“THE SECRET IS TO GANG UP ON THE PROBLEM, RATHER THAN EACH OTHER.“ - THOMAS STALLKAMP
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CUT ME UP ZINE When I first made a proposal for the personal project I had originally intended for it to be based around the cult movie The Room. It was meant to be a year long exploration that looked into the “its so bad that its good” culture and pastiche the movie. However as work on this developed the project took a new direction. Cut Me Up zine is a collaborative project between illustrator Erd Yakingun (iamanoctopus) and myself. It is a small low fi A6 zine that folds out to an A3 poster on the inside. The first issue looked at celebrity culture and the growing amount of celeb obsessed magazines, such at Hello, Heat etc. The aim was to use these magazines to create a new and more disgusting publication, re-using the horribly laid out images to create our own gruesome world. It was a success, sold out and launched us into the zine community that we have actively been a part of ever since. So upon joining the BA I had intended to use the second issues theme ‘The Room’ as a starting point to my external project. The aim was to immerse myself in this cult trend; embrace the terribleness of the movie and create a celebration pack of this “meme generating” film. So alongside my interest for self-publishing I also started to research around the movie by going to live screenings, engaging with fans and trying to understand how the movie had developed to a cult level.
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Production of CMU #2 happened fairly quickly and when it launched we were approached by Ohh Deer and NGNG design to sell through their online shops. The actual zine had become less of a look into the ideas around the cult and how it was made, but more a celebration of the movie. In some ways this is what a true fan-zine is about, creating a self-published piece about something you enjoy. It was for this reason that I decided to discontinue ‘The Room’ research from my university project. The appeal of creating the Cut Me Up zines is that they don’t need to be deeply assessed, they can be enjoyed for what they are; an amusing and sometimes gruesome publication that engages the reader in our sense of humor and can be collected as new issues are created. A large part of this collaboration has also been touring the zine round self-publishing festivals and creative fairs, with a good response each time. I enjoy doing this, as it’s a great way to meet fellow illustrators or designers too. In the past I have made some brilliant contacts through such events which proved to be extremely useful when writing my dissertation on self-publishing. Through fellow publishers such as Jimi Gherkin, have become members in the SE LDN zine community that have meetings and help organise large creative fairs. To help expand the CMU franchise and engage more with the zine community we are currently building a new website that will actively post about zine news and feature zines that we enjoy. Over the next spread are the #2 layouts.
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We still continued with the production of the zine while my Personal Project was taking a new direction and concentrating on completing commissions I was receiving. I made a special run of The Room posters to go with our zines. Some of these were to be handed out at the special live screenings and the rest to be sold or made into sketchbooks. At the live screenings at the Prince Charles Cinema with interviews from Tommy Wiseau (lead actor & creator) and Greg Sestero (actor) I was able to hand some out to fans. I also happened to meet Tommy at the bar and talk to him. I explained our project and he was very positive and interested to see the work.
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A personal interest of mine is book binding, and so I always try to create my own sketchbooks or publications for a project. As an individual who is keen to practice re-use I often make these books using failed screen prints as covers and the frontispiece. The inside pages are also made from recycled paper. This is a practice that we also use in Cut Me Up, often when behind a stall we will be binding and cropping sketchbooks from
any of the screen prints that we felt weren’t up to scratch to sell. We were selling these online in packs of varying sizes with embossed logos and rounded corners. They sold well and people enjoyed the ethical nature of them. We were then emailed by the London Fashion and Textiles Museum enquiring about us creating a range of recycled sketchbooks to sell at their up coming show.
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The FTM asked us to create a series of sample books based around their exhibition ‘Designing Women: Post-War British Textiles’ including work by designers like Jacqueline Groag. We had to include their logo on the covers, which was quite annoying as it isn’t the most eye pleasing logo. However we set about making some designs to be taken to the risograph.
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We were supplied with off cuts of the fabric used in the exhibition and given the challenge of turning them into books. This wasn’t really what we were used to but after using wood as a cover to one of my books I was sure we could manage to come up with an interesting design.
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With the textile books we managed to create a few different sized designs that use the fabric as a wrap around the cover. We only had one night to make these so had to hand sew them and add notes that confirmed that it we were making them on a large scale a sewing machine would be used. They were neat and we were proud of them, the saddle stitch binding suited the fabric well. For the second lot of books we had to include the FTM logo and keep the exhibition theme apparent. So we made a vector version of their logo and some of Groag’s designs into a repeating pattern. The FTM logo was an odd colour choice of blue, pink and orange, and although I knew we didn’t have the exact colour on the risograph, by separating the colours into 3 layers the orange could be created by applying yellow over the pink. Then the blue could be set to print slightly lighter than it usually would. The results were far better than expected and the risograph process had improved the logo greatly. I then made a frontispiece for each book, wire bound them and guillotined the edges. There were A5 and A6 versions of this style, both of which were made using recycled paper.
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Once all the sketchbooks were bound and neatened we packaged them into plastic wrap envelopes to stop the risograph inks rubbing off. We then made a little gift pack with the books inside, contact details and a few sample zines of our other work. This was then hand delivered to the Museum in time for the show. When we heard back from them they said they really enjoyed looking at the sketch books and admired the work we had put into them, however their budget for the show was coming to an end and they didn’t have time to ask us to create the large number that they originally wanted. This was understandable as to create a hundred we would have needed far more time as well, there was no point rushing the process. So instead we agreed to revisit the project in summer when they have a new show going up.
