Can we talk about how zines from the 90s had way more messy glue and tape than the clean digital layouts everyone uses now?

I pulled out a batch from 1997 and the cut-and-paste chaos felt so alive compared to the sterile PDFs I've been seeing in distros since around 2019, and I'm wondering if people still do that hand-cut collage thing or if it's gone fully digital now?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_jesse15d ago

Man, I disagree. I was doing zines in 1998 and the glue sticks were always dried out and the tape yellowed within a year. My 2019 PDFs actually look like how I wanted the originals to look, not like a ransom note. People romanticize the mess but the readability was terrible and half the text was illegible from photocopy degradation. Why would you want to go back to something that looked busted on purpose when you can get clean results with free tools?

the_sarah15d ago

Saw a piece the other day about how the whole zine revival is more about the feeling of making stuff than the actual result. People aren't after crisp, perfect pages, they're after the wabi-sabi of it, the imperfections that show a human was there. The dried out glue stick and yellowed tape are part of the story, not a flaw. You're totally right that PDFs look better and last longer, and for pure readability they win hands down. But I think there's a difference between wanting to see your old work preserved and wanting to recapture that messy, hands-on process for new projects. Do you think the appeal now is more about the act of creating than the final product looking "good"?