FIN? is a zine of killed, rejected, and forgotten studio work by the Manchester design duo DR.ME (Ryan Doyle and Mark Edwards), a running archive of the ideas that didn't survive the brief.
Launched as a monthly, free-to-download PDF &mdash a "Print It Yourself" release built from client and personal-project offcuts that would otherwise sit unused in plan chests and hard drives &mdash FIN? gathered its best material every six months into a printed compilation. Across its run DR.ME produced 29 P.I.Y. digital issues and 5 printed issues, some 540 artworks in total, before the studio stopped making new issues in 2019. The library holds that 2019 printed issue, by the duo's own account the series' final year. Its cover is built from the same raw collage vocabulary &mdash cut barcodes, crossed-out file names, sticker-sheet fragments &mdash that runs through the interior pages.
DR.ME is the studio name of Ryan Doyle and Mark Edwards, a Manchester, UK design partnership working across branding, illustration, and collage-driven art direction. FIN? sits outside that commercial practice: a self-published side project the pair used to keep rejected work in circulation and to push themselves toward constantly making something new.
Notes
Self-published by DR.ME with no ISBN by design (small self-distributed studio zine, never assigned one). FIN? ran as monthly free-to-download PDF issues ("P.I.Y." / Print It Yourself) from roughly 2016-2019, with a printed "greatest hits" compilation about every 6 months DR.ME's own account (via The Weird Show interview, June 2020) says they stopped producing new issues in 2019, after which the full back catalogue (29 digital + 5 printed issues, ~540 artworks) was released free via Dropbox during the pandemic. The library's copy is the 2019 printed issue source article shows distinct cover art labeled by year (2017 vs. 2019), and the cover used here is the one explicitly labeled "PHYSICAL_COVER_2019" -- but it is not independently confirmed to be THE final printed issue vs. simply A 2019 printed issue, since exact print/issue numbering wasn't published. No page count, trim dimensions, weight, or print run were found for this specific issue in any source checked. Official studio site dr-me.com is live (verified 200 via curl with a browser user-agent) and matches the studio's current description ("Daring and disruptive design studio") however, the WebFetch tool itself received a 503 from dr-me.com on repeated attempts, apparently anti-bot blocking on the Cargo.site host rather than the site being down -- confirmed live independently via direct curl. The site is a single-page Cargo.site portfolio (sitemap.xml lists only the homepage) with no dedicated FIN? shop/product page, so no page count or dimensions could be sourced there. DR.ME's Twitter (twitter.com/drme_studio) and Instagram (instagram.com/drme_studio) were found linked from an associated DR.ME Cargo project page (waitingroom.press, contact email info@dr-me.com matches dr-me.com) but were not used as authors[0].url since the official site itself resolves Instagram content is login-walled and no FIN?-specific post could be verified.
