I HAVE IMPROVED AT DESIGN 😤
and receipt printer meetup went great!! 🧾🧾
Dear friends,
Last week I finished my first draft of Pouch Preview!!! Which is exciting news on its own, but even more excitingly: When I compare it to the Pouch prototype I made 5 weeks ago…
I SEE IMPROVEMENT in my design skills 😭
I’m not saying this to brag; I’m saying this because honestly, the day-to-day of learning can be devastating lol. Finishing Pouch Preview was SO HARD! Last Wednesday I spent 4? 6? hours trying to make one of my spreads look right, and everything I tried (time-consuming! difficult!) ended up looking not-right-at-all 🫠 I spent the rest of the night just slumped on the couch!
So Friday evening, when I was uploading my PDF to Mixam for a test print, I was feeling far from triumphant. To be honest, I wasn’t feeling much other than,
OOOOOMFG I FORGOT THE PAGE COUNT NEEDS TO BE A MULTIPLE OF FOUR* 🤦🏼♀️
But after adding 2 empty pages (💀) then submitting the order, I went back to look at the test print I had done 5 weeks prior.
There it was…..
I COULD SEE MY IMPROVEMENT ✨
I’ve been taking it veeeery easy the last few days, and now that I am rested, and I AM feeling triumphant!! I’m so excited by how Pouch is coming along, and I’m excited to share some of that progress with you in today’s newsletter.
OH yeah, and the Receipt Printer Meetup I mentioned last time went really well!! I unveiled a new project called Dogs of Fate 🐕 Keep reading to learn more!
I hope enjoy today’s newsletter, and please trust that you are getting slightly better every day too 🫶
♡ vrk
(*For printing a staple-bound zine, you need the page count to be a multiple of 4 because of the folding: each piece of paper adds 4 pages. My Pouch Preview test print was 22 pages, i.e.… not a multiple of 4 lol.)
EVIDENCE OF IMPROVEMENT #1:
Pouch cover after 2 weeks 📓📓📓
EVIDENCE OF IMPROVEMENT #2:
Pouch layouts after 5 weeks 📖📖📖
🧾 Receipt Printer Meetup #1
Sorry if I gave anyone social anxiety by sending out an invite to an event one day before said event 😆 To clarify: I had just forgotten to send the invite to this newsletter; I hadn’t forgotten to invite people in general 😂 Andrés and I had been spreading the word about the meetup over a month in advance!!
Anyhoo, the event was a huge success!! We had over 40 RSVPs and maybe… 30ish attendees? Such a strong showing and such a fun and enthusiastic crowd. We had like 8 Cat Printers floating around, all of which were named the same thing, so no one could tell which printer they were printing to and everyone’s images were just popping up in random corners of the room. It was chaos in the best way!! Everyone was covered in thermal-printed stickers by the end of the night, the way it should be every night.
Dogs of Fate 🐕
I had a table with all my receipt printer goodies, and I unveiled a new project that I had made the day before: DOGS OF FATE 🐕
Yes, it’s another fortune telling machine 😂 My usual fortune telling collaborators Aaron and Ryan have been busy working (I know, absurd right), so I made this one by myself and it only took me a single day! (It did take the entire day though lol)
Concept:
Press the button
Get a fortune
It has a dog on it
There are 7 total fortunes, 100 total dogs!!! I handpicked 100 dogs from the dog API repo and then sorted them from saddest to happiest to match up to the 7 fortunes. There are also a few celebrity dogs 👀 including my family’s dogs, Shinbee and Georgia, as well as mister_presley!!
The fortunes:
There’s also secret button that lets you receive a fortune cleanse if you didn’t like what you got.
I included 1 very bad fortune (“OH no your fortune is bad”) that has a 1 / 100 chance of appearing. No one at the event got it though!! (Meanwhile it popped up twice for me while testing…………….. not gonna think about that too hard)
Here’s a face I made at some point for some reason:
Sometime before the end of the year, I’m gonna write up how I made Dogs of Fate!! Hopefully in a clear enough way that you too could build a Dogs of Fate machine if you wanted. And maaaybe I’ll make a video on it. MAYBE.
In the mean time, here’s the GitHub repo: 💾 fortune-button
Though in its current state, it’s probably pretty hard to understand unless you have prior experience in this stuff.
