Zine Cut-and-Paste
- cut and paste
- DIY zine
- perzine style
Everything literally stuck down: photocopies, tape, handwriting and typewriter slips.
Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.
What it is for
Cut-and-paste reads as a person talking directly to you. The handwriting in the margin is the part people respond to, because it was clearly not planned.
It also handles a lot of information gracefully. Six things to say can be six pasted slips, which is harder in any designed layout.
How it works
Layer the fragments and keep every cut edge visible, with a small drop shadow so they read as physical paper.
Hold things down with strips of masking tape at the corners, and let the tape be visible and slightly crooked.
Mix the sources: typewritten slips, photocopies at different quality, magazine cuttings, biro handwriting in the gaps, a doodled arrow, a ruled underline, a smear of correction fluid.
When to use it
Use it for a zine fair, a workshop, a reading group, a feminist or queer night, a craft session, a student society, a community noticeboard.
Leave it alone when the poster must look authoritative. It is deliberately informal.
Told apart from its neighbours
Punk fanzine is the aggressive branch: higher contrast, ransom-note titles, an enemy in mind.
Dada collage mismatches scale for absurdity. Zine collage keeps everything roughly life size and is about sincerity.
School cutout collage uses coloured sugar paper and is made by children.
Where it was used
Riot grrrl zines in the early 1990s built the modern version, with Bikini Kill and Jigsaw among the best known. The personal zine, or perzine, kept it going, and the style resurfaced online through Rookie and a hundred Tumblrs.
- riot grrrl zines
- perzines
- Rookie era self-publishing
The prompt
Replace the blanks with your own event, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.
poster for <event>, DIY cut-and-paste zine layout, photocopied fragments laid over each other with visible cut edges and drop shadows, strips of masking tape holding pieces down at the corners, handwriting in biro in the gaps, typewritten slips of paper pasted at slight angles, a doodled arrow and an underline drawn with a ruler, mixed photocopy quality between fragments, the odd correction fluid mark, <date, time and place> handwritten in the largest space left
What goes wrong
The model returns a flat digital collage. Ask for visible cut edges with small drop shadows and strips of masking tape holding fragments down.
The second failure is one consistent photocopy quality. Say each fragment is photocopied to a different degree of quality.
Leave out
alignment, uniform quality, digital smoothness, empty space, a single typeface
Watch for
The tape and the shadows are what sell it. Flat fragments read as a digital collage.
Questions
Print it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
