#inkjetprinting

Codpiece at Lowestoft harbour

This is a hand-made, home-made, small format, photo art zine, which uses a semi-random combination of recycled ideas, printed pages and materials from two recent Maya themed projects, a magazine and a photo book .

With this project, I wanted to relax and improvise on my usual slow and methodical design process. I wanted to use a quick, low-fi, minimal design, and scrapbook style production at home for a small run (15-20) of experimental art zines. More specifically, my goals were:

Re-use existing printed pages (left over from other Maya projects)

Incorporate a broader variety of papers, textures and colors

Use randomness and surprise so that each zine is unique

Incorporate elements of collage and hand drawing

Minimize design and production effort and time (no writing)

Accept and adopt any design, printing and production errors

Learn to do hand printing, binding and trimming at home

Link the printed zine and my blog through a QR code

Enjoy and have fun making these (so it's not a task or a job)

Here's what the pages look like on zine #18:

Outcomes:

I really enjoyed doing this project!

It was an experiment, so my expectations and ambitions were low.

There was no stress or worry about errors or missing details.

Each zine was unique, so there was no need to be uniform or precise.

There was no looming deadline and no text to be written/edited.

Mixing media was super fun, I could easily add bits and bobs.

I loved the idea of recycling/reusing pages that I had pre-printed.

I worked from my laptop & iPhone or by hand directly onto paper.

Some learnings for next time:

Simple designs tend to be "better" than ambitious or complex ones.

Folding letter sized sheets in half was ideal for this project.

I'd avoid cutting larger paper sheets down to letter size next time.

I was clumsy with hand binding at first. I soon got much better.

Trimming the zine edges was hard without a big rotary cutter.

The thin vellum pages were pretty, but required special printing.

My plain paper is too thin for two sided inkjet printing (it bleeds).

I need to get more natural paper tones. (ecru, off white, etc).

Packaging papers (cereal boxes) make for good card stock.

-"Oh, you forgot about me for some time, now you need to blow me to make me work"