How many hats do you need to publish a CHIMPAN zine?

Friends back home kept asking “Zé, you never post anything online. What have you been doing? How are we supposed to know?” That’s when I started considering the first hat: self-publisher.

Visit the Chimpanzine website

After that first hat, the second came just as easily: If I’m to create a way to keep in touch and I’m a printmaker, why not screen print the whole thing? And thus was born CHIMPAN zine, a printed publication that would showcase what I’ve been up to, and who have I been with. From inspiration, interviews and even a guest illustrator, CHIMPAN’s content thrives on a sense of a creative community.

This project is led by my love of design magazines and screen printing. Putting these two together, I’ve decided to screen print the whole 50+ pages zine.

The very many hats this project involves:

Content creation;
Interviewing and copywriting;
Liaising with sponsors;
Editorial design;
Curation;
Screen printing;
A website;
Social media.

The interviewer, copywriter and curator hats came with the content creation one. Plus, I wanted to be involved as deeply as possible.

As you can see by the flatplan, the designer in me quickly emerged, securing its own hat, reaching into editorial, website and social media and pitch decks that I’d send to sponsors.

That’s when another challenge came: marketing this publication to secure sponsors and advertisers, without it even being printed yet. Thankfully, Design can go hand-in-hand with Marketing, and that’s exactly how the second last hat came to be: I email and called any company I could think of, readily sending and showing the pitch-decks that the designer hat had provided. Luckily, I was able to secure enough funding – and off we went to the screen printing beds at the Print Club London studio.