2️⃣ Sequel coming soon!
The best signal that the event was a success: So many people asked us about the next receipt printer meetup!! Lots of folks said they want to build their own project and present it next time.
Stay tuned for info on Receipt Printer Meetup #2 — I’m meeting with Andrés to discuss in a few hours!! This time I will send the invite to y’all with ample heads up 😆
🗓️ Pouch terms & updated timeline
I’ve been saying things like “Pouch Preview” and “Pouch test print” which I’m sure might be confusing if you’re new here (or even if you’re not).
Pouch is the name of an indie magazine that I’m making! I covered it in my newsletter last month, but basically it’s a zine for paper lovers ✂️
Also, here are some terms I made up:
Pouch Preview is an early, incomplete version of Pouch issue 1, which I’m gonna send to some folks for feedback in December.
Pouch Preview test print was just a single test print of Pouch Preview that I ordered last week.
Pouch Issue 1 is the real issue launching in Spring 2024!! (And I’ll be making test prints of issue 1 before then too)
Current timeline:
🎃 October: Made the Pouch Preview draft + ordered 1 test print on Mixam.
🍁 November first half: Refine Pouch Preview and start making the Pouch website.
🥧 November second half: Place the real Pouch Preview order on Mixam!! (Maybe 50 copies?)
🎄 December: Pouch website is live. Distribute physical Pouch Preview copies for feedback. Start getting pre-orders for Pouch. Start getting contributions for Pouch. (Folks will be able to contribute journal layouts + favorite pen recs!)
☃️ Jan/Feb/Mar: Iterate on Pouch based on feedback, incorporate contributions & get ready for launch.
🌸 Spring 2024: Pouch Issue 1 launch!!!
Thanks to everyone who volunteered to be a tester for Pouch! I’ll be printing copies in a few weeks, so I’ll reach out to gather shipping info around then 🥳
🐣 What’s happening post-Pouch?!
Pouch (and all the design/writing/photography/drawing/learning that I need to do in order to make Pouch) has been taking up ~100% of my work time lately, but I think my bandwidth will free up again in December 🎄
So what’s next?!
In my plans for December, I wrote:
Work on what is speaking to you the most
So I shall do that!! I have a long Notion doc where I backlog various things I want to make, so I’ll check in at the end of November and make a call.
But I also wrote this shortlist:
✏️ Tiny tools to help make making Pouch easier (DO NOT REWRITE ALL OF INDESIGN (YET))
🍎 Tiny tools to help learning with things (such as: korean, design, drawing, colors, and/or making cute journal layouts)
🌷 Tiny tools to help make journal layouts easier
📖 Make more zines
📓 Write a 3rd arc for Death Note
I feel like I’m not going to write a 3rd arc for Death Note but I MIGHT
🍁 READ: My life is a stationery store
It’s the end of this newsletter!!! Once again, thanks so much for reading 💓
I usually close with a list of links to fun paper-related things, but this time I want to feature a single blog post by one of my favorite artists-in-paper, bbangi:
The blog post is originally in Korean, but not gonna lie, I didn’t read it it Korean, there were too many words and I was lazy 😂 (I might try again later this week…). So instead I did read it in English via Google Translate!
Using Google Translate for Korean is a mixed bag in terms of quality, but this time I found the auto-translation to be surprisingly beautiful:
Could things be a little different this year-end? Just like putting on thick clothes in the cold autumn wind, it is time to shed the old skin and get new skin. My skin will hurt until I adapt to the world again, but I have to let go of the old, damaged shell that I once was. We welcome November with that promise. We wrap ourselves in a fragile shell and open the door to autumn.
📖 Read here: [November] My life is a stationery store
🇰🇷 Or if your Korean is better than mine: [11월] 내 인생은 문구점
**Here is my translation of what’s on the post-its, since that can’t be auto-translated:
Which of these feelings is most similar to what you feel now: 1) Happiness, 2) Uneasiness, 3) Lethargy (I looked this one up lol), 4) Loneliness, 5) No confidence
Did you eat your vitamins? Are you hurting anywhere/sick?
What is the thing that gave you a hard time today?
(…adding to my post-Pouch project shortlist: create a browser extension that auto-translates images)
ok not that it's decided by a vote but my vote is DEF a third arc for death note 😂 😂