Burn Out: a Heart Felt Zine

The expressive type book is an assignment everyone is excited about because the design is entirely up to you. You pour your heart and soul and make something different. The only real requirement is that we had to choose two letters, one being from a blog that collects all sorts of letters, that can pair together.

I decided to dedicate this book to two great artists, Allen Ginsburg and Kurt Cobain. I took Kurt Cobain's Suicide Note and Allen Ginsburg's poem Howl and combined them into a zine that travels through the up and down experience of being high. The speculation is that Kurt Cobain was high when he decided to take his own life and that Allen Ginsburg's Howl has many correlating themes and reenactments of being high. Another connection between Kurt Cobain and Allen Ginsburg is the fact that Cobain was a huge fan of Ginsburg's work. He felt like his words spoke to him.

And in that sense, I took each line of Cobain's Note and found matching themes and feelings through Ginsburg's poem and paired them together on the same pages.

The decision of making the book into a zine came about because both Ginsburg and Cobain come from sub-cultures that share information through budget friendly sources. Zines are a way of copying information cheaply giving the creators the ability to source it out to more people.

The yellow was chosen as the spot color for a few reasons. One of the first reasons was because yellow is known to be a cheerful color. The contradiction between the cheerful color but melancholy words was something that I felt was intriguing. The typefaces are used in such a way to show the difference between the words of Allen Ginsburg and Kurt Cobain. The typeface Trixie was used to convey Ginsburg's voice because it is modeled after the typewriter typeface that was used during the 50's and 60's. Similarly, the typeface Graphik was used to convey Cobain's voice.