The joy of DIY zines

This is about the most lovely little site: DIRTY LITTLE ZINE ~ a handcrafted little tool as a free, fast way to make a zine. Nothing more and nothing less. And it’s clearly been put together with much love and care within the spirit of a good ol‘ fashioned zine printing style. I LOVE IT!! ~ thank you, Rick!

Rick describes himself simply as someone who loves zines ~ the DIY kind especially. As he puts it: “Stapled, photocopied, cheap, alive.” All I can say is please take a look at his site, explore it, have fun and support the project if you can. (◠‿◠)

The beauty of this is that you get eight pages to fill, a handful of typefaces, black and white only, no colour picker to worry about, three text sizes and horizontal and vertical alignment options. And that is it. There are no layers, no grids, no complex tools to distract you. It’s literally all about what you’d like to say, what you’d like to show and you just drop in your images, add your text, or not, and within minutes you have something that looks like a lovely little zine (◠‿◠)

monochrome march

When I discovered this I just had to have a go. There had been a lovely initiative called Monochrome March on Mastodon, encouraging people to take black and white photos throughout March this year. I had joined initially just to play with a camera on the new phone I got recently and it was so much fun that I ended up literally taking a photo a day ~ this resulted in quite a number of photos (take a look). The perfect material to try out this little zine tool.

I took a look through my photos, selected a few to fit and dropped them into the Dirty Little Zine to see how it might come out. and it turned out to be a lovely little thing. I printed a few copies and gave them to friends who reacted with such delight that it made me smile ツ There’s just something about a tiny, foldable, slightly rough object that the screen just can’t compete with.

I love it so much that I keep trying to think of purposes and reasons to create another little zine. With the introduction day coming up for our MA students, I thought I could put something together that summarises our first day. We give them a lot of information as well as links and more and it’s often a bit overwhelming ~ an overload. A little zine that contains all the important bits we talked about might be just the thing for them to take away. This will be something tactile, something they can touch and take away with them ~ while being a useful little booklet of important details.

imperfection is beautiful

Those of us working in design, especially digitally, always think about the craft of getting things right. We want to have clean code, considered typography and systems that hold together under scrutiny. I do believe all this is very important for digital outputs but it would be such a shame if we lost track of the beauty of imperfection.

What the discovery of Dirty Little Zine did was remind me that sometimes the rough and the flawed outputs, especially the ones that are tactile, express a beauty that is to be appreciated. It is why many of us working in web design love the early planning stages with messy sketches, post-its everywhere and scribbled notes, highlighted sections that look like a mess but capture all our thinking in an instant. This little zine tool is about essentially the same thing: what matters most is what you want to share rather than whether you present it perfectly.

Hand someone something that is a little bit rough around the edges, but something they can hold in their hands and flick through without having to engage with any digital tools or gestures might make them connect with it a lot more. I would argue that there are more people collecting photocopied zines than polished brochures of any kind. The imperfection of something hand-printed or merely photocopied has memory ~ it has character ~ something that a polished design often lacks.

If you have a folder of photos or some half-baked ideas lingering in your mind, or maybe some doodles, I would encourage you to have a play with Dirty Little Zine. Give yourself a few minutes to tinker and play. Then just print it. Fold it. I bet you will see how joyous it is to have a little zine in your hand that captures something that was on your mind. (◠‿◠)