This project started as a one-day International Women’s Day portrait shoot.
Originally, the plan was to create a zine that would be distributed inside the event gift bags. The publication would highlight previous projects, sponsors, and the initiative itself while people attended the shoot.
And I remember pushing on that pretty hard during the early conversations because I kept coming back to the same question:
What is making people keep this once they leave?
If the women participating in this year’s shoot weren’t even featured inside the publication yet, then the object was functioning mostly as marketing material. Which is fine in theory, but it also meant the emotional connection stopped at the event itself.
So the conversation shifted from exposure to attachment.
Instead of rushing the zine for the day-of experience, we decided to wait until the portraits were edited and rebuild the publication around the women who actually participated in the series. Their images, stories, and presence became the centre of the piece rather than supporting material orbiting around the campaign.
That changed everything structurally.
The sponsors still received visibility, but now through association with something people genuinely wanted to keep. The women featured in the project could see themselves reflected inside the object. And the publication itself started functioning less like promotional collateral and more like a cultural archive tied to a specific moment and community.
I think about this a lot with printed matter. Branding conversations tend to focus on reach and visibility, but community thinking changes the equation entirely. You stop asking how many people will take something home and start asking how many people will care enough to hold onto it afterward.
Huge kudos to @amandathirkillphoto for championing this project and creating portraits that feel deeply personal while still holding a strong collective presence.
Zine 0005 — Collaboration.
We didn’t just invite collaboration on this one. We forced it.
No solo pieces. Everyone had to work with someone else. Different mediums, different ways of thinking, all pushed into the same space. Some of it clicked right away, some of it didn’t, and that was kind of the point.
So the design couldn’t clean it up too much. It had to hold that tension.
We kept the structure tight across the covers, but let the gradients shift so each one feels a bit different. Same system, small variations.
We also pushed it outside of the page. Gatefolds, QR, stickers, even a typeface that came with the zine.
This one got some recognition on @behance , which was nice.
But the interesting part was seeing what happens when you stop trying to control everything and let people build something together.
📘 @ottdesignclub , theshycreative, @arty_izzy
📸 @remitheriault from @houseofcommon.studio
Zine 0003 - RAW
This one came from a reaction. At the time, everything was polished, curated, built for the grid. We wanted to move in the opposite direction and lean into something more raw.
So we worked with actual materials. Each cover was spray painted by hand, then printed on top, which meant no two copies were the same. The variation wasn’t a side effect, it was the point.
Inside followed the same logic. Textures, scanned writing, fragments that felt closer to something handled than something designed.
The shoot pushed it further. We treated it like packaging. Raw meat, labels, a custom sticker system to hold the concept together. Not just a visual, but a full context.
Looking back, this was one of the first times we built a project where the idea carried through every layer, from production to presentation.
That’s still the standard I measure things against.
📘 @ottdesignclub , @theshycreative , @arty_izzy
📸 @remitheriault from @houseofcommon.studio
Reminiscing on our ODC second zine.
This was the moment we started pushing beyond the page. We stepped slightly outside of the @ottdesignclub system and treated the zine as something to experience, not just read.
We built a custom playlist accessed through QR, so the content extended beyond print. When we shipped copies, we included bubble gum and invited people to chew it while flipping through. It sounds simple, but it shifted how people engaged with the work. It became physical, a bit nostalgic, something you remember in your body, not just visually.
The photoshoot followed the same idea. Bright, tactile, a bit chaotic. A response to being stuck on screens for too long.
Looking back, this was less about making a “nice zine” and more about building a small system around it.
That’s the part I keep coming back to.
📸 @remitheriault from @houseofcommon.studio
Found these while prepping for our talk at @objectprojectartbookfair .
Behind the scenes from the NYC Pivotal Moments exhibit.
Everything started on the floor. Prints everywhere, no clear order yet, just trying to understand how it would come together in a space that wasn’t ours.
This project stretched more than expected. Logistically, creatively, mentally. A lot of decisions happened in real time, with no clean roadmap.
Looking back at these, it’s clear how much of the work never makes it into the final photos. The pressure, the doubt, the constant recalibration.
We talk about the outcome. We rarely talk about this part.
Still figuring out how to unpack this one.
A study in form, but also a shift in context. This piece started as something flat and controlled, then moved into an object that can be used, carried, and eventually marked by someone else. That change matters more than the final image.
Designed for All Hands on Deck, now up for auction.
#allhandsondeck @btpbrewing
@ottdesignclub is part of @objectprojectartbookfair .
We’ll be exhibiting all weekend with a selection of our zines: Zine 0006 Renaissance, Zine 0007 Building Bridges, and Pivotal Moments.
On Friday, @arty_izzy and @theshycreative will take part in the panel Holding it Together: Building + Sustaining Collective Publishing Projects. A conversation about building something with a community and knowing when it needs to shift, pause, or end.
This one is close to home 🖤
Exhibition Market
Friday, May 8, 5 to 9 pm
Saturday, May 9, 11 to 6 pm
Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre
290 Lisgar Street, Ottawa
Panel discussion
Friday, May 8
6:00–7:10 PM
See you there 👀
Most printed pieces assume a straight line. You start at the front, move forward, and finish at the back.
This one resists that.
The structure asks you to pause, flip, and reorient. Not because it’s complicated, but because the content doesn’t land in a single direction. It shifts depending on how you approach it.
That’s where it gets interesting. The reading experience becomes part of the message. You’re not just moving through pages, you’re adjusting your position.
“Something still doesn’t connect” isn’t a statement. It’s a moment. The one where you realize the problem wasn’t the design, it was the angle you were looking at it from.
So you turn it. And try again.
Working on a reversible zine.
The structure has to resolve in both directions, which shifts how the layout is built from the start. It’s less about styling spreads and more about setting a system that can hold its own when flipped.
Mini zine to give at @offfest
I thought I was being overlooked.
Which didn’t make sense to me, because I’m not sitting here doing nothing. I’ve built things. Real things. Publications, events, spaces where people actually show up and engage. I can point to the work and say, this exists, this mattered, this connected.
So when it didn’t translate online the way I expected, it was easy to blame visibility or the algorithm.
But the more I looked at what I was putting out, the more it felt like a translation issue.
The work itself has depth. It has layers. It’s built around people, context, intention. But the way I was showing it flattened everything. Same formats, same pacing, same visual language that everyone else is using to present their work.
It made everything feel interchangeable. Because the work is interchangeable, but because the way it’s being communicated is.
That’s a harder thing to sit with.
It means the issue isn’t effort. It’s not even the work itself. It’s how easily it slips into something familiar the moment it hits the feed.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that gap. Between work that actually holds weight in real life, and work that just passes through your screen.
I don’t have a clean answer yet.
But I can see it now, and I can’t keep showing up the same way.
March pulled me away from thinking about design as something that lives on a screen.
Most of what I worked on ended up being about surface. Not in a purely aesthetic way, but in how something is handled, opened, revealed, and sometimes kept. I found myself paying more attention to the moment something is held than the moment it’s seen.
That shift came through across everything. The wrapped pieces, the boxes, even the skateboard explorations all pushed me to think less about composition and more about interaction. Not just what something looks like, but what it asks someone to do.
I kept coming back to the same question while working: what actually makes someone hold onto something?
It made me reconsider how I think about branding. Less as a single visual impression, more as a series of small encounters. A texture, a fold, a detail that creates just enough curiosity to slow someone down.
March felt like a transition into that way of working. Less focus on producing for the sake of output, more attention on how the work exists once it leaves me.
