Overview
Ghosts Emerge is a poetry zine designed and curated using Figma and Inkscape. The design tension lies in creating an immersive experience using poetry and vivid imagery.
Goal
After a period of writing and reflecting, I built up a collection of poetry. From this collection, I curated a story using the poems. The challenge was how to create an engaging reading and visual experience.
Process
Given the artistic and expressive nature of this project, the constraints depended on the medium, format, and theme. I already decided that it would be A5 zine, themed around ghosts and fleeting memories. I chose the A5 format, as most conventional zines use it. My intention was to create it in both physical and digital form.
The first aspect I addressed was typography. For the typography, it started with the font, font-size, and any decorations. I chose Crimson Pro, size: 18 points, with soft text-shadow. The serif and shadow combination creates an eerie effect, which fits the theme. Then comes layout and composition, which I handled spread by spread. E.g. straight single columns for serious poems and free and flowing layout for poems about fleeting thoughts.
For each poem, artistic decisions were made, in order to create a multi-layered experience. Visual patterns, photography, everyday objects were used to either support or emphasize the poetic message. Motifs like ghostly clouds and black lines spiraling were used to display the theme of strong emotions and to guide the reader through the zine.
After putting together poetry and graphics, the zine was prepared for reading and distribution. Through iterations, several versions were validated to check for bleeding, opacity of visuals, and readability.
I shared the zines with a group of test readers and their feedback was collected to improve the printable and readability. The digital version was then prepared for web zine viewer, after physical reading was approved.
Results
The project resulted in:
- A pdf for press companies to print
- A zine booklet for physical reading
- A web zine for digital reading
In the end, I curated a poetry zine and created a layered visual experience. I blended storytelling and poetry with visual immersion using typography, composition, graphic design, and photography. Both the digital and physical versions of the zine are available on the web and as printed copies.
Reflection
This project taught me how to use typography and composition structurally, to express emotion and guide the reader. Having worked on Ghosts Emerge, I am now more capable of storytelling in a more visual manner.
If I had done something differently, it would've been to define design patterns and consider more printing principles when making a zine. Although the zine was black & white, there was room for improvement in opacity and edge bleeding, which caused a couple of reprints during testing.