I don’t know if this is a Cardiff-specific thing or whether it’s true across the board for graphic designers, but there seems to be very little, if any, feelings of rivalry or competition between local freelancers. I count several in my circle of friends and acquaintances and we’ll often recommend each other to clients if we are busy or feel we’re a poor match for the work in question.
So it was with this zine – the lovely Adam Chard recommended me to Melissa Hinkin who works for the international art prize Artes Mundi and who, in her spare time, curated a number of wonderful pieces for a zine put out to coincide with the celebration of the Women of the World festival in March 2015 at the Wales Millennium Centre.
Several things had already been decided – Melissa had strong ideas about the kind of work that she liked, she knew how she wanted the inside and outside covers to look and she had decided that the innards should be printed in a single colour – Pantone purple. Melissa wanted the piece to be an artwork in itself, she wanted the order and prominence of the two languages used to shift playfully and she wanted it specifically not to be traditionally feminine / girly. But the rest was up to me.
Hand-on-heart this has to be one of my favourite creations. The quality and variety of Melissa’s selections, the freedom to design something entirely un-commercial and our shared vision of both the role of the zine and the way it should look and feel made this project an absolute joy to work on. I am very grateful for having had the opportunity.
The zine is loose-leaf (unstapled) and was printed on 100% recycled Cyclus Offset by PCP printers in Port Talbot.
And there’s further exciting news…