What is Zenith?

At the end of Senior year, Freestyle students are tasked with Zenith: a self designed project applying the skills acquired during our time at Freestyle. For my Zenith project, I decided to create a Photography Zine documenting my trip to rural Uganda.

Zenith Proposal:

For my Zenith project, I decided to create a photography zine documenting a rural village in Uganda Africa. In the summer of 2019 I traveled to Uganda to independently execute a project. During my trip, I documented the individuals in a rural community through the medium of digital photography. I have so many photos that have laid untouched for the past year that I have been meaning to create a project with. There is so much meaning behind each of the photographs that I want to emulate by turning this into a physical project. After the project is complete, I hope to work with a print shop to print copies so that I can sell them to raise money for my next project with the community in Uganda.

This Zenith project is a new challenge for me as it will allow me to explore Adobe InDesign since that is a program that I am fairly new with. It also requires a lot of visual planning and preparation in order to match photographs and themes together and design the booklet layout.

For my Production Class (Design), I will use my knowledge of the principles of art and design to construct my zine layout. A large portion of the process will consist of planning and arranging photos into pairings based on composition, colors, and art principles.

Process

The most difficult aspect of producing the zine was deciding which images to pair together, which images should stand alone, the order of pages. These are all personal artistic choices that had to be made throughout the process. At times, I let myself step aside from working on it so that I could look at it a few days later with a fresh mindset and creative perspective. This enabled me to make good revisions and notice small aspects to change. I calculated margins, bleed, gutters, and created grid lines to guide myself in InDesign and keep things symmetrical. I experimented a lot with the tools that InDesign provides which taught me a lot about the functionality of InDesign.

Completed Project

Details:

  • 5.5″ x 8.5″ size
  • 32 pages
  • Perfect Bound
  • Paper: 100lb Satin
  • Cover Paper: 110lb Satin Matte Laminated

Reflection

Making a zine had been on my mind for a while now— with a collection of photo books and zines from creatives that I admire, I was bound to make one sometime. Considering my love for photography and my enthusiasm for learning new creative softwares, I knew the Freestyle Zenith project would be the perfect way to achieve this goal of mine. 

In the summer of 2019, I traveled to Uganda, Africa independently to execute a personal project. During my stay, I immersed myself in the culture and lifestyle of the individuals in a rural village in eastern Uganda. I of course brought my camera to document my stay and the unique individuals I came across. Upon returning from my trip, I admired all the photos and shared them with friends and family members. Those hundreds of photos sat untouched on my hard drive for over a year, and I really wanted to physically display them, and therefore felt that the best way to do this was to make a mini photo book— or a zine. 

The project began with a lot of planning: I determined how many pages I wanted, what type of spine, what type of paper, and researched some print shops based on my zine preferences. I then sorted through hundreds of photos and picking out my top 50 images. I edited them, making sure the resolution and colors were aligned for printing. I then taught myself how to use InDesign and experimented with the layout I wanted to do: I decided to keep it minimalistic and have the zine consist of purely photos. I then printed out the photos at home and paired them together. This was the most difficult aspect of producing the zine— determining which images should stand alone and the order of pages and images. These are all personal artistic choices that had to be made throughout the process. At times, I let myself step aside from working on it so that I could look at it a few days later with a fresh mindset and creative perspective. This enabled me to make good revisions and notice small aspects to change. I calculated margins, bleed, gutters, and created grid lines to guide myself in InDesign and to keep things symmetrical. I then laid out the zine in InDesign and continued to revise and solidify my photo and page order. I learned a lot about the functionality of InDesign through experimenting with the tools that it provides.

If I could do the project over, I would probably choose to work with a different print company. There were some issues with the bleed and how far the pages were taken into the spine. A local print shop would have allowed for more flexibility as well as proofs and more printing customization. Nevertheless, I think the zine still turned out great!  

Now that I successfully created my own zine and learned a lot about how that process works, I would love to continue making zines of my photography work in the future so that I can have a hard-copy collection of my work. There’s something about holding a physical copy of your work that feels very rewarding and much more valuable than when looking at it online.