MØRNING brings back the punk and creative freedom of zine making with new Burn Book

One particular studio who has its finger on the pulse with the ever-evolving digital sphere is creative strategy agency MØRNING, who’ve recently published an exceptionally creative zine entitled Burn Book. “As a team we were craving something tactile, tangible and a zine felt right,” studio duo Lydia Pang and Sam Jackson tell It’s Nice That. “We knew the format would push us to be uncomfortable, to play with the tension between transience and permanence.” MØRNING are a team who often “work in the shadows”, in part due to their occupation as creative strategists. “We thought it was about time we vampire strategists put something out into the light and showed what our work looked like, smelt, sounded like,” the team adds. “So this zine really shows off our strategy chops and our ‘be less shit’ ethos, free to the whole community, downloadable to anyone, available to everyone.”

The studio's aptly-titled Burn Book, in all its maximalist beautiful glory, is a true manifestation of the company mission: “Be Less Shit”. The “feral, punk, anti-establishment spirit” of the zine itself is what makes Lydia, Sam and the team love it so much. “It’s the way they galvanise a community, in our case, the misfits,” the team adds. The zine even comes with black matches so “you can set fire to the zine once you’ve finished it”, truly emphasising then transient nature to the medium. “It was designed to be devoured and then destroyed.”

As the Burn Book is split in to ‘Doomscape’ and ‘Dreamscape’, the zine plays with an evolving design language and gradient “to denote where you are at narratively in the subject, dark tones and chaotic type, colour saturation where light starts to seep into the body text letter by letter,” the duo explains. Overall, Burn Book is bustling with “weird ideas”. There’s visceral and “gross” art in both the ‘Doom’ and ‘Dream’ sections of the zine, thanks to the likes of artists and cultural leaders like Ione Gamble, Alex O Brien, Jodie Smith, Cherish Chang. “We pride ourselves on our collaborative relationship with the community and culture, feeding it versus just reporting.”

For MØRNING, community is as important as their clients. “The zine is both an offering and invitation to connect with us,” they claim. “We had hundreds of downloads within a few days and it warmed our stone cold hearts to see people show up for our efforts.” The studio has also launched Ø, an experimental creative project that delves into the "entangled relationship between humans and machines through the perspective of an otherworldly creative" – that creative being a three-headed dog bot, of course. "For us, Ø is a way to grapple with how AI is shaping everything from culture and the creative industry to how we communicate and bias in tech – essentially, how it is reimagining our very humanity."