(4/10) Designing and writing my zine, cards, and guestbook!
What did I do this week?
Finished writing Chapter 3 and 4
Sketched cover designs and illustrations for zine
Made PSD template for zine
Continued zine prototype on Figma for printed mockup
Met with Professor Camila Morales for bookbinding help and resources
Started analyzing cultural probes
Designed conversation card design and mocked up a prototype
Finished writing Chapter 3 and 4
I finished writing chapter 3 and chapter 4 over the last weekend. Chapter 3, the ancestorial and god rituals, definitely took a lot longer to write because it is the part of Chinese New Year that I am the most unfamiliar with. In contrast, chapter 4 took me 2 days to finish writing. It’s the one that I have the most memories about, so it was much easier to write down all the things that happen that day. Now that the zine is finished, I will send them off to different people to read and get some feedback on the structure and content of the zine. Hopefully, I can get some actionable feedback by the end of the week so that I can start editing it over the weekend. I want to finish the writing part of the zine this week or early next week so that I focus the rest of my time on the illustration and production of my zine, cards, and guestbook.
Sketched cover designs and illustrations for zine
Spent an hour sketching out ideas for the cover of the 3 zine books. I want the cover to be almost collage-like, with images from inside the book on the cover so people might get a brief idea of what the book is about just by looking at the cover. I also did a few explorations about how the insider cover might look like and how the table of contents will be laid out.
I also found an amazing reference book for my project. On Friday night, after some procrastination on Pinterest, I came across a locally printed risoprinted zine about Chinese porcelain (the pattern I want to incorporate in my design). It was created in collaboration with Wing on Wo & Co, the oldest family-owned shop in Manhattan Chinatown. I went out and bought it the next day. It has already been invaluable to me as a reference for old Chinese designs that I didn’t know about.
Made PSD template for zine
It became painfully obvious to me early on that Figma is the wrong software to use for printing. After watching a few Youtube videos on what is the best way to do the layout of my zine (I highly recommend the video series by Oliva and Pindot), I decided that the best software sequence to use is Photoshop for my page design and illustration layers for risograph and the actual layout of them to be on InDesign. I might do the shortcut Photoshop way if time is short, but I will need to triple check my page order if I do that. Anyways, I definitely need to do my pages on Photoshop, so I made a template with the guidelines on Photoshop to make it easier on myself when I start doing the final illustration. I will probably have to change the margins for these later now that I have printed mockups.
Continued zine prototype on Figma for printed mockup
This was where I spent most of my time this week and where I learned the most. Printing the book, and having a physical copy in my hand, really crystallized what I wanted it to look like. I use the printed mockups also as where I read through my zine to finalize which illustrations I want to have where, what the margins are going to be, and other factors in appearance.
The biggest annoyance was figuring out the print order for the books. After a few failed attempts, I decided to tear up pieces of paper and use them as a mockup for my book. I labeled the pages with the number I want them to be for fall the pages. Then I separated it and looked at the sheet of paper itself. Then I used that as a guide to see how I should order my book so that it came out in the print form. This was super useful, and I will definitely do this again so that I don’t mess up in the risoprinting stages.
Met with Professor Camila Morales for bookbinding help and resources
I met with Professor Camila Morales on Friday after a recommendation from my classmate Linnette during the show and tell. She has a lot of expertise in bookbinding, so it was very exciting to be able to talk to her about my zine. She gave me a bunch of resources and equipment that I will need to successfully create my zine. I will look over them this week and purchase the equipment needed.
Started analyzing cultural probes
Last week, I received the last of my cultural probes. The return rate has been pretty good! Out of the 12 that I sent, I got 7 back. Last week, I started looking over them briefly, already interested in the elements that people list as most important to include in their Chinese New Year celebrations. I have uploaded them as scans to my Google Drive, separated into individual folders by name of the sender. From there, I will look them over and analyze them. Hopefully, I can create some fun-looking charts with the data. Though truthfully, cultural probes aren’t about finding hard numbers but finding inspiration. I will also look at my survey results this week.
Designed conversation card design and mocked up a prototype
I started my card designing process by assembling a small inspiration board. I had already cut up some card sizes and knew that I wanted to use a tarot card size. So I looked up inspiration from Dribbble, Behance, and Pinterest. I am drawly to the flat tarot card design, though ideally, I would like to reuse whatever illustration I have from my zine so I don’t have to redraw things, I’ll think about that. I also gave myself some parameters of what I want to include in my card design:
Illustrated picture of the item/ritual
Name of the item/ritual
Short description of item/ritual
QR code to a website with a longer explanation
Back of the card has a uniting design but also differential the card by its category
Tarot card size
From there, I take myself a 30 min timer and draw up as many designs as I could in my sketchbook. From there I picked 4 to turn into a paper prototype.
I made 2 single sided design and 2 double sided design. Single sided, as in there is only information on one side of the card and the other side of the card is a unifying design for the entire deck. Double sided as in there is information pertaining to the card on both side of the card. After that, I showed it to a few people to get feedback and the people liked the most was the single-sided design with the Chinese porcelain pattern edge.
Next Steps
Started designing guestbook
Sketch illustrations for both zine and cards
Make presentation
Analyze cultural kits and survey data
Go through printed zine and make illustration notes and content edits