2024.08     
Houston, TX

Mixed Media + Photography

The poster design for the 2024 edition of Zine-Fest Houston was conceived as a tactile, analog still life that embodies the event’s theme, “Zine-topia / Dystopia,” through material contrast and symbolic accumulation. Rather than relying on illustration or purely digital composition, the poster was built from a deliberately staged arrangement of real-world objects laid out on a tabletop, photographed as a unified composition. This approach foregrounds the physicality of zines themselves—handmade, handled, circulated—and situates them within the messy, contradictory realities they so often respond to.

At first glance, the image reads as random clutter, but each object was selected to carry metaphorical weight. Items associated with waste and disposability—trash, old paper bags, an empty plastic water bottle, a discarded battery—sit alongside tools of making and survival, such as a pen, scissors, stapler, and assorted electrical components. These elements point to a tension between production and depletion, creativity and exhaustion, utopian aspiration and dystopian residue. The presence of drugs further complicates the scene, evoking both care and dependency, healing and coping mechanisms within systems that often fail the individuals living under them.

Technology appears in a fragmented, almost ironic form. Random electrical parts and an empty AirPods case reference contemporary digital life, rendered obsolete or perhaps intentionally discarded. Nearby, an hourglass introduces a temporal dimension, suggesting urgency and precarity, and the sense that time itself is a limited resource. Opposing this, a small living plant sits among the clutter, acting as a modest but defiant symbol of growth, care, and persistence amid decay.

At the center of the composition sits a small, staple-bound zine, opened to a spread that displays the event’s essential information. Rather than treating this information as a separate graphic overlay, it is embedded directly into the physical world of the image. The zine functions simultaneously as content, container, and subject—both an object among objects and the conceptual heart of the poster. This choice reinforces the idea of zines as vessels of self-expression that emerge from, and speak back to, lived material conditions.

The placement of the zine is carefully orchestrated to echo Zine-Fest Houston’s own logo. Paper cutouts—a pair of eyes above and a series of wave-like forms below—frame the open pages, subtly recreating the logo’s visual language within the still life itself. This gesture operates as a quiet, clever act of visual branding: recognizable without being overt, integrated rather than imposed. 

Formally, the poster embraces imperfection. Creases, scuffs, mismatched textures, and uneven surfaces are not cleaned up or corrected; they are integral to the image. This aesthetic aligns with zine culture’s resistance to polish and mass-market refinement, favoring instead authenticity, accessibility, and directness. The poster becomes a micro-landscape of both dystopian overconsumption and zinetopian possibilities.

Ultimately, the poster functions as both an invitation and a statement. It invites viewers into Zine-Fest Houston as a space where these contradictions are not resolved but explored, shared, and reshaped. By grounding the design in physical objects and visual metaphor, the poster reflects the enduring relevance of zines as grassroots media—capable of holding complexity, fostering community, and imagining alternative futures from the debris of the present.