Interaction Design · Project 1 of 3 · Weeks 1–5
GD 2 Project 4: Zine
Who gets to speak — and how does the form of publishing become part of the message?
FORMAT
Individual
WEEKS
12-15
METHODS
Hand-drawn grid · Thumbnail layout sketches · Typographic hierarchy · Paragraph styles · Character styles · Adobe InDesign · Editorial layout · Multi-page design · Physical production · Iterative critique
TAGS
Human Rights, Design Education, Design Thinking, Community
Why this project
The zine project asks a question the other projects in this course don't: what if you controlled the means of production? Mainstream publishing, advertising, and institutional communication all involve gatekeepers — editors, clients, and approval processes. The zine has none. That freedom is also a responsibility: without a client or a brief, the only question is what you actually want to say. Students who have been designing to a prompt all semester suddenly have to find their own prompt. The best zines in this course are the ones where that question — what do I actually want to say?
The zine tradition the project draws on is explicitly political. The Riot Grrrl zines of the early 1990s used cheap reproduction and direct address to build a feminist music-and-culture community outside mainstream media. Queer zines created distribution networks for voices that had no other venue. The Black Panther Party newspaper — which Emory Douglas designed — was a zine in everything but name: self-produced, community-distributed, politically urgent. Counterpublics theory, developed by Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner, provides students with a framework for understanding what zines do politically: they create alternative public spheres where marginalized voices can speak to one another outside the terms of dominant discourse. Students are not expected to produce manifestos. They are expected to understand that the form they are working in has a history of saying things that needed to be said.
Robert Bringhurst's insistence that typography exists to honor content is the project's typographic premise. Ellen Lupton's Thinking with Type provides the practical framework for paragraph and character styles. The hand-drawn grid before InDesign opens is the Kelly-derived requirement that runs through every project in both GD1 and GD2: the structural decision must be made consciously, on paper, before the screen offers its defaults.
The Brief
PROJECT PROMPT
Design a zine on a topic connected to the human rights issue you have been working with all semester. You have already done the research. This project asks you to use that knowledge to create something that feels personal, urgent, and intentionally designed.
A zine is a self-published document with a point of view. It does not describe a topic — it takes a position on it. It has a reader, a voice, and a reason to exist beyond the assignment. The topic can be closely connected to your human rights issue or interpreted more freely — a personal angle, a related community, a historical moment, an overlooked dimension of the subject. What matters is that the connection is real and the voice is yours.
Every text element must be assigned to a named paragraph or character style in InDesign. No freestanding, unstyled text, although in he tradition of 'zines, typography may be hand lettered. The grid must be drawn on paper before InDesign opens.
DELIVERABLE
Thumbnail layout sketches (minimum 5) and hand-drawn grid — photographed and submitted
Zine: minimum 8 pages — cover, interior pages, back cover
Page size: 5.5" × 8.5" (half-letter), portrait orientation
All paragraph and character styles defined and applied in InDesign
Paragraph styles required: Headline, Subhead, Body Text, Caption, Pull Quote
Character styles required: Emphasis, Small Caps or Label — Minimum 3 images, sourced legally
InDesign file (.indd) with packaged links folder
Print-ready PDF, labelled Lastname_Firstname_GD2_P4_Zine.pdf
Minimum 4 printed copies for critique
Self-assessment — see separate assignment sheet
What I've learned from running this
The requirement of physical production — printing and assembling the zine instead of just submitting a PDF — compels decisions that influence the work. Paper selection, reproduction method, and fold structure are not merely production details; they are integral design choices. Those who grasp this reach a level of design thinking beyond what digital projects alone can achieve.
This semester, the zine project took a different approach: students designed a manifesto. The open prompt led to diverse outcomes. Some created something genuinely urgent and personal, while others produced work that was formally polished but conceptually shallow. The manifesto format often resulted in strong declarative design, and the act of committing to a position — expressing it in print and making it reproducible — holds educational value. However, the disconnect from the semester's research was evident. Students who spent fourteen weeks exploring a specific issue made zines about unrelated topics, leaving their accumulated knowledge unused.
In the future, the zine will still be a manifesto but connected to the human rights issue students have worked on all semester. The topic can be interpreted freely — a personal perspective, a related community, a historical moment, or an overlooked aspect — but the connection must be authentic, and the voice must be authentic to the student.I expect this change to produce more specific, more urgent work. The semester-long research thread should pay off here in a concrete, visible way. That is the intention. I have not yet had the opportunity to observe it in practice, and I will update this reflection after the first semester the connected-topic requirement runs.