One of my first assignments here with mindyourmind was to take our Program Evaluation that was conducted between January 2008 and February 2010 and make it into a youth friendly and fun format for the website. Since I make personal zines at home I decided to use a zine format to convey our results!

The first few times I made a zine it was a lot more difficult but now I have a large collection of images and backgrounds to choose from when I start something new. Since zines traditionally have been made from black and white photocopied pages, I followed the same format for our evaluation zine, except I added highlights of red to mimic mindyourmind’s colours. I printed out a bunch of images and brought in my favourite zine making supplies: my paper cutter, scissors, glue stick, and pens.

One trick I learned when making my own zines was to use black paper to be a backdrop against for text against a busy background. I always go through so much paper when making zines but I always recycle the scraps! Some of the backgrounds I used for the mindyourmind zine were made from logos and posters on the website. I love taking something seen every day and turning it into something new.

The zine is now sixteen pages and is ready to be scanned for the website. We might make a few paper copies all stapled together like a real zine as well. It has been so much fun to do something I love and be able to share it with everyone who visits mindyourmind.ca. We’ll let you know as soon as it’s up – I can’t wait!

By Erin