flirting with fascism

Publication design

The brief for this project was to design a publication for the text ‘Nazi Punks Folk off’ by Karl Sparklen that explores and illustrates the themes of the text. In the article, Sparklen explores how fascism has attempted to and sometimes succeeded in infiltrating the black metal and folk music scenes in the UK. He discusses that whilst both music scenes outwardly reject being aligned with the far-right their resistance to the mainstream appeals to Fascists, and their long history of whiteness is undeniable. My design focuses on two themes; Disease and Contradiction. I wanted the publication to express how fascism is a disease that slowly corrupts its host. And how it tried to infect the folk music and metal-rock scene. But I also wanted to convey the hypocrisy within these music scenes, how whilst they do not condone far-right extremism, they cling to their white history and are still exclusive and non-diverse today. I conveyed these themes through the structure of the publication and visual imagery. An atypical structure was chosen to convey the theme of contradiction. The book is non-linear, once readers get to the middle of the text they need to flip the book around to read the second part. The theme of disease was illustrated through mark-making/imagery. The publication starts white and gradually turns black as if the text is slowly infected with fascism. I created textures by hand using black paint and scanned them onto my computer where I could manipulate them further using Photoshop and Indesign. It was fun to experiment with a different form of image-making.