Self-published and made to be handled, my zines are where I work through ideas without a client or a brief. It's a format that lets me move between design, archive, and diary, and follow a subject until it takes shape. The themes range from pattern and memory to identity and the things that shaped me. The selection below is a cross-section of that.
Shiidkayga
Shiid, also known as baati, are traditional Somali house dresses: loose, ankle-length, and typically made from lightweight cotton in bold, saturated patterns. For this zine, I digitalised the patterns of several shiid from my own family.
They are everyday garments, yet their vivid colours and expressive patterns map the domestic spaces I grew up in.
Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus
A zine about how typography, layout, and perspective shape a myth. The title moves the focus away from the hero and toward those who witness, receive, and carry the aftermath — the nymphs who found his still-singing head, the soil of Lesbos where it washed ashore, the ghost of Eurydice after his failed rescue.
Each voice is translated into a distinct typographic and spatial behaviour. Variation comes from placement, alignment, density, rhythm, and the use of white space; reading paths are interrupted, slowed, or dispersed depending on the point of view.
The layout doesn't illustrate the myth. It uses typography to ask how the event was experienced by different beings, and how a story changes when it's told from its edges rather than its protagonist.
Roma senza filtri
A zine that collects Rome outside its postcard image. Instead of the monuments and golden light the city is usually reduced to, these photographs look at the everyday one, the messy, absurd, and unglamorous moments that rarely make it into the frame.
The images are ironic, blunt, and often funny. Laid out with little intervention, they're left to speak for themselves: overflowing bins beside ancient ruins, tourists and residents caught mid-gesture, the small contradictions of a city that is both a museum and a place people actually live in.