Zine

Emily Gosling investigates how today’s designers are tapping into the deliberately chaotic, cut ’n’ paste approach that zines from the 70s and 90s made their own

Subversion and the idea of both fucking with and forging a DIY path around the ‘system’ has always been at the very heart of zine culture. The zine aesthetic – both visually and conceptually – is the ultimate manifestation of ripping it up and starting again, the idea that formed the core of punk culture, post-punk culture (we have Scottish post-punk purveyors Orange Juice to thank for the popularisation of the phrase), and youth culture more generally.

The word zine is simply a shortened version of magazine, or more usually, fanzine, but in its snappier, four-letter form it has far more significant connotations. ‘Zine’ – at least, in its origins – speaks of bedroom activism, of punk, of the dissemination of ideas that otherwise may not be circulated: those around queer sexualities perhaps, or underground music scenes, or simply fandoms so niche there isn’t a hope in hell of seeing them in print-titles-proper.

The aesthetic most of us associate with zines today – a visual chaos of cut-and-paste imagery, deliberately scrappy approaches to layout, maelstroms of numerous different typefaces, strange photographic crops, hand-scrawled notations – exploded in the 1970s with the birth of punk. Vitriol and ebullience alike were expressed in print as hastily put-together pages that indulge in their underground, countercultural status; the most famous of which are Sniffin’ Glue, Mark Perry’s zine from 1976 to 1977, and its US peer Search and Destroy, published by V Vale between 1977 and 1979.