A Guide to Love Riding Your Bike

I like bikes. I really like bikes. Really, ask anyone I’ve ever had a conversation longer than 5 minutes with.

I like bikes so much I decided to spend two months on one and rode from Brisbane to Adelaide (4000kms) with all my stuff strapped to the bike.

It had been a couple days since a shower

I describe myself as a commuter, 95% of the time I spend on my bike is for the purpose of getting from A to B. And enjoying every minute on the bike mind you.

As a certified bike-boy living in a car dependant city in a car dependant country I face a lot of criticism ranging from the more common:

You rode here?! In this weather??

To the classic:

Bike F**got.

But as I continue to ride, and love the mode of transport I’ve chosen, friends, colleagues and acquaintances have begun asking for tips and help beginning their own riding journey.

Immediately I'd start sending them paragraphs and paragraphs of information, just a constant stream of all the knowledge I've acquired about bikes. This I found to be amazingly inefficient and not a very helpful reference for them assuming they don’t commit my impromptu manifestos to memory.

So I started looking to online resources that I could send them but I found most of them were roadie centric (I love GCN as much as the next enthusiast but most of their staff are ex-pro cyclists) and the rest were incomplete or hard to compile.

So I decided to fill the need.

This is my commuter bicycle zine A Guide to Love Riding Your Bike. (What is a zine?)

Its been a project I’ve been working on for around the last six months. I started thinking about the sort of layout, size, content I want and just started writing.

Writing out first drafts on paper really helped me to slow down and to just write and was a method I had used back in highschool. The writing I’ve been doing for this blog and the writing I’ve been doing for work has given me some good practice going into this project.

Figuring out what medium to use took a LOT of trial and error.

Zines have an aesthetic I adore. If you google Zines you’ll quickly find yourself excited and overwhelmed by the amazing things people create. To narrow and localise my search I went to Visible Ink: Youth Hub to check out their zine library, and found an amazing space and an outstanding organised who made me feel more welcome in a space than I’d felt in a long time. I sat their for hours reading through their zines, seeing what kind of layouts and methods they’ve used to create.

I headed home and excitedly started planning and printed and collage layout. I made a couple of pages I was pretty proud of.

Then I showed my friend Janet and she didn’t love them nor think they were what I wanted for my zine. Disappointingly, she was right, I didn’t want something that grungy or dark for my guide designed for accessibility.

Back to the drawing board I went, every couple of weeks I’d try a new digital program, like Word, Publisher, InDesign, Gimp, but I could not get what I wanted out of those programs easily.

Janet, my saviour, recommended me to use Canva and although I had already spent so much time struggling I was excited. This program while not perfect did 95% of what I wanted it to do and frankly its limitations helped me make graphic design decisions I was getting stuck on.

After months I produced a draft! A finished a thing! It feels outstanding, getting it printed and having it my hands gave me a better idea of readability, both graphically and content wise. Yet again Janet the all-star gave me some outstandingly helpful feedback that went straight into the final

And here it is.

I am so proud

You can download the entire thing here. I designed it to be printed at A5 but I'm not your Mum so do whatever you'd like with it. Or alternatively ask me nicely for a copy next time you see me.

Its 16 pages and designed for A5 so its a real cute info-book size I can hand others. Those size restrictions forced me to be succinct and to really think carefully about what I thought was important for someone looking to learn how to enjoy commuting with your bike. I designed the cover to be printed colour with the rest of the book B&W, that makes it only ~70c per booklet.

I intend to replace the cover picture with my and my friends on my tandem bike but to get this out there, that picture will do for the moment.

This has been one of my favourite projects, full of learning, mistakes but ultimately I have produced what I set out to do and that makes me feel mighty proud. If you have interest in enjoying riding your bike then check it out!