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One of the several top-secret creative fruits which occupied me during the Melbourne lockdown has now arrived!

I’m pleased to announce the release of The Melbourne Flâneur zine, which collects the most popular posts appearing on The Melbourne Flâneur vlog between July 2019 and June 2020, as voted by you, chers lecteurs.

Your all-time faves, “What is a flâneur?” and “Are there flâneur films?”, are there, as well as articles about the father of flânerie, Charles Baudelaire, and my innovative art of ‘flânography’.

I’ve even included a bonus spread showcasing my moody black-and-white film photography. It features pix of Melbourne’s mean streets and gritty laneways as yet unorbed by you, dear readers.

A piece of fiction, plenty of groovy graphic design, and—most ambitious and gruelling of all—I even turned one of my videos, “Dismembrance of things past”, into a six-page, 54-frame comic strip.

Thank God the video was only one minute. Photoshop almost went into meltdown, and me with it.

Check out the super-short video below as I take you through a whirlwind flick-through of what you’ll find inside!

I’ve always loved the grungy zine æsthetic. As you can see in the video, with the slick paper and full-colour pages, this zine isn’t quite ‘grungy’, but it’s as close as a dandified fellow as your Melbourne Flâneur can come to getting ‘down and dirty’. I chose a dirty, low-res printing option to give it that grungy, Risograph-style sprezzatura.

Mostly, I used the zine æsthetic as a licence to take some innovative liberties with graphic design. You’ll notice, for instance, that in the article titles, I do some funky things like turning the lettering on its side, back-to-front, etc. I primarily designed The Melbourne Flâneur zine for print rather than for on-screen reading because, even though I crafted it on the laptop through my Artisanal Desktop Publishing process, I wanted it to be tangible, substantial, like an old-school zine, but handmade new-school-style.

The primary purpose of the zine was to create something exclusive I could give to my clients as a piece of added value. Often when I’m working with businesspeople, academics or other creatives, they evince an interest in reading my work or looking at my art, but the urgency of servicing their projects doesn’t leave a lot of time for that.

I wanted to design something tangible and substantial which would give them an insight into my world as a peripatetic writer, the Melbourne I see through the lens of my Pentax K1000 and my Minolta XL 401 Super 8 camera, as well as something a bit off-beat, design-wise, mixing the funkiness of the zine with the boutique approach I take to writing, editing, designing and publishing documentation.

The thing I like about zines is that the artisanal, handcrafted aspect of these typewritten, photocopied, stapled-together little mags gives them a sense of ‘exclusivity’.

The magazine proper is a totally commercial creation: it’s always pushing products at you. The zine, on the other hand, takes the commercial form and makes it distinctly personal. The exclusivity which comes as a function of a zine’s tiny print run subverts the slick-paper mag’s purpose to push as much soulless product to as many faces as possible and makes the format a humble, intimate ‘advertisement for oneself’.

I often drop in at Sticky Institute, the zine shop in Campbell Arcade, and pick up a few weird little creations. I love owning a few handcrafted zines by Melbourne writers and artists that I can puzzle and ponder over, and I wanted to give my clients something of that experience of exclusivity, of entering intimately into my world of flânerie, into my dark vision of Melbourne as a place of friendly menace.

The Melbourne Flâneur zine is now available for purchase in the Dean Kyte Bookstore. If you want to experience this feeling of exclusivity and re-read all your favourite articles, revised and illustrated for print, you can purchase a physical copy for $A25, including worldwide postage, or you can download the PDF eZine for free!

Just click this link to go straight to the product page in the Dean Kyte Bookstore.

And I now have brochures for my print and video products!

The two new brochures below are more of the many creative fruits I pumped out during lockdown. I’m really pleased with the designs I came up with. After a rocky start, I caught a wave of inspiration. I invite you to download my new brochures and check out what I came up for yourself!