Zines

Project Year

2025 - 2026

Skills

Design
Art Direction

Challenge

A low-stakes creative side project to flex my design and creative muscles without too many encumbrances. No better medium than to explore through zine-making. In this medium, I get to literally do, talk about and design whatever I want without answering to nobody and appreciate the art-making process for what it is. Pure enjoyment and pleasure. Like a kid freely able to dance and express themselves without the need or fear of living up to any standard nor pleasing no one.

Approach

I started off with going with the basic, classic zine template, printed on a single page and folding into 8 smaller micro pages. No stapling needed, just one simple cut in the center and fold. To make things easy, I went with some fairly simple topics of personal experiences with skincare, "SKIN" and "WORDS" to layout some of my favorite quotes, lyrics, and snippets of media and speech that have one way or another inspired me in some way. In this way I spent less time worrying about the content and more time designing. Soon after, I've introduced more educational zines like "F*ck You, Pay Me."

Helping Creatives Get Paid Fairly

Educational content flows pretty naturally for me, writing SOPs, recording tutorials and providing pragmatic advice to others are some of the things I enjoy doing. Mike Monteiro: F*ck You, Pay Me, was the inspiration for this zine. Using some of the lessons Monteiro shared, I adapted the content into my own writing style, sharing personal experiences and additional advice around topics like salary negotiation and NDAs. This larger format 20-page zine provided the space needed to dive deeper. This zine subsequently sold out during events like Detroit Zine Fest, showing a real need and interest around the topic.

Preparing for Zine Fests

The catalyst for the various zines I've designed in the past year and a half was to help provide some exposure to Brew Press. During early 2026, the content and designs were refined over time. Later that year in collaboration with Brew Press, we tabled throughout Michigan at Flint Zine Fest's inaugural event, Detroit Zine Fest and Grand Rapids Zine Fest. Brew Press assisted with the paper sourcing, printing, folding and construction of the zines.

Zines Don't Have to Be Elaborate

The great thing about zines as a medium is that if you're interested in starting in writing something like a magazine or a tiny book, it's the perfect entry point for dipping your toes in because the standard zine format forces you to work with limited space. "Words" came to be a great early exercise to see what big ideas will realistically fit so it became a collection of some of my favorite all-time quotes.

Long Forgotten Artworks

In order to source some artworks, I delved into one of my favorite places to scavenge, the Wikimedia Commons. Unearthing new-to-me works by masterful engravers like Marco Dente, Jacques Gamelin and others who've long passed this mortal coil in centuries past, therefor whose works are now effectively in the public domain. It is interesting to me to juxtapose the work against some more modern treatments, inverting the sketches brings a new transformative edge and feel to the original works. I wonder how they'd feel if they could see their works being used in this way today.

A Twist on Framing Text

Taking great inspiration from the design of of the book, Snacky Tunes: Music is the Main Ingredient, Chefs and Their Music (2020) by Darin and Greg Bresnitz, I thought it'd be fun to experiment with it in a zine format. More visually striking than the traditional rectangular columns of text, creating the framing shapes in Illustrator than exporting back into InDesign makes for some fun design moments, elevating a what could be boring subject on skincare to be a little more interesting to gaze upon.