SEASONS is an interactive editorial publication exploring love, loss, and growth through intimate, lived experiences. Rooted and birthed from personal conversations with queer individuals in Singapore, the project documents the quiet, complex realities of modern relationships, moving beyond idealised narratives to examine how love is formed, challenged, and transformed over time.
Designed as both a visual and reflective medium, SEASONS invites readers to not only witness these stories, but to locate themselves within them.
From One Perspective to The Unheard ones
Beginning from my own intersectionality of love and heartbreak, I dove into the perspectives of those that differ drastically in accessibility, relatability and experience in comparison to mine. From exploring what lacked in current existing creative mediums when it comes to narrating the honest struggles and diverse romantic dynamics in Singapore’s creative landscape, this publication is for the real and unabashed, the ones who refuse to let their stories go untold and faded.
And thus a new form of reflective medium is born. A merge between a magazine a journal, ‘Seasons Magazine’ is a mini-publication, an artifact of witnessing to these diverse stories of love, loss and growth.
With the idea of “The Unfiltered Room”, the moodboard was made to feel like an unashamed, loud yet emotionally intimate conversation between chosen-family on a summer’s night after a round of drinks and heart to hearts.
Verbal tone that is candid, raw and boldly honest, the opposite of ‘educational’ or ‘polite’.
Playing with high contrast style to represent defiance, refusing to be quiet or ‘rubbed out’ of Singapore’s shunning society, while poses and and model interactions centers around connection and expressing their feelings.
Mockups and prototypes were made to test and determine if the journaling prompts successfully lowers "social armor" and provoke genuine, deep self-reflection.
I was also testing to see if the interactive aspects of the medium evokes curiosity and the desire to connect with their peers through the prompts.
I intentionally chose close friends in the fashion industry to participate and lend their creative eye to the editorial, capturing the emotions and visuals of each chapters: Love, Loss & Growth.
Allowing them to express their perspectives infront of the camera and giving them the space and platform to do what they do best: create and tell their stories.
As it is my first time working on a full publication that is not merely a fashion editorial or spread, I wanted to see how other previously done zines and interactive journals have been made, to have a clearer idea on what would fit best for binding, interactivity and layouts.
The word reflects the cyclical nature of love; the beginnings, endings, and renewal, mirroring how we move through passion, loss, and growth over time.
And like the changing of seasons, the transitions in-between different seasons of our lives, move us through phases that quietly reshape who we become.
Font Choices
Serif fonts were chosen for titles and body text to evoke a sense of editorial prestige and authority, referencing the role of magazines in queer cultural expression in recent years.
And a style of typewriter font were also added for prompts and reflections, scattered across the book to suggest presence, adding a human, intimate quality to the pages.
Layouts & Visual Language
Some layouts incorporate elements and motifs drawn from interviewees’ personal stories, allowing visual variation across pages and tying the designs in lived experiences.
“Love” is the first of 3 of this series; it is neither grand nor performative. It exists in the quiet small gestures, fleeting moments, and the unspoken ways we choose each other.
This chapter of SEASONS MAGAZINE explores the early stages of connection, where love is still forming; uncertain, tender, and felt felt deeply before it can be fully understood.
“You taught me how to love you, but not how to stop.”
- Nikita Gill
Loss is rarely a single moment. It unfolds over time; in fragments, in silence, in the slow realisation that something has changed. Sometimes it even unfolds all at once, a somewhat inevitable collapse.
Through personal reflections, this chapter captures the messiness of holding onto what was, while learning how to release it. Bringing to light the different takes and observations during this stage of grief.
If love is where we begin, and loss is what unsettles us, then growth is what cements and remains.
The final chapter turns inward, tracing the subtle, unspoken shifts that occur after everything has changed. Here, growth is not presented as resolution, but as a process and the result: of learning to stay with oneself, of reclaiming one’s own identity, and of redefining what it means to move forward. Through each story, growth emerges not as something strived, but as something that is continuously moulds and requires living through; shaped by memory, resilience, and the quiet decision to keep becoming.
CREDITS:
Photographer, Editor & Co-stylist:
Erwinshah Hastings
Models: Myo, Pearlsi
Co-producer: Pearlsi
TAGS:
Art Direction, Styling, Graphic Design
