{"id":1081,"date":"2009-09-04T22:08:39","date_gmt":"2009-09-04T10:08:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/?p=1081"},"modified":"2009-09-04T22:08:39","modified_gmt":"2009-09-04T10:08:39","slug":"getting-ready-for-the-limelight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/?p=1081","title":{"rendered":"Getting Ready for the Limelight"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"limes\"Part Three: We Folded Before We Even Began<\/strong><\/p>\n

The problem with inviting a swag of people on board for a new fanzine is that unless you have some hard rules, at early stages\u00a0things can sometimes stray into the ‘design by committee’ arena. We didn’t really have that apart from one aspect, which was how to fold the staple-free Zeus Plug<\/em>. It wasn’t as simple as it sounded because everyone came to the party with different methods – something I’d not anticipated! We couldn’t come to a satisfactory outcome for days.\u00a0Here’s Jono’s suggestion:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\"jplay1\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"jplay2\"And Dave also pitched in. Dave wanted his to open intuitively like a map or schematic, which maybe spoke more of his engineering background. Nobody thought the regular folds and creases of the page needed to act as article borders, but it helped in places.<\/p>\n

\"drlay1\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"drlay21\"And last of all, mine, which won through some democratic action snuggled up with\u00a0some good old-fashioned autocratic foot stomping.\u00a0I wanted mine to open like a flower. My idea was to have a folded page that opened like a book, turned itself over and continued to read like a book, then opened out to be a larger piece of paper – one side of the A3 page with which you could do anything. It could be a poster, a flow diagram, a game board, wrapping paper\u2026 in other words, it could take a step to the side and be something other than a fanzine. I don’t know if I seriously took that idea to the table with Jono though, I think we just had too much to say, and filled the space available. BAZ is closer to that ideal.<\/p>\n

\"palay1\"<\/p>\n

\"palay2\"<\/p>\n

Folding paper is a design process of course. The bound book is usually only read in one direction and reveals more of itself as each page is turned, the design of a book-style fanzine is largely immutable however; anything straying from the norm becomes an exercise that consumes time or staples, or more paper. By folding an A3 page in a particular way we would be giving Zeus Plug<\/em> pages too, without recourse to binding. And of the three ways we came up with individually, no one way provided fewer or more pages, which was interesting but it didn’t help the decision-making process.\u00a0 The issue of limited, finite space was embraced as well. I would have liked the subtitle for Zeus Plug<\/em> to be ‘Adventures in Relatively limited Time and Space’, but the others thought it was a bit too cute, and they were right. It was a discipline though, fitting so much onto such small area; ideas had to be distilled, arguments strengthened rather than bolstered or driven home by repetition. Andy Diggle, former editor of 2000AD<\/em> envisaged his tenure as reinventing the comic in the style of “a shotglass full of rocket fuel”, being punchy, daring ideas in short stories. Zeus Plug<\/em> was supposed to be a bit like that – concentrated, fixed, focussed. Early emails between Jono and I would often take the form of dialogue about cutting articles down rather than fleshing them out or including illustrations to fill the gaps (surely fanzine editors don’t do that, do they\u2026?)<\/p>\n

Editing is exhilirating, but that’s perhaps easier for me to say – Jono was the one with the Publisher software, doing the hard yards!<\/p>\n

PA<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Part Three: We Folded Before We Even Began The problem with inviting a swag of people on board for a new fanzine is that unless you have some hard rules, at early stages\u00a0things can sometimes stray into the ‘design by … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-zeus-plug"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1081"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1120,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1081\/revisions\/1120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeusblog.tetrap.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}