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

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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.