The Orange Juice Compendium
0, 10, 100, 1000 Circles
DanceDanceDance
Moon/Sun
The History of a Colour
name stamp
During a selection of critiques that I undertook after their completion, feedback was positive towards the zine series. It was generally agreed that the content was widely varied and presented multiple aspects of my personality, which was the intention of the project. A select few found it more difficult to link some of the content back to me, particularly with the Moon/Sun zine, however a key aspect of the zines is that they would be able to stand alone as pieces of work as well as being representative of my practice. It was agreed that Moon/Sun did work as an individual piece of work and so ultimately the zine was still successful. It was also agreed that the handmade nature of the series gave a very personal feel, and most felt it related more to them than if I had digitally printed each one and used a digital typeface.
In terms of how the zines were produced technically, there were only a few minor setbacks: when creating the front cover for The Orange Juice Compendium I used a basecoat screenprinting technique that I had never tried before. This technique requires exact precision in order to line up each layer directly on top of each other, however the orange and white circles on the cover are misaligned by approximately 1mm. This printing error is barely noticeable, and with extended practice using the screens it would be easy to correct. Also when binding the zines, a selection of the pages did not line up correctly, causing them to be shorter than the rest when the zines were trimmed. I decided not to trim the zines down to match this smaller page size as there would be a risk of cutting into the text and images, and I did no want to compromise the content of the zines. To resolve this issue in the future I would either be more precise when binding a publication, or print the content on a larger page, allowing room for a large bleed around the outside, and trim down to the correct size.
Each of these zines were handmade, and if I were to physically send them out to people I would hand make a larger run. In the event that I would need to send out a bulk order, however, I have scanned each of the pages before they were cut and bound , so that I would be able to print out the templates for each page and add additional colour and stamped lettering by hand.
As discussed in peer critiques, this project has the potential to be extended further into different areas. One example would be to use the rubber stamps and a selection of the phrases from the zines to create business card style slips of paper (below), that can be made quickly and in a greater number, and could be used to pass out details to a large number of people at once. Another would be to use the large number of sketches and test sheets created in the process of testing the rubber stamper to create an additional zine - the pages would be cut and bound in the same style as the rest of the series, and would allow people to view the creative process in creating these zines.
