2024

This is the one page zine I ran with for the first project.

When it became clear Gossamer wasn’t going to print, I backed out and leveraged some Illustrator files I’ve been wanting to use. The repeated shape is a single character from the Whirligig font developed by Zuzana Licko.

One thing I like about working in Illustrator is that I can randomly apply colors to elements using the Recolor Artwork tool. I can load up a colorway and then just run and re-run until I find something I like.

Once settled on the resulting composition, I paste the vector elements into Photoshop, breaking each color’s elements into their own layer for arrangement, further post, then on to print.

Aligning Layers & Trapping

In order to print the text in it’s full, uninturpted Violet color, I created trapping by punching through the lower two layers before printing Violet last. Alignment was a bit of a challenge, but I got several to print well.

Directly above you can see that the final, Violet, layer was still a bit off. Further tweaking within the Riso allowed me to achieve 👇

Success

The edges of the text are a bit saturated. This is because when in creating the trapping, one typically shrinks the selection that’s cut by a couple pixels, thereby allowing the element to entirely fill and cover the lower, earlier layers.

Color Study

I did a number of iterations on color as well as changing the ordering of the layers.

Older Iteration

This is a version I was experimenting with early in the process.

I’m not sure what I was doing that produced such saturated reds. This wouldn’t have been reflected in the same way once printed, so I backed out and reworked the file into the directions you see above.

Tacking this on to pull back the curtain a bit.