Octo Canyon Zine
Role
Co-Host, Graphic Designer, Finance, Shipping
Project Overview
The Octo Canyon Zine is a physical charity zine that focuses on Agent 4, the protagonist of Splatoon 2's hero (story) mode. This zine covers every stage, sector and boss in Octo Canyon. 78 artists came together to create this zine.
Donation Total
$2,724.45 was raised for the Coral Reef Alliance
Project Duration
August 2020 - September 2021
Contributor Graphics
One of my main responsibilities, for the project, was creating graphics for our guest artists and contributors. A tradition in the zine community is to create spotlight graphics for guest artists that are posted to our social pages to get people excited about the project. I took inspiration from the Sunken Scrolls found in Octo Canyon when designing the guest spotlights. We invited 13 people to our project. Each graphic contained an icon and a crop of the guest artist’s favorite Splatoon related drawing.
We opened applications to the general public and advertised through Twitter and Instagram. During our application phase we received over 250 applications. Around 200 people were applied for the page artist position, drawing a page for the zine, and around 50 people applied to create merchandise for the project. We accepted 57 artists (not including guests or mods) into our project.
Agent 4 Collaboration
We received over 250 applications but could only had 57 open spots. We understood how disappointing it is to get rejected from a zine project, so we came up with an idea that would allow anyone to participate in our zine. The Agent 4 Collaboration project allowed anyone to submit a fully body drawing of their Splatoon Agent 4 character. At the end of the submission period, I compiled all drawings and created a poster and was included in the physical book. We received a lot of positive feedback thanking us for having another opportunity to participate in our zine.
Production And Fulfillment
One of my favorite parts of zine projects is placing orders for our physicals goodies with our manufactures and then shipping out customer orders. For this project we made books, acrylic charms, stickers, buttons, enamel pins, and washi tape and it was my job to find manufactures that suited our needs.
Whenever I ship zines, I like to make vlogs (video blog) showing my process and how I ship. I love showing behind the scenes footage because many people don’t know how much effort it takes to run a project like this and hopefully this video gives a little peek at all the work that went on behind the scenes.
Project Conclusion
I wanted to give a special shout out to all the moderators of this project: Lia (co-host), Alpa (promo artist), Shadoo (promo artist), and Seth (writer). I’m so proud of all we accomplished and I’m happy our project was such a success. There have been many Splatoon zines before this one, but this has definitely reached the top in terms of engagement, sales, and customer satisfaction.
This was only my second time hosting a zine project and I have to say it has been my favorite. I love how the cooperation and collaboration between moderators was non-stop and how we were able to come up with new and engaging ways to keep attention on our project. I learned a lot from this project I will continue to use some of the methods we came up with in future zine projects. Thank you for helping to bring this project to life!
