I made a zine that is basically an A3 sheet folded to make an A5 zine. I spread them around London and they are pieces of Romantic poetry, prose, essay as a means of encouraging the recovery our senses, our emotions and our humanity in the face of unprecedented de-humanising arising from techI'm wondering what your thoughts on it are?
This is the other side.By the way it isn't actually issue 7 nor do any of those names correspond to real people.
>>24956963Cool, nice to see someone making something instead of scrolling tiktok or filming an unwatchable video. Also neat focus.
>>24956966great tactic. id love to do something similar in my city.
>>24956963Nobody reads magazines anymore unc. Waste of time.
>>24957134>Doing something as opposed to doing nothing is a waste of timeThis is what happens when you have endless dopamine loops. Nobody does anything and then everybody complains that nothing gets done anymore.
>>24957151>Nobody does anything and then everybody complains that nothing gets done anymore.I'm not complaining. Doing things inevitably leads to trouble. Life would unironically be a lot better if everyone only did the bare minimum.
>>24956966Lol I’ve done the same thingI’ve made two issues so far. I printed like 15 copies and put them around town, in spots where I think like-minded souls would be.3 “different” authors with different personalities, “published since 2010”
surprise it's just chud shit
>>24956963>>24957168in what kind of places did you leave them? i feel like arranging something official would be against the spirit of the enterprise.>>24957197psyop
>>24956963I'll critique the design and maybe come back to actually read it.>text on background imagesI generally dislike this sort of thing, whether you separate the text into a box or fuck with the contrast like in 9.png. With the box you obliterate the image (what's a painting with an aribitrary white box in the middle? may as well just keep the page blank at that point), while without it you sacrifice readability in some way.>center-aligned textMakes it harder to read (a constantly changing starting position to new lines) and generally just looks like ass. You also seem to use it on both poems and prose (The Long Journey?), which is weird as hell; it's bad in either case, but it also really fucks with that prose piece because the audience will approach it like line-broken poetry.>ragged-right text for proseMore a matter of taste, but generally dislike this over justified text with proper hyphenation. Filling a column looks much better to me, and any weird spacing is ideally fixed by hyphenation; sometimes you'll have to manually fuck with lines where there's no good place for the hyphenation algorithm to break a word, or there's no way to fix a line. And now I'm seeing you actually mix ragged-right with (unhyphenated) justification on that fourth panel. (Look at the line "of the profoundity" for what I mean by bad spacing from justification without hyphenation.) You also insert new lines in a paragraph, which is weird, especially in the middle of a sentence.>font choiceThe title looks nice, but I think you should have chosen a different font for the body text---one that's more readable at small sizes. I'd also use a uniform font size for body text, since size has a weird implication of importance, and it looks way cleaner. Change the size as few times as possible, elements of the same type (title, author, body) should have the same size.>illustrationsBeyond ditching all the background stuff, I'd reduce the number of illustrations to keep the focus better. Panel two in 8.png looks way too busy and neither of the foreground images hold any real importance, plus they're going to be so small that they lose detail and just feel busy. Generally choose one and use it well instead of smattering a bunch of smaller middling images, which costs you cohesion. I think the first panel's title and illustration actually look nice together, so compare that one to how all the other pages are illustrated; that title page could carry the rest image-wise and you could simply focus on the text and whitespace everywhere else. Think about balance too, and what's visible to the reader at once; if you were working with two-page spreads, then that spread is your fundamental unit.Pic related is part of something I made on letter-sized pages in two-page spreads, so think the top/bottom two pages are a unit. The title page balances the text on the right page, and the image in the bottom right balances the columns while breaking the visual monotony.
>>24957251I mostly left them in spots I like walking to where not many other people go, like little parks, hidden spots, and abandoned buildings. Also left some in the goodwill books section and hidden between other books at the local bookstore. They’re meant for the type of person who wanders and searches through the stacks. In my shitty small town where the average person is like 60 and drives everywhere these types are few and far between but that’s all the more reason to do this, hopefully one of them will contribute to the next issue
This is some of the most sophomoric poetry i've ever seen.I appreciate the effort but work on your poesy
>>24957402>most sophomoric poetry i've ever seenIn what way? What are you comparing them to? Because I've done the rounds in bookshops and poetry libraries and most of the stuff which gets printed today is total shit. All the stuff I wrote was very impromptu and I didn't put a lot of work into each piece but rather I'm more focussed on the piece as a whole espousing a certain worldview. However, that poem with full page is genuinely good and I wager you to show something you've wrote which is better.
>>24957293Thank you anon for writing this I will be sure to reference it when I make the next one. I should say though I have very little interest in design and this literally the first thing I've ever designed in my life. My goal is to keep doing them and hopefully find someone to design it for me because I simply don't care. I just want to get my ideas across. I literally got the idea from a local music zine and I just copied the design.
>>24957168Cool. I did that so people might be encouraged to send me their writings and I can get more people involved instead of me doing it all. What was yours about?
>>24957675It'll get easier if you try to do less in terms of the design. Come up with a good title page (like you've got), pick a basic body font (Garamond or something), unify the font sizes, and stop center-aligning things. Takes less effort than changing up everything constantly. If you feel the need, add in extra illustrations sparingly, then you're good to go. It takes more effort to figure things out the first time, but all the following iterations will be easier.
>>24957658>In what way?It's mediocre poetry. Not bad but something a slightly talented highschooler might write.>What are you comparing them toActual good works of poetry written in the past. Not just talking about the greats like coleridge but even forgotten poets or shit written anonymously in magazines in the 1800s>Because I've done the rounds in bookshops and poetry libraries and most of the stuff which gets printed today is total shit.Nobody denies that virtually all modern poetry is total shit.>However, that poem with full page is genuinely goodIt really isn't. the similes are basic and the meter isn't very good.i genuinely admire what you're trying to do but my suggestion is to spend a few months reading great poets and work on your poesy before writing any more. try writing some spenserian stanzas or something
>>24956963>zineThe word is magazine you illiterate faggot
>>24957744Anon, with all due respect, it is almost 2026. Edmund Spenser and John Donne are not my contemporaries. I exclusively read the greats, I know full well I do not match up to random poets in the 19th century. But it is not the 19th century. I'm a modern poet. My aim with my poems is, like Wordsworth in lyrical ballads, to write poems that anybody can understand but also contain depth and meaning.
Cool idea!I can drop some more notes later, when I’m at a desktop, but what tool have you built this on? I also know zines are pushed as the be all/end all of DIY publishing, because figuring out imposition (arrangement of pages for printing in a booklet) can be confusing without the correct software. But I think a saddle stitch booklet is often stronger.At first glance you’re using a display font (meant for maybe >20pt) rather than a true text font. It’s spaced too tightly and the thin strokes will nearly disappear at text sizes. You use another serif (Times?) as well, which does work a lot better at that size. Using the two is strange, they’re too close together, but also too different, like striking a dissonant semitone upward instead of a solid chord.Have a look at some really good typographers for inspiration (Wolfe Hall, Studio Ardworks, Joost Grootens, to name a few).
i wont read the image but would definitely read it if i found it in the while. ive found some pamphlets and read all of them but i think they've all been conservative christian stuff, possibly all at airports
>>24957779Retard
>>24956963waste of paper people will think its gay religious propaganda and not even look at it then keep scrolling cat videos on their iphones. you are an idiot haha
