I REALLY struggled with this module, I’m not going to lie. I went backwards and forwards with the what the message was and who it should be aimed at. I spent a lot of time trying to figure these important elements out and as I started going through the design and development process I was still not decided on what to say or who my zine should be aimed at, there were so many options I just couldn’t decide!
Finally I took it all down to basics and without wanted to sound patronising decided to try and get a message out to the general public about the displacement of people in the world. I’m still not sure if it would be a message Falmouth and Penryn Welcome Refugees would actually ever use though.
Once I had (kind of) settled on the zine I then had to try and think how to tie that together with the mural. This was a bigger puzzle which I did not figure out at all. The mural is not at all like the zine and does not include any of the hard-hitting messages that the zine features. The reasons? The wall of the building is on the water-front. I was trying to figure out the audience that would be passing by there, I figured mostly yacht owners and probably fishermen. I was then trying to figure out what message they would read and think about. At the time of trying to work this out we had the Global Citizen lecture so I decided to try and tie the colour palette and bubble-letter style in with friends from the global community. I also needed to work in some illustrative text somehow. I adapted the bubble font into coils of rope in similar shapes, kept the colour palette and tried tying together AHOY with global citizens which seemed a bit odd so I changed it to Global Friends…
All-in-all I do not like the outcome of this module. I would have preferred a tighter brief so I could have spent more time figuring out the illustration rather than spending so much time on marketing aspects. I did learn a lot, as I mentioned in a previous post, I really discovered the need for preliminary sketching for ideas and will definitely take this forward into new modules. I also realised that I do have a style, it needs a lot of work but actually I quite like it and I think part of accepting it will mean I can start developing it more and more.
A very large part I discovered in this module was zine culture, how much I love it and most all Risograph printing, which I had not looked into at all before. I completely fell in love with the whole concept, culture and style of Riso and can’t wait to get more and more involved somehow with it.
Strangely I also remembered how much I had loved print and publishing when I was in my early 20’s. I had tried to get a job in the publishing world but had not succeeded and consequently had moved into marketing field. This whole zine world awoke that part of me that had been sleeping for all those years.