Rules to Live By: a zine of 18 creative manifestos
Handwritten wisdom on creative practice + behind the scenes making a risograph zine
What makes a creative life? How does one maintain a sustainable practice?
I am always seeking to find answers to these questions, taking pleasure in reflecting on my own art journey and learning from others’ experiences too. One of my favorite methods to capture these answers is the manifesto, a public declaration of intentions and motivations—or to put it more colloquially, “rules to live by.”
I’ve written about the artist manifesto before and I continue to be enamored with this succinct way to capture the spirit of an artist. The manifesto is way more about how to be than who you are. And what is there to engaging in creativity than to expand in this way, outside of self?
To give a proper ode to the creative manifesto, I invited a group of Substack writers to participate in a collaborative zine called Rules to Live By. This publication contains handwritten five point manifestos from eighteen artists and writers, weighing in on what drives their life’s work. Each contribution is unique to their character, but also universal in desire and experience.
A limited amount of physical copies are now available in my shop. Each book is risograph printed in teal and orange, spiral bound with matching orange coil, and (optionally) perforated by hand.
Making these zines from start to finish has been a huge labor of love. I hope these books find their way into the hands of those who will cherish them as much as I've enjoyed creating them.
For folks who want to see the zine immediately at a more accessible price, purchase a digital copy of the zine here. 50% of digital profits will be donated to Corita Art Center, an artist nonprofit dedicated to Corita Kent's teachings.
Corita’s Ten Rules poster is a big inspiration for this project, and the center has been doing amazing work supporting folks impacted from the Los Angeles wildfires. I am thrilled to facilitate this opportunity to give back in Corita’s name.
Thank you to the amazing contributors
for their inspiring human-centered submissions. I am a huge fan of each and every one of their newsletters, so I highly recommend you peruse their writings and subscribe to their work.Behind the scenes (making a book is a lot of work!)
Last week I mentioned I took a ten week risograph zine workshop at SVA. This book project was one of two main endeavors I took on during this time. The course, though not cheap, included access to RisoLAB printing facilities with unlimited masters for the winter/spring semester. I was determined to take advantage of this.
I got the idea to create a collaborative zine of handwritten creative manifestos during analog February. Boredom will do wonders for generating ideas! I brainstormed a list of newsletter-writing friends and acquaintances to ask for their participation.
The perks of making this collaborative zine were trifold:
I can make a more interesting zine with a range of styles and perspectives.
I don’t have to make all the art on a time crunch and inevitably cry from self-induced pressure.
I can share work from some of my favorite human beings on the internet.
I hurriedly sent off emails asking folks to contribute as a way to commit before perfectionism had a chance to take over. Here’s one of the emails I sent:
Folks quickly responded in excitement(!) and sent over their submissions in the following weeks. I had each contributor submit their five point manifesto in black and white, which I then separated into two colors for risograph printing.
I’ve written a beginner’s post on printing a risograph zine before, so I won’t get too into the riso weeds here. However, the process was wildly different from my first riso zine!
Because this zine consists of spiral bound individual pages instead of a folded booklet, I didn’t need to print in any specific order. I separated layers for each page into two spot colors in Photoshop rather than relying on Spectrolite for color separation.
Each letter-sized page was individually toggled on and off and sent to the printer via Photoshop. I printed on Neenah Exact Vellum Bristol, a 67 lb. card stock that is sturdy but not too thick.
I also printed a typed version of each person’s rules on the back of each page, which caused more headaches. I had to reprint the pages in the image below because the back side didn’t horizontally align with the front. The lightbox is a handy tool for checking for alignment issues like this!
I had originally planned to print 75 copies but used up a lot of my paper in the learning process, so ended up with 40 final editions. Printing and trimming all the pages to make 40 copies took about six hours. I cursed the risograph printers and the paper trimmer many times and repeated to myself that “imperfection can be its own charm” when confronted with visible crop marks and slightly askew cuts.
Once that was complete, it was time for collating (aka stacking each printed page in proper order), punching pages for spiral binding with a binding machine, putting in each spiral coil and cutting with a crimper, and perforating each individual page.
These last bits of binding and assembly are my favorite part of the process, when I know the book is almost done and I can give it the final bit of love that it needs to shine!
I hope you enjoyed reading about the process of making Rules to Live By. After laboring over these books, I am in a state of “never wanting to make my own books again” 😮💨 but I know after some rest, and with these creative manifestos in hand, I’ll be excited to tackle another publication.
If you’ve checked out the zine in either physical or digital copy, I'd love to hear which rules resonate with you most! Thank you always for your support.
Such beautiful labour of love! Making something physical out of things that normally live online is such a special thing!
this is really really cool, and I love getting to see the behind-the-scenes, too!!