cut it out
[2025 rg]

a note

CUT IT OUT is a project i wrote in 2016 after a summer spent working in a medical school's gross anatomy laboratory. it feels strange to revisit the project now, nearly 10 years later. as i mention in the first footnote, rather than extensively editing the text, i decided to leave it largely unchanged. while i know that i'd write it very differently now, i'm also interested in learning to love it as an embalmed snapshot of my thinking from that time.

regarding the layout, i was interested in allowing each part of the text to live its own independent life. in the more linear word doc of the original text, it felt frustrating to keep jumping back and forth to look at the footnotes or figures. my brain began to feel much more calm once i let each part of the text have its own space to exist. my attention felt less fractured, more free to linger or wander as it pleased. plus, by using spiral bindings (reminiscent of school workbooks) on three sides, i was able to create a situation where readers needed to dissect the cover in order to begin reading. the discomfort of that commitment is a core concern of the text itself.

at the level of visual design, i was interested in using a block print for the cover given its reliance on the physical act of cutting material away. during a meeting of Carving Club W/ Little Patch of Hell @ Paper Jam + Print, i used three sides of a Pink Pearl eraser to create the stamp that provided the letters which i later scanned and scaled for the zine's cover. as to the zine's text itself, i opted for the freely available typeface Arsenal, which was designed by Andrij Shevchenko and won the Ukrainian Type Design Competition Mystetsky Arsenal in 2011. i was interested in its resonance with Optima, the typeface that i believe is used in Frank Netter's classic anatomy atlas. Optima was designed by Hermann Zapf and was supposedly inspired by the engraved letters he saw on tombstones during a trip to Florence. i like that hand-carved stone letters meant to commemorate the dead gave shape to the typeface that would later become central to the foundational anatomical atlas used to train generations of people learning to care for the living.

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