How zines influenced mainstream design — and how to join the conversation

How zines influenced mainstream design — and how to join the conversation

Zines have always been a way for underrepresented, excluded, or fringe ideas to be voiced and heard.

Unlike the usual distribution routes for ideas put on paper — traditional magazines, literary journals, art galleries or curated digital platforms —  the zine’s simple format of printed art and writing in a self-published booklet allows anyone to distribute their work without much cost. All you need is something to share and a willingness to share it in order to create a direct line between you and a reader. 

Though many zines today are distributed digitally, the origin of these “mini magazines” is in the messy, physical world of glue sticks, scissors, and paper scrap collages, resulting in intentionally nonstandard layouts that would give grid-lord Josef Müller-Brockmann a serious headache.

Zines are a tool for connection among fringe communities, in part due to the non-standard design but also because they are a unique outlet for concepts considered too left-field or inappropriate for public consumption. And just like its subversive sister, graffiti, zines have influenced generations of designers, artists, and creators — not just print, but in web design, too.

Today, as DIY coalition-building has been experiencing a renaissance, and resistance against the status quo is urgently overdue in the design field, zines might be the perfect playground for designers looking to join a fresh dialogue outside the boundaries of their backgrounds. 

In fact, there’s already an exciting amount of zines produced from the drawing desks of artists quarantined at home, as well as DIY art spaces popping up to create community. So, in the true spirit of zinemaking’s DIY origins, I’m excited to share how you can not only draw from their influence in your own work, but also try it yourself — whether you’re picking up a pen and a pair of scissors or getting inspired by this alternative school’s long and many-faceted design lineage. 

Who made the first zine?

The term “zine” as most know it is a 20th century invention. People familiar with zines tend to picture hastily-Xeroxed punk rants from the 90s containing content such as instructions for how to slash the tires on a police car while doing a cartwheel. (Yes, that is something you can actually read in a real zine.)

However, if you want to be pedantic (and I don’t, really), its roots technically go all the way back to the birth of publishing through the invention of paper and the first printing press. For instance, if you categorize political pamphlets under the phylum of zines, you could call Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses one of the earliest zines, or Thomas Paine’s Common Sense a zine. I’m choosing not to, but you could, since both men were using DIY publishing to speak out against corrupt establishments with their own “punk” counter-narratives. 

Likewise, BLAST, an early art journal published in 1914, was not called a “zine” but got rather close, with its writers intending for the publication to be an avenue for “ vivid and violent ideas that could reach the Public in no other way.” Sounds pretty zine-y to me. 

Last but certainly not least in the early Pantheon is FIRE!! (With two exclamation marks.) In 1926, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Aaron Douglas, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennett, and John P. Davis created this invaluable editorial piece of history, capturing these Black artists’ uncensored perspectives during the height of the Harlem Renaissance when it’s likely that no other publisher would have done so. In a tragic irony, their headquarters were burned down, ending the project after just one issue — but they opened the door for the playwrights, novelists, and other creators who followed them. 

I think the creators of FIRE!! are the first true zinesters — they wrote not just as an act of self-expression and defiance, but illuminated new possibilities for previously silenced and excluded artists, too.

The evolution of the zine 

The evolution of the zine as a medium can be traced through the progression of the printing technology available to artists at the time. Mimeographs or low-cost proto-copiers were a descendent of the typesetting done on original printing presses. They first appeared in the 1870s and eventually helped budding science fiction “fanzines” (where “zine” comes from) lift off in the 1930s-1950s. 

To make a fanzine in the 1940s, first, you’d need to be so passionate about whatever you were reading that you would be willing to hand-write original fan content, purchase a mimeograph, and have a plan to distribute them via mail, clubs, or conventions. 

You’d then need to then type out your stencil on a sheet of fibrous material using a typewriter. If you were adding illustrations, you’d also need a hand stylus to etch the drawing onto the stencil. If you made a mistake, you’d need to use a special correction liquid to retype over your error. Last, you’d need to roll the stencil over paper in the mimeograph — finally creating your zine page.

Fanfiction over the decades has covered various styles and topics. Early fanzine readers were highly motivated subscribers, leading to a short-lived cottage industry of writers, distributors, and conventions.

That motivation proved to be extra-powerful when Star Trek was canceled after just two seasons in 1969. Outraged fans coordinated letter-writing campaigns, mainly through zines, which ultimately saved the show. When the show returned to air, Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry actually encouraged show writers to reference fanzines when working on episodes, creating a dialogue between creators, actors, and fans that we can see mirrored on fan Twitter threads and in Patreon-exclusive content today.

When copiers became widely accessible through copy shops in the 1960s and 70s, zines underwent another renaissance, giving voice to countercultural movements in the US and beyond at the time. 

In this iteration of the form, it became easier to quickly make hundreds of copies of hasty scribbles and collage layouts pieced together from other printed material. This mirrors how print layout was done at the time in mainstream media, with copy editors and graphic designers literally laying out designs on paper and gluing words into place. And it exploded from there.

In true zine fashion, punk and riot grrrl music scenes — especially in the Pacific Northwest — took this mainstream design technique and put a DIY spin on it. Members of the original riot grrrl bands Bikini Kill and Bratmobile made some of the first riot grrrl zines in the early 1990s, covering a wide range of feminist topics. Concurrently, they used similar design techniques in their album art, echoed in many more zine-style homages over the next three decades.

Left: Bikini Kill’s album cover art for Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah; right: art for Cage the Elephant’s single “In One Ear” released in 2008. 

When we talk about such a print-driven medium arriving at the doorstep of the 2000s, it’s easy to jump to conclusions about how the dawn of the Internet age (summarized beautifully in this Webflow site) heralded a definite lull in print zine production. However, I’d venture that DIY websites like MySpace and Geocities, along with email newsletters, may have not only replaced quite a few zines, but made the information previously hand-printed and distributed in small circles much more accessible as well. 

Today, as the design trends of the 90s have come back in fashion — zines are also having a moment. 

Want to learn more about zine history?

• Listen to this episode of fan culture podcast “Author’s Note: Don’t Like, Don’t Listen” for a deeper dive into the relationship between sci-fi fanzines and the Star Trek subculture in the mid-20th century
• Check out A Brief History of Zines from the University of North Carolina’s Rare Books Blog if you skimmed this section and wanted a faster summary
• Read Punk Press: Rebel Rock in the Underground Press for a wild tour of the punk movement and its many artistic stylings