Alternate Reality Monthly Zine
Stories that take you places.
ABOUT:
Alternate Reality Monthly, (abbreviated to A.R.M), is a zine I created to celebrate storytelling and the worlds that people dream up in their heads. Many of my friends are also storytellers like me, one way or another. So, this project would be a way to display our storytelling together through interviews, articles and short stories.
OBJECTIVE:
After researching magazines from eras new and old, a design plan was put in motion. The objective for this magazine was to embrace a very mismatched and maximalist design style, pulling together fonts and typography from drastically different eras and styles, evoking the feeling of a publication issued across all time and space.
PROCESS: Cover
For the main illustration, photography and vector art are layered on top of one another to represent both fiction and nonfiction tales respectively. If you look closely into the background, you can find a photograph of all the magazine’s failed physical prints sprawled out on the floor. This photo was transformed into a repeating pattern that was used to give a chaotic texture to the cover, giving the appearance of stories flying out of the page.
PROCESS: Logo
To create the logo’s custom mismatched typography, elements from an old English typeface and a futuristic typeface were fused together, to represent both the past and future.
PROCESS: Interview and Illustration
Using Adobe InDesign, an interview transcript of a friend and fellow storyteller, Boston Thomas, was formatted and justified to develop a magazine spread that is easy to read. To capture the cinematic feeling of Boston’s novel. A custom frame for Boston’s portrait photo was digitally painted in Procreate, featuring his novel’s space-faring corvids.
OUTCOME:
The “Alternate Reality Monthly” zine concept would continue to highlight the stories from storytellers from across the world, using the maximalist aesthetics of the brand to pull from an endless expanse of visual motifs, just as vast and diverse as the stories being told.