OUGD502: CRB - Craig Atkinson

Cafe Royal Books run by Craig Atkinson publishes weekly photo zines of a different topic per week.  I first came across the booklets through Facebook, and noticed that some subjects published about were in areas near to my home town which drew my attention closer to these zines.  The simple black and white layout with popular sans serif typeface Helvetica is a clean aesthetic that I have used in my work before and am attracted to due to the minimal, rigidness of the typeface attributes and grid system.

From this initial recognition I followed the business on Twitter, Instagram and looked at their website which holds an archive of all publications.  I was inclined to contact Craig for advice on photo zine production and layout design as primary research for a responsive brief to create my own photo zines.  The first time I contacted him I got no response, but have recently sent another email as I am nearing the final production of my booklets and wanted to know a bit more about self-publishing and production methods.

Although this is a short response I'm glad I received a reply; at this stage in my design process I had tested creating my zines by cropping and binding by hand which proved very difficult to produce accurate and consistent results each time.  Here I have my answer; for such a large run (often CRB releases editions of 200) it is far easier for the printer to do all of the work especially when releasing a new booklet every week. I can use this knowledge in my future work if I decide to self publish any books or zines.