The Making of Be Mine, a Zine Story
Or, TFW Your Hoarding Tendencies Are Validated.
Our first project in Brand Design this semester was to make a zine (which is pronounced zeen, and I won’t entertain any arguments on this topic). Zines have roots in sci-fi and punk fandome, and they are historically small-batch and low budget publications, often produced by photocopying, frequently bound with staples and/or glue.
Zines also have a certain obsessive quality. I’m obsessed with many things, so I had a few initial ideas (including a zine devoted to Casa Bonita — I might still do this). But the idea I kept coming back to was to somehow use the correspondence I’ve spent my life saving.
I’ve saved every letter I’ve ever received. I came by this naturally; both of my grandmothers were also letter-savers. My dad’s mom saved the letters he wrote her from Vietnam. I’m glad those were around for me to read, which is probably why I saved every letter one of my best friends wrote me when he was stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. To me, it’s obvious that those things should be saved.
However, not all of the letters I’ve held on to have such obvious reasons for being preserved. Case in point: in middle school and high school, I counted notes as letters, and I saved all those too.
These don’t hold as much weight as a letter written from Fallujah in 2004, but they’re rewarding and culturally significant in a different way. In my collection of middle school notes, I have a series of 17 love notes from a certain young gentleman. They are earnest. They are bold. They are actually pretty sweet. They are also hilarious.
Anything I wrote back to him is lost to history; all that remains to tell the story of this non-romance are his letters. One thing that has always struck me as funny (in addition to the eight-grade poetry) is that a person reading this one-sided correspondence would understandably think there was much more of a relationship than what actually existed.
Once I knew what my content would be, it was time to come up with a cover.
At this point, I hadn’t decided to annotate the notes yet. When I was thinking about images that I could juxtapose with these letters, I remembered a series of posters I’d seen wheatpasted around Denver a year or two ago: shots of women’s nude and barely-clad torsos. Since the series of letters had no female voice, I thought these images might work.
But this lingerie-model-with-the-head-torn-off look wasn’t working at all with the content, which, as I mentioned, is actually pretty sweet (most of the time).
My next idea was to riff on a YA romance. I looked at a bunch of book covers…
…and came up with my own version.
This felt like I was getting a little closer — and this was the direction I initially thought I would end up pursuing.
For a third option, I wanted something very different from the first two concepts. I was pretty deeply embedded in my middle school memories at this point, reteaching myself to fold notes into origami hearts and thinking about the journals I kept, so I decided to try a version that looked like a notebook.
I went out and bought a composition book, and spent a few days decorating it with Bic pens, highlighters, stickers, and White-Out. This version felt like the natural home for a bunch of angst-ridden notes. And when we workshopped cover ideas in class later that week, the consensus was that this felt authentic.
I used PhotoShop sparingly, and annotated the pages by hand. I put everything together in InDesign so I could create a final product that was the same size as a composition book.
I passed a few copies out to friends, passed a few more out to strangers, and left the rest at places where the teenage version of myself hung out: mainly coffee shops and book stores in Denver’s Capitol Hill and South Broadway neighborhoods (here is one hint).
I also gave two copies to teenagers, via a high school English teacher I know. Here is some feedback I got from an actual teenage boy:
If you’re having a difficult time reading this, I can summarize. He thought it was a good look at two sides of a story. He felt nostalgia at some points, because he remembered making similar moves when he was 14 (as you can see, he is now a 17-year-old boy). He was unsure of the ultimate point, but liked it overall. And he wanted to hear more of the girl’s side of the story!
Due to a fortuitous printing error, I have thirty more copies of this to give away. If you happen to be in Denver and near the kind of hip place that lets randos drop off their zines, be on the lookout for Be Mine.
