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Tutorial

[illustration and expertise] Red Design, www.re d-design.co.uk

Cut-and-paste, photocopiers, punk rock, drug culture, passion, independence and the DIY ethic – all the ingredients you need for a classic fanzine design. Go get your hands dirty… he rise of counterculture and the underground press in the 1960s really started the self-publishing movement, but it was the punk rock explosion in mid-70s Britain and America that really kick-star ted the fanzine movement. It’s this period that we’re going to focus on in this tutorial by showing you how to create your own contemporary take on classic punk Zine design. Fanzines were made (as the name suggests) by true fans of the music, or whatever subject they were writing about. More often than not, the producers had little or no design or art skills but managed to create some of the most ground-breaking, exciting, visceral, shocking and downright amazing visual art that has ever been made. A lot of the techniques used by the exponents of fanzine design are much underused in the digital world

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of contemporary commercial art, where it can be all too easy to let everything happen inside your G5. We want to show you how to get your hands dirty again, to play and experiment with cut-and-paste techniques, to get out that Letraset that you’ve been saving for a rainy day and to ignite that passion you get from designing for a subject that you really believe in for no other reason than because you can. Not only should this help you produce a great fanzine, but it should inspire you in your work on any number of other projects. We show you how to revisit these old techniques and play around with them in new ways using Photoshop and InDesign to create a print-ready A5 fanzine that you can start handing out to your friends, giving away at shows or sharing with like-minded folks however you want to…

Tutorial Create your own fanzine

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Part 1: Find inspiration Immerse yourself in DIY culture and get fired up…

As fanzines are invariably personal and largely based on an individual’s passions and obsessions, choose a subject that you’re truly infatuated with and want to share with the world – it’s this passion that’s at the core of DIY culture. We’re making our fixation with skulls the theme of the Zine, and we’re going to call it Skull because it sounds pretty punk.

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Any project you work on should always start with some research, and a fanzine is no exception. Rifle through old gig tickets, hunt around your home town for flyers, visit second-hand bookshops, go to your local independent record shop and check out the vinyl section for some self-produced non-commercial design inspiration. Immerse yourself in the scene!

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For this Zine we’re going to email some friends and colleagues and ask them for contributions. It should all be about freedom, so we’re making the brief as loose as possible.

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Part 2: Get your hands dirty Create artwork for your fanzine without using a computer… Get hold of spray mount, marker pens, newspapers, tape, a scalpel and some Letraset. Most local stationers still stock a limited amount of the latter.

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Zine culture Although blogs have begun to supersede printed fanzines, the genre is still very much alive. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth is one of the more important proponents of fanzine culture and he still promotes his record label Ecstatic Peace with the brilliantly named Sweet Release.

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There are two main elements to fanzine design, and these are elements that are ubiquitous to all 2D design: type and image. It’s the rough-and-ready treatment and combination of these two that particularly characterise fanzine design. For now we’re going to start working with type away from the computer with a view to combining it with images later on in Photoshop.

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Tutorial Create your own fanzine

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Have a go at creating a masthead and some bold title type for your Zine by using Letraset and hand-written type (use markers, pencils or a paintbrush for this). Remember to not be too precious about what you’re doing – just do it!

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If your Zine features any lengthy chunks of prose, get hold of an old typewriter and type them out yourself (again, don’t worry too much about making mistakes).

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Get really messy and splash some paint over paper, get some drips of ink running down a page, draw some scratchy lines, scribble and doodle with a marker, scrunch up some paper... do anything you like really. All this can be used to create essential texture when you scan everything in.

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Part 3: Treating images Give your digital photos/scanned images that photocopied look… Take any image you want to use for your Zine, convert the colour mode to Grey (Image> Mode>Greyscale) and open the Levels palette (Image> Adjusments> Levels). Use the sliders to get a high-contrast roughed up image.

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Take this image and convert it to a bitmap (Image> Mode>Bitmap). Use the ‘halftone screen’ method, click OK, then set the number of lines to 50 and choose Line from the Shapes dropdown menu. Experiment with different numbers of lines and different shapes.

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Tutorial Create your own fanzine

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Treating images continued… Internet help If you’re not lucky enough to live in a town with a thriving underground DIY scene, don’t worry… the internet is a great place to find some contemporary inspiration: www.paperrad.org – mind-melting self-publishers. www.nieves.ch – mind-blowing archive of Zines (and you can look inside too!). www.atpfestival. com – the world’s greatest mix tape. www.eyoe.com – promoters of amazing shows and creators of great flyer art.

Open another image and go to Filter>Pixelate>Colour Halftone. Set the Max Radius to 4 and click OK. Then change to Greyscale (Image>Mode>Greyscale) and tweak the black and white in the image slightly using the Levels palette (Image> Adjusments>Levels).

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Scrunch up a sheet of white paper. Scan it in, convert it to greyscale then convert it to a bitmap (Image>Mode>Bitmap) using the 50 per cent threshold setting. Convert it back to a greyscale image, drag it onto another greyscale image already open in Photoshop and multiply the layer (Layers palette>Multiply).

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Part 4: Combine type and images Use layer properties to combine your black-and-white images with your scanned type… Scan in all your handcreated elements at 300dpi and convert them to greyscale. You may need to tweak the contrast of the scanned elements using the Curves palette.

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It’s then simply a case of creating a new A5 PSD for each page of your Zine and laying out the elements as you see fit. Don’t be afraid to be a bit rough and ready. Use the Multiply/Overlay features in the Layers palette to build up the typographic/texture elements over the images.

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Tutorial Create your own fanzine

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You can change your black type/texture elements so that they’re white out of a dark image rather than black on. First, invert your type/texture layers (Image> Adjustments> Invert). This will give you white type on an opaque black background.

Then, using your Layers palette, apply the Screen filter to each layer. This renders the black background transparent and enables you to build up type and texture layers as you see fit. Try this technique using typewriter text – it looks great!

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Part 5: Lay it out Use InDesign to compile your artwork and paginate… Paper stock If your Zine is low on pages, why not copy it on to a heavier weight of paper. If you don’t like black and white, you could try photocopying black onto any other colour (neons work well) or you could colour photocopy your Zine in one colour onto a different coloured paper stock.

You need to paginate your Zine to get all the pages in the right place when you print. Set up a new document in InDesign at A4 size with two columns and no gutter, and number the pages according to the screenshot above. Then place your PSDs into the right places.

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If you want to increase the pagination (note, the page count must be divisible by four), start with the right-hand side of your first spread and number it page 1, then hopscotch diagonally left and down then right and down until you get to the last spread then jump across and hopscotch back up the opposite way.

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Distribution

You can place PSDs straight into InDesign (rather than having to save images out as TIFFs or JPGs), so if you’re not happy with a page once you’ve imported the file, it’s easy go back into Photoshop, edit, save and then update the link in your Links palette in InDesign.

Once you’ve got your printed Zine, you need to start sharing it. Give copies to all your friends, go to some shows and hand them to fellow giggoers, and leave a pile in a local bar. Or how about going digital – save your Zine as a PDF, email it round and get the recipient to print it out (a good trick that saves the self-publisher some money!).

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Once you’ve got all the pages in and you’re happy, that’s it! Save it out as a print-ready PDF and get photocopying. The joy of a great Zine is being able to share it with like-minded people, so get out there and start distributing copies! ca p

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Tutorial Create your own fanzine

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