Toward the end of my undergraduate degree, I designed a zine around one of my favorite things: punctuation. My friends can concur— upon seeing the product, they described it as “approximately the most Shane thing possible.”

I started by defining practical considerations and broad vision goals. For ease of printing at a visible scale, I opted to design a 12-page booklet, so that it could be printed across 3 double-sided sheets of letter paper. At the time of designing the zine, I was finishing a linocut printing class and particularly interested in high-contrast image design. With this in mind, I set a base color palette of saturated CMYK and, when needed, simple combinations of them. Lastly, I resolved to use bold, all caps type to make sure the central punctuation came through clearly.

I chose the punctuation marks I wanted to use and brainstormed what I might convey with them, leading to central questions for each piece. (How is a comma like an apostrophe? How do dashes, hyphens, and semicolons convey separation vis-a-vis connection? How do quotations and brackets characterize the text they contain?) With concepts in mind, I moved from pencil-and-paper thumbnail sketches to layout in Photoshop and Illustrator. There, I refined my linework, color usage, and texture. (When necessary, I gathered texture from student newspapers, campus safety warnings, and my professional resume.)

This zine was printed on a risograph at Max’s Garage Press in Berkeley, California. I found other distributors of zines from Max’s Garage and reached out to them to start forming connections in the world of zines. It has been sold at Silver Sprocket in San Francisco, Verbatim Books in San Diego, and Skylight Books in Los Angeles.

Below are a few highlight pages from the zine. If you’re interested in seeing the rest of the zine, please contact me via email to purchase a physical or digital copy.