This is our Pen Profile for the target consumer we want the zine to be aimed towards. It gives a small insight into their life.

Ideas and Inspiration---

-free badges with illustrations in relation to our subject matter.

-small, landscape layout to be in fitting with a small witty booklet.

-consider if we were to name our zine 'Spring Clean', how we could make our visuals support this name.

Illustrator- Sarah Douglas

I really like Sarah's gentle illustrations she has created, she's managed to get a message across in a simple drawing so it's nice and easy on the eye. The way she's used block text and only coloured in a few letters also looks very effective and fitting with her illustrations.

Possible Cover?

If we decided to stick with the idea of the bird and cage, with the birds acting as peoples feelings caged up inside a cage, the front cover of the zine could take a similar look to this.

Instead of having black ink on colour, white offers a more crisp and clearer image i think and would stand out much more.

Layout and Design inspiration

I think a landscape layout is the minority layout chosen for zines, so to take this layout, it would give the zine an individual layout. I also think it's a nicer layout for our content too, as it's smaller, more compact and a fun size which all mimicks our zine.

The first picture of the neon pink zine really inspires me to print our cover similar to this.

It gives it a stunning industrial effect, we could design our cover first and then transfer onto a stamp, then stamp black ink on a variety of neon covers.

Samples of Zines

From looking at these zines, i can see that every one of them stands out for their unique and individual appearance. Personally for me, i don't think i would be as persuaded to purchase the A3 black and white zine (far right) as for me it would be too big to just have a quick flip through on the train or bus home for example. We want a size that our readers are able to pull out anywhere for a quick, humorous read!

From this image, i'm really inspired to perhaps do our front cover on a different media from paper.

The bottom left zine is my favourite on this, i specifically like the hand drawn rough border going down the left side of it, and although it's not perfect, it gives the front cover a much better structure and clearer image than the others.

This is a lovely idea for any zine i think. It could be adapted to our zine in that we could have a cage of 'annoying creatures' that have BURST out and into the world travelling the country getting opinions of other people on what annoys them, allowing them to share their thoughts on our website, which we can then run features on every issue updating people on where they've been and what opinions they've discovered.

BRIGHT

This zine grabbed my attention next to about 10 other zines immediatly because of it BRIGHT, NEON cover.

Definitly a colour trick to consider when designing our cover.

Shoes, Shoes, Shoes

Ghetto Stiletto is a zine which shows an array of women's footwear for pure enjoyment and viewing only, in comparison to naff catalogues out there that try to increase brands market share!

I think this is a lovely idea for a zine and really personal to the editor. If i was creating a zine solely focused on my personal interest, i would create a zine based on dresses or hairstyles. :)

The Joy of Public Transport

This zine, a comedic yet artistic documentation, documents ones travels on the public transport system.

It's a combination of text and drawings and one that is out there to entertain its readers.

This zine is similar to what we're considering for ours, a witty document on things that annoy us, with specific attention to fashion, culture and the arts.

Notes and Errata

This zine comes in a variety of colours, red, yellow, blue and green.

This is an idea we could consider for our zine, perhaps having the same image and font on the cover but a variety in colour, to give the zine a collectable connotation.

Bird in the Hand Zine Shop

An online shop offering a small collection of zines, mini zines, mixtape zines and typewriters.

This website was extremely helpful in giving me some inspiring ideas as to what content i could base my zine around.

Adventure Time

Adventure Time' chronicles the search for fun in everyday life. From the observatory to the graveyard and on to group nudity, this zine asks the crucial questions: what to do for pleasure?

This magazine has made me think about my personal interests/ hates/ passions that we could create our zine on.

I tend to have a stronger passion towards things that annoy me and i think this would make an interesting zine, as it would offer something new and different compared to peoples positive interests.

People would also be able to communicate with the magazine more by reading about annoying things that they too share a passion towards hating.

The zine could be fun, witty and entertaining and one definitly to have an active communication with it's readers through its own website where readers can share their personal annoyances, which we can then run features on in the zine.

Birds

Using this zine as a prime example, zines can literally exist on anything, they are totally personal to each and every individual that makes one.

The mini zine is called Birds and explores the different characters that our avian friends might have.

'Imagine if we knew just what that little chirping song meant - a sorrowful story of hope or despair? We just don't know.'

Birds is told through comical drawings of birdies drawn by both The Fetus and to a lesser degree Susy Pow! The drawings are explained by text boxes on each page.

Again, i am very drawn towards the hand made touch of this zine through the pen drawings and writings and offers a more artistic look to it.

What is a Zine?

Having not really heard of 'zines' before this project, we set out to shop '45' in Nottingham and found this book 'Watcha mean whats a zine?'.

It provides us with all the help, tips and advice we could possibly need for creating our own zine, from how to lay the zine out, to what content we could include and finally how to make sure are zine sells at the end and isn't a failure.

From the layout of this book (a mixture of hand drawings and a little but of computer type), i really found it interesting to read and was never bored whilst reading through it, the hand drawings also gave it a much more personal touch.