Secret 7 - Digital Development & Production

Secret 7 - Digital Development & Production

Development

The format was pretty basic, taking forward a few key scamps for creating a library of digitally repurposed punk zines, using the most common punk zines of that era as a starting point using tonal contrast and shapes to simulate folded punk zines as a way of digitally repurposing a physical publication. 

Using outlined heavy weight madras sans serif type helped create that link between hand drawn type to digital, as the outline is more delicate than a solid black colour. The use of a sans serif doesn't have the decorative serifs, keeping it simple and clean as hand writing doesn't have these extras. 

The addition of lines around the edge was supposed to reference dashes of permanent markers, correction marks, hyphens etc but it just looked ugly, no other word for it, it didn't flow with the zine images it felt out of place and unconsidered.

Using gradients within shapes influenced by the zine folds, these gradients use a blue that has a very digital aesthetic and is also a nod toward a digital interpretation of spray paint, there was too much going on here though, this is often the case in punk zines but the use of white type on the zines and he high impact background distracted attention away from the foreground imagery. 

Taking influence from the washed out neutral tones of the collages within some of my research this off yellow stained white sort of hue was used, this looked nice in terms of making the zines stand out, further making something quite flat have a little depth. But the coldness and harshness of the monochrome scheme didn't compliment this tone of yellow. Maybe something a little more desaturated would work. 

Bringing in the date of the album release within a 3D box to add further depth and also reference the shape of a cassete tape a common distribution of music, a physical owned piece of music digitally repurposed within a jpeg design. 

Adding texture too the gradients to give this cold flat digital effect some depth and feeling of physicality. The gradients running parallel dont work though, with flat colour the zines feel fixed. Now they feel like there floating about and it loses all structure. With this been a library or a capture of the zines there needs to be a feeling of structure.  

Production
I created a texture through analogue marks scammed it in and began applying it too the folds of the zines, this worked perfect for adding depth and a physical feel and really applied my methodology of transitioning analogue to a digital format in a simple yet effective way. 

Moving back to more neutral tones but desaturating the vibrancy out of the yellow, this colour looks like weathered newsprint, a perfect emulation to show the idea of digitally repurposing print process's, especially DIY zines as this was used so often as a stock choice as it was cheap and printed and folded well. 

Trying out a black spray paint effect which doubles up as a photocopy shadow. Again it doesn't work it feels far too out of balance with the rest of the composition but the shadow itself is nice and  worked perfect for adding further depth and shadow to the zine folds. 

Combined with the addition of stencil effect on the debut album type to further reference DIY & Dadaist aesthetics, the texture was added to the front of the 3D box too to make it feel more like a physical thing.