Yesterweb vs Zine
イエスタウェブ / ジン／自主制作冊子
Yesterweb comes from Digital Retro and Zine from Publishing and Editing. One is aesthetic and the other technique. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Yesterweb
The look of a movement that began in February 2021 as a Discord room and grew into a webring and a zine. It calls for leaving what it names the core web, the platforms run for profit, in favor of a peripheral web of hand written personal sites, and it dresses its pages in 88 by 31 buttons and stamps arguing that frames are still a good tool.
Zine
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Circulates personal and communal voices without publishers, through small runs, low budgets and DIY reproduction.
| Yesterweb | Zine | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 2021–2023 | 1930s– / 1970s revival |
| Family | Digital Retro | Publishing and Editing |
| Kind | Aesthetic | Technique |
| Cues | Rows of 88 by 31 pixel buttons, put there to be copied by hand onto somebody else's page / A tiled background image that stays fixed while the page scrolls past it / Text heavy GIF stamps carrying the argument itself, such as frames are fine and you should make your own website / Previous, next, and random webring buttons closing out the foot of the page | Photocopiers / Handwriting / Cut and paste / Small print runs |
| Best used for | Linking your own hand written pages directly to other people's pages instead of publishing through a platform · Setting up your own machinery for binding a scene of personal sites together, a ring or a button exchange | Booklets for a small readership, made and handed out entirely by the makers. · Subjects no commercial magazine will take, made fast and cheap and passed hand to hand. |
| Type | A quirky display face for headings and a plain sans for body text; the manifesto stays as text no matter how long, never as an image. | Mix handwriting and typing, sizing letters by loudness rather than by grid. |
| Composition | Stack the content in window like boxes down the page with a vertical band running along one edge, and close the foot with a link list and the ring buttons. | Treat the spread as one sheet and favor filling it over leaving margin. |
| Material | Purple and pink laid over black, a tiled image fixed behind everything, and buttons and stamps pasted in as raw GIFs with no compression pass and no shared dimensions. | Coarse photocopy tone, staple binding, the shadows of cut edges left in. |
| Caution | Collect the nineties signifiers but drop the argument and the reason for leaving the corporate web goes with it, leaving the nostalgic wallpaper the movement's own summary names as the trap. | Copying only the coarse photocopy look misses the point. Who is sharing what with whom comes first, and the roughness is a result of small runs and low budgets, not a goal. |