Working in collaboration with an illustration student, we created a twelve page, two colour zine around the subject of an 'untold story'. We created a modern re-telling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, focussing on the untold themes and morals of the story in a contemporary design style. These takeaways from the story include paranoia, trust, greed and faith.

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice follows Orpheus the muse’s journey into the underworld to bring back his wife who was killed from a snake bite. Using his talents as a singer and performer, he bargains with Hades to let him return to the surface with his wife. However, he is instructed by Hades that he must not look behind him at any point before reaching the surface, or his wife would be dragged back into the underworld, forcing Orpheus to trust in both Hades and his wife that she was following closely behind him.

Initially, we explored the idea of making a ‘choose your own adventure’ style of zine, with the reader being able to choose whether or not they would look behind them if they were involved in this story. This proved a challenge however, as we had a small, limited number of pages. As a result, we decided to communicate this idea of having two potential outcomes by using overprinting techniques with our two colours of the zine. These colours each demonstrated a different outcome - the purple showed the ‘bad’ outcome when Orpheus turns around, while the gold showed the ‘good’ outcome with them returning to the surface together.

To give the viewer the opportunity to make this decision on whether they want to ‘look behind’ or not, we included a smaller insert page on the last spread that covers the endings of the zine, allowing the reader to look behind the insert to reveal what the outcome of their decision was. This allowed us to include a form of interactivity in our zine surrounding the themes of trust, paranoia and hope from the original myth.