Making time for personal projects is always tricky – when things are busy it’s hard to find the time, and sometimes there’s just a bit of an ebb and flow in creativity. So instead of working on a specific project for a set period my approach more recently has been to have several things just bubbling away in the background that I can dip in and out of.
There are my collections that went into the Amass Zines – empty noticeboards, things in gutters and handprints on walls. I still take the photos when I see them and put them into a gallery, but I’d already done that and didn’t feel the world needed more dedicated zines for them right now. Then there are the things I’ve been calling ‘distractions‘ – an interesting bit of light, a random rubber head on a pathway, some steam I spent 10 happy minutes trying to catch with my camera when I was supposed to be catching up on some admin. Plus the monthly personal diary type zines I’ve fallen woefully behind on. I love making zines!
On a walk around the block I started to think about what these things have in common and what the best thing to do with them might be. The styles of photography might be different but essentially they are all things that grab my attention, that I value, so I felt that was enough to loosely tie them together. I decided I’d like to make a zine of these things, so that idea took hold and things grew around it. The zine would be a series but I might not commit to a set frequency, and in between it would be good to have a space to put images I collect along the way, a sort of blog just for that.
On another walk around the block I tried to think of a title. I’m not very good at titles, but ‘Trivial Matters’ popped into my head and I liked it – many of the things in these images are probably considered trivial, so they might be ‘trivial matters’, they are mostly fleeting observations, but they matter to me. I dropped the ‘s’ just because it seemed somehow neater that way.
I thought I’d give a tagline a go too, and came up with ‘WELCOME DISTRACTIONS’. I can’t remember how that came about but would bet it was on a walk. All my best thinking is done on walks.
I started playing around with ideas for the zine and I built a basic WordPress site – it’s been ages since I set up my own site from scratch (well, using a template for the design but most other things from scratch!) I quite enjoyed it. I played around with images on bits of paper for the zine – I wanted it to fit in a C6 envelope, I wanted the cover image to wrap around so you could lie it flat and have that as an image if you wanted, somehow I wanted to make use of my Grandad’s letterpress and I wanted there to be some sort of ‘interactive’ element.
I finally got Adobe InDesign (this is an affiliate link – if you click it and decide to buy something I may receive a small cut of the payment, but it won’t cost you more) and once I got the basic hang of it it made design and sending things to print so much easier! I went through Grandad’s sets of letters and spelt out TRIVIAL MATTER in the biggest, simplest font he had (he mostly did business cards) 18pt Univers bold capitals was therefore the project font.
After a few mockups on my own printer at home I finalised the design and sent it off to Mixam where they created the final zine, along with some flyers for the ‘interactive’ elements that go into the zines. Interactive is probably a bit too grand of a name for them – they’re just a little thing but I wanted there to be something you discover in person and hope to experiment more with what can be done in zines in the future!
So that’s it really! A website for all my observations to exist in, a zine with a selection of them arranged in a way that pleases me and hopefully more creative things to come!
You can explore the TRIVIAL MATTER website here and you can buy TRIVIAL MATTER 01 on the website if you’re in the UK or on Etsy if you are outside the UK (mutters about the stupid B-word under breath).
