bat in a hat

The unique aspect of the layout compared to the other work tho is that you are ultimately making a scaffolding for every other contributor, the layout is supposed to bring attention to the important elements. Doesn't mean you can't have fun with it, especially when the topic of the zine suits a fancier approach (like Scarbook taking inspiration from various artbooks and how they lay out art), but ultimately what's important for me is whether the piece on a page (be it writing or art) is able to look best it can for what we need. Writing needs to be easy to read, art needs to be able to shine, authors should be easy to see (we love good crediting in this house).

So for instance lets go back to when I was designing HGCZ. We established the dark blue background with white frame when I was designing spotlights and I felt like a darker background color in that instance made the writing visually closer to the comics vs having a white background.

When it came to credits, comic and cover artists knew how much space I'd need more or less so I was able to include all the people who worked on any given piece. Single illustrations on the other hand had more or less one placement for credits for the sake of readers being able to locate it quicker (Scarbook does something similar even tho the size of the art changes so drastically). Then came the trigger warnings, making them into little icons was my idea on how to make them easily readable, fit the comic book aesthetic and ultimately to be able to warn people on whats ahead of them since HGCZ ended up being pretty heavy.

For font choices, body font needed to be readable first and foremost. Since we had some very long fics, any funkier font would get tiring on the eyes FAST so a simple sans serif was a way to go. I usually go back and forth based on the general look and theme of the zines whether sans serif or serif would work better. For headers meanwhile I was able to go a little bit more fun and I could have very well went for a more stereotypical comic book font choice since it was supposed to be mainly used for titles (the fact that it ended up being the secondary font was kinda just because it worked so well). Thing is if you look at the Hotguy logo, be it the original one, the HGCZ one or the new one I redesigned (fun fact, that one was fully hand made, I didn't use any fonts in it), they're all very sharp, pointy and blocky. Makes sense to make the header font be a reflection of those design principles while keeping in mind to not go too serious, we are talking about a superhero called Hotguy.

Finally for a little pizzazz I used HG colors all over the zine since they were so easily recognizable and tied everything together so nicely, while a sprinkle of CG colors let me stretch my wings (ha) a little more which came super handy when designing timeline graphics for Ghost Issues. Also the little pop of red and pinks help to not make the layout color palette too stale.

That was way more yapping than I thought I had in me but hey I hope this is at least a lil bit interesting to you. I do always love to talk about my thought process (there's some asks in my askbox that have been waiting for me to get to them as well, certain designs just need more talk time than I currently have ack).