The Wanderer #1

By Simon Parkin
thewanderermagazine.wordpress.com

Parkin says in his introduction that his day job is as a print designer, and upon opening his zine you can tell this almost immediately after opening it up and taking a look as, ore than anything else, this zine is clearly designed. Parkin has spent a lot of time creating the look of The Wanderer and what it looks like is a magazine: the titles, fonts, side bars, activities (!!!), photo credits, and everything else add up to show that he is clearly experienced with this sort of thing.

The content of this mini magazine is all centered around in Parkin's interest in walking, and is split into many different sections. He lists a "top 5 fantasies whilst walking", reviews books and movies, goes into why he likes walking, talks about his numerous sheep rescues, gives information on identifying birds of prey you can see while our walking through the countryside, has a diary of a walking holiday he went on, discusses photography and why he dislikes golf courses, and a number of other things. Needless to say there's quite a lot of content in here.

My only complaints with the zine are that it is a little over designed for a zine. The aforementioned holiday diary uses scanned pages torn out of a notebook as a background, yet the text over them is all in a computer font. This seems really "magazine-y", and actually writing it by hand and then scanning it in would have given it a bit more of a personal feel.

But tha's a small complaint, and if you're interested in walking this is probably a zine worth checking out, even if some of the text could have been moved a milimetre ot the right.