Deek Magazine - The Self-Destruct Incident

This issue began cleanly, or as cleanly as a zine can when there's a nude girl with a gun to her head on the front cover. As the pages turned, the reader would see clean type and aligned content turn into columns of uneven length and wavering lines of text. But to turn the pages the reader had to first deal with the staple in the center of the page, pressed through the entire book.

We observed two types of interaction with the zine in the wild: readers who saw the staple and meticulously removed it, and readers who were unaware just pulling at the cover and inadvertently tearing it apart. We'd anticipated the destruction with the ripping. We'd also antipated destruction from the removal - we didn't use any staples in the binding.

Once the magazine was read it was never the same again.