Final Project: The Vanguard

My zine is about some of jazz’ most iconic musicians, and their contributions to the genre. I wanted to print this project with the risograph printer because it is a very interesting process and I appreciate the screenprinted look that it gives to the photos.

As far as inspiration goes, an artist that I have followed for a long time, posted about two years back, this book-like poster-like piece on jazz musicians that overlapped their pictures with distorted  text of their names. He is known for manipulating and working with text and I wanted to integrate some of that into my piece to make it more dynamic. Here is his jazz piece: https://www.behance.net/gallery/46720069/Jazz-Greats-Workings-Zine

I viewed time in a chronological sense and organized the musicians based on the year they were born. The project itself definitely had some rough spots, especially with the printing process. A risograph printer will not align your pages evenly, because it is a screen-print-esque process, so the front and back of certain pages wouldn’t align and made it difficult to bind the book. The printer itself had plenty of issues like getting jammed or just completely stopping in the middle of a print. Another issue was actually getting access to the printer, I made one reservation early on to print but I needed more time and getting that in the middle of finals week was not easy. Because the printer was being used by other people as well, settings were constantly being changed, and one time in the middle of my printing, the settings reverted back to the ones being used for the project before mine and messed up my pages and I had to start over again! Overall it was definitely a challenging project to execute but at the end of the day I had a lot of fun working with the printer and its outputs and am excited to use it again soon.

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