affinity publisher PROTECT & SURVIVE

[GarryP]

Here's a project that I've been working on - on-and-off, a couple of hours here and there - for a while now.
It is a basic recreation - using Designer and Publisher - of a genuine UK Government booklet that was commissioned in 1976 for distribution if nuclear war broke out. It was on sale from 1980 but was to be distributed free to every household if things stated to look really bad.

I've tried to be reasonably accurate in recreating it as best I can be bothered to but there are still some issues:
* The booklet was manually typeset in 1976 so the actual typefaces used are probably not available in digital form. I've tried to get close but there are differences.
* Where reasonable I have tried to keep the typography as it is in the original document, including the strange 'quirks' that don't seem to have a good reason for being there. (Almost every paragraph needed some manual tweaking.)
* The colours are probably not accurate. I've been working from scanned documents of differing quality and don't have the original to hand (a quick check on eBay shows some originals going for up to £75).
* The image on the front/back cover was created entirely in Designer but it's not a perfect facsimile.
* All of the other images were taken from a scan and tidied up - with GIMP - to differing extents (usually very basic stuff). I simply don't have the skill or patience to recreate them with vectors, especially for a silly experiment like this.
* Some things - weird layout, strangely positioned text, etc. - that bugged me in the original have been 'improved'.
* I've added a disclaimer to remind the reader that they're not looking at the original document, just in case there was any confusion.

While reading the booklet I recommend listening to the 12" Annihilation Remix of "Two Tribes" by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. The narration in the song includes phrases from the TV information film that accompanied this booklet, and some phrases that were in the original script but dropped from the film for 'decency purposes'.

This took me way longer to do than I expected it to but it was a good learning exercise.
I hope you like reading it. Know your warning sounds people!

Note 1: To see it clearly, click on the image and zoom in.
Note 2: The image quality has been deliberately reduced to make it less easy to use for nefarious purposes.

[SrPx]

Very nice work.

Kindda disappointed, as I expected to find some breed of zombies in some page. Or at least a gigantic cockroach which would have survived the radiation and the social media, and even evolved as the next species to rule the world...

* Runs away. Very fast .*

[Smee Again]

An American idea was: "When you see the flash, duck and cover!"

Truth be known, if you would have seen the flash, it was the last thing you saw and you were dead before you hit the ground.

That said, resembles a pamphlet they taught us in school in southeast Louisiana in the late 1960's with the door and the sandbags. Crazy stuff, and probably totally useless in reality.

[gdenby]

Hi, GarryP,

Nice work. A worthwhile re-creation of a pretty much useless document. I recall as a child of 5 or 6, watching a nuke test broadcast on TV. Not too long ago, I found the broadcast on yoo-toob. It showed how the troops were being saved from the fall-out dust by having the dust on their clothes swept off w. brooms. In event of nuclear war, a broom may be your best friend. Oh, and by the way, don't worry about inhaling the dust when it is brushed off.

While it is true that alpha particles decay quite rapidly, I'm reminded of something a friend of mine told me. Her father, a film of whom I saw, was a Navy doctor who was one of 3 who landed on one of the Pacific atolls just after a nuke shot. Upon seeing the geiger counter reading, he commented, "Well, we're dead." I think she said it took 12 years, during which time he became an expert on the effects of hard radiation on human tissue. 

[GarryP]

Thanks SrPx. I would love to have made some kind of parody with zombies, or similar, in it but I just don't have the artistic skill. One of the lines that was dropped from the accompanying TV information film was "If your Grandmother, or any other member of the family, should die whilst in the shelter, put them outside but remember to tag them first for identification purposes." Shame that wasn't shown in the booklet.

Smee Again, you might be interested in this podcast episode: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/atomic-tattoos/ Very interesting, and a bit scary too.

Thanks gdenby. Yeah, probably not the most useful booklet that's ever been created. One sentence in it that gets me each time is, on page 13, where it talks about having a radio and batteries: "Keep any aerial pushed in". As if getting poked by your radio aerial is something you'd be most worried about during a nuclear holocaust/winter.  I've just watched this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLGHRjLnfMk Near the end, the narrator says: "If the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had known what we know about civil defence, thousands of lives would have been saved." I don't really know what to say about that.

[SrPx]

On 3/22/2019 at 10:28 AM, GarryP said:

I would love to have made some kind of parody with zombies, or similar, in it but I just don't have the artistic skill.

If I'd have more random free time other than moments like these (even with the low I charge for my freelancing, can't justify myself the time of doing stuff just for fun... and heck do I miss it... ! ) , I'd offer my help for that, right now, lol.  But maybe wouldn't fit, would have crashed the vibe : You did very well replicating that kind of brochure style ( and even reproduction type) from the times. I can see using it for sarcasm's sake as a fun vehicle to make hilarious versions of it . Not meaning linking it with the nuclear disaster, as is a sensitive issue... But with the style of "technical" instruction, you find everywhere, from installing furniture to best sex positions, to how to unbox a device, etc. Often , reality surpasses fiction, and gives you funnier brochures (maybe not in a theme like this) than you could ever have tried to create for the purpose of it being funny. Some people unwittingly produce really weird stuff...