BOW A5: Printed publication received

Notes on what works and what needs addressing. (Added 26/9) The main thing that bothers me having seen the print is whether or not I still need the random print on various pages, having inserted the monologue. I need to sit with it for a while before making a decision about the next iteration.

1. As a newspaper type zine, this version works well enough.
2. The size was a little bigger than the template Newspaper Club usually print, as stipulated on their site. They kindly allowed me to use an older size – it is bigger than the A2 zine I made, but not the A4 size I was after, as I hoped to emulate an exercise book, the sort we might have been given in a maths class at school.
3. Being newsprint from cover to cover, they are less substantial than the A2 zine – slightly higher gsm in the A2, and therefore if I want to stick to referencing school exercise books, which I do, a more traditional printer will need to be used.
4. That said, the colours work well on the cover. I like the olive green and the greys of the text and the shadow puppet. There is what looks like a slight smudge on the puppets which I will need to look at and clone out – think it’s some fabric, but because it’s magnified it looks like an ink-splodge.
5. The inner cover printed graph paper works really well – I think I should make more of this in a future version – if I go for publication in SYP.
6. Photographs of screen feedback come up well on this paper.
7. I managed to miss the “The Listener” had cut down down to “The Listene” when resizing I think – and will need to look out for that type of thing if I resize back up to A4 .
8. Reproductions of screenshots (re-saved as Tiffs) old films have worked surprising well on newsprint.
9. I am annoyed I lightened the old tattered picture too far after it came back dull on the initial test. I need to look at that image. It’s not a true colour representation in any-case, the original is not orangey and much paler than my photograph has always been. In this print, I sort of ruined it (in my opinion) and need to pay extra attention to it any future prints.
10. I like the phone – was worried about how it might look, but pleased it came out well.
11. The text works just fine where I placed it, included inside the booklet rather than as a separate insert but its presence does present me with a query about the fragments of text now – if the main text is included, do I need the fragments of text – maybe OTT which is why the text may be better in an insert.
12. The blue tiles could do with coming back down a notch colour-wise after I adjusted them after the initial test.
13. The poster of the woman’s eye looking up could be ever so slightly lighter maybe 1 or 2 percentage’s in LR.
14. Rest all works well on the paper as it is. I am glad I did this initial run this way. It’s not exactly what I envisaged but it has given me plenty to think about in terms of where it might go next. Do I really need the folds etc? Probably not. Lewis Bush said they break, get torn etc. And add cost. The signifiers are all over the place in other ways and behave erratically within the tightly controlled grids I provided on the page. If I were to make a higher quality book, I would need to relook at the texts all over the page as it might not suit a different format. I think I would also want to test certain images on paper choices if at all possible. Finally, I think if this were to be more than a newspaper/zine and a more substantial ‘book’ type publication, there is a chance it would need more content to be a commercially viable proposition – something to think about.