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FLYER ART WORK The manager of a new club night in Nottingham contacted me about doing the artwork for their launch night flyers. He said that he would like to use patterns similar to the ones I had been making on my ‘work in progress’ blog. I would then collaborate with another designer for the final layout. I agreed as I had not ever done flyer designs before.
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Some of the art works that had caught his eye were the photo-collages I had been creating. When I asked if he just wanted to use one of them he said that they didn’t suit the music though the pattern shapes were what he wanted, in block colours.
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After making a rough pattern in Photoshop and sending it to the manager, he was very happy with the results, but wanted to use specific colours. He gave me these orange, blue and red tone that in my opinion are horrible together, but applied them anyway. It was around this stage that I realised I didn’t understand the musical genre he was creating these for, and the image felt very forced. To me it felt like a case where the client had seen something he liked, thought that was cool and then wanted to force it to work for their product. Which is not the way to create good design for anything in my opinion.
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At this point I started to get frustrated with the colour palette and decided to forget about it and just concentrate on the pattern so that it would be ready to send to the designer I was collaborating with. I took it into Adobe Illustrator and completely remade it with vectors so that everything was perfectly aligned. At this stage the night still did not have a name, and I hadn’t seen many examples that the designer was capable of or the style of flyer the manager wanted. The only flyers I am used to are the ones around London art colleges, which are apparently very different to Nottingham nights. As I continued working I was told that the designer who was going to receive the pattern could not use an illustrator file, instead it needed to be a flat file. So in order to let him easily edit the colours I needed to save each element down on with a contrasting colour. The file that was sent looked disgusting in those colours but thankfully it worked and the designer was able to edit it.
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Once the other designer in Nottingham had the pattern he was able to alter the colours and we could start working on filters and layouts. I left most of the decisions over the ‘style’ of flyer to him as he was working with the manager so had constant feedback. They continued to send me experiments and I would let them know minor changes or which designs didn’t really work. At this point my main role in the creation process was over and the logo, feel and placements were to be decided by them. This style of flyer and the music that goes with it is not really in my interests so I trusted their decisions.
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By the end of the project I had already started work on an album cover for someone else, and so had to leave them to the rest. This was fine as the majority of my role had finished. It was a weird experience for me to see a pattern I created get made into a completely different context that I would never have done. The final design (right) was very far from my normal work, so it was interesting to see a different route it could take. The designer had added filters, screened over the colours and placed the logo. Once submitted the manager said it was perfect for the night and sent it to print. This project made me realise that there was a whole area of design that I don’t feel comfortable in, and for that I’m glad that the Nottingham designer was able to take control of the flyer. I don’t necessarily like the style of the flyer, but that’s probably because I am also not into that scene of music or night life. The project also made me realise how hard working with someone over a long distance can be. If they assume the wrong context about your work, or you don’t understand what they need, it can be very hard to explain to each other. Working over the phone and online with tools like DropBox makes it easier but it’s still not the same as face to face.
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PERSONAL LOGO For a very long time I have been meaning to completely update the branding of my website and design of my logo. This is still a work in progress but I am working with an illustrator from secondary school who works under ‘Jonny M’. In return I have agreed to help him create a website. So far these are the drafts I have created with his help.
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This has been a very casual collaboration, and is more like a creative exchange. I am still making the images but he advises and helps influence my decisions. Its a very casual working environment and more about teaching me to improve my skills on Adobe Illustrator just as I will teach him in Dreamweaver. As there is no particular deadline the work only has a very loose structure, and only happens when I visit home in Surrey. Having others around me in a studio environment will make updating portfolio decisions easier. I always find that getting at least one opinion from another artist helps.
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OUTCOME & EVALUATION
Throughout the projects I have been doing as part of unit 11, many have involved some sort of collaborative element to them, however the experiences of each have been very different. With the cut me up zine collaboration I am working with fellow illustrator Erd on a project that both of us are passionate about. We share similar interests and have strengths in different areas of design, this seems to be a good formula to working as a duo. The work we create together has started to find a signature language and is always developing. I don’t see this project ending after university, I believe it may even expand since the work created under the CMU name was always more fun to create when kept separate from assessed work. The collaboration for the flyer project was a very different way of working to Cut Me Up. Instead of being able to spend a whole day together working on a piece
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and discussing ideas, there was not real contact at all. This made communications ideas for the design and understanding the needs pretty difficult. I hope that not all clients are like this, from my experience with the guardian and the Fashion and textiles museum, they are not, those clients were far better at explaining what they wanted. The flyer was also a good example of a project that I probably wasn’t right for but did anyway. Luckily the final designer obviously had the same interest as the manager and so the end product was what the night needed. This got me thinking how easy or hard it might be to work for people who you have no connection or interest with. In something like the flyer project my main purpose was just initially to create a pattern. To get a fully finished well rounded piece of work like that you either send it to someone who specializes in that art or a team of designers. I know that larger collectives, such as peepshow and puck studio all have many members and still manage to work on their projects together. I think the key to this is that they also have their individual projects constantly on the go too. If I were to join a collective I believe that this would have to be the same for me. Although bouncing ideas off of each other for editorials and work is a great way to come up with a great solution, sometimes the final outcome just needs one artist to create it.