Masthead Zine reprints logos from 1960s and 70s Chicano newspapers as a red-ink zine by Alexandria Canchola and Joshua Duttweiler.

The first thing you notice is restraint. One vermilion red on warm cream, nothing else, and the letterforms do everything. The cover stacks M-A-S-T-H-E-A-D in mismatched period styles: a fat Victorian M, a tilted circus A, a blackletter-flavored S, a street-brush h with a long curling tail. It reads as a dare and a specimen sheet at once, type treated as the entire visual event. Inside, each spread catalogs mastheads from a different paper like specimens: small dates tucked under each one, variants lined up so you can watch a logo evolve. The EL CUHAMIL sequence runs from 1971 to 1983, tightening from a boxed thumbnail into a full-bleed white-on-red slab. CARACOL gets three lives: a prim serif, a psychedelic bubble-letter swell, then a nautilus shell with the name set inside it. The red is constant, but the personalities are not.

The Masthead Zine as a Typographic Archive

Duttweiler's own description names the stakes: a masthead must carry enough weight to stand out from a cluttered page, stay recognizable even when partially obscured, and fit its audience the way a logo fits a brand. The Chicano press of the sixties and seventies took that brief personally. Activists fused text and image into a narrative that pulled from post-Mexican Revolutionary art, indigenous motifs, colonial-era Rococo, Victorian display faces, what the designers call Aztec-inspired art deco, Mexican street-brush script, informal calligraphy, and woodblock and linocut lettering. It is all there in the spreads: LA GENTE's geometric zigzag panels, the spiky medieval-meets-linocut AHORA, INSIDE THE BEAST's eagle crest stretched across a ribbon. The zine's layout stays quiet on purpose, a handful of mastheads per spread, generous margins, tiny captions, so the comparison happens between the red marks themselves.

The object matches the subject. Masthead Zine was printed with Current Press at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where Duttweiler is an assistant professor of graphic design, in an edition of 100 in October 2022. It was distributed at the AIGA National Conference in Seattle that year, the right audience for a piece like this: designers who know a masthead is a logo doing the hardest job in print. Duttweiler is also one of the 35 exhibitors at PRINT 2026, Design Week Mexico's graphic-design platform, currently on show in Mexico City through the end of the month. The scans carry the print story in full: the ink texture in the solid reds, the paper's warm cast, the rough edges that say the type was really there. Every page argues that these newspapers were serious typographic artifacts, and that the archive deserves better than a footnote.

Masthead Zine was co-designed with Alexandria Canchola. See more from Joshua Duttweiler at his portfolio.