Hole zine is the product of Broos Stoffels’ mini golf obsession

Sometimes the best projects are the ones where we let our niche obsessions take the stage. Publishing then, becomes a very useful tool to share our newfound passions with anyone who might want to see them in print. For designer and art director Broos Stoffels, a long term interest in mini golf was the making of his latest zine Hole: a publishing project that compiles his research and visual experimentation surrounding the competitive sport.

“I find the small varying tracks and the different obstacles very charming. The way they are designed and embedded in a local landscape express a lot of creativity to me”, he tells us. Solely printed in green with a slender format, the artist’s zine cleverly nods to the conventions of the game, with a physical hole that runs from cover to cover “connecting the various text, image and illustration pages”, says Broos. From miniature flags containing page numbers, to the round eyelet staples that bind the book’s contents, everything is mini golf crazy in every detail. The publication’s pages are filled with dense bold typography that dances around the book’s perforation, with the colophon typeset to place all of the vowels O under each other and then erasing them to create a track toward the hole. To top it all off, Broos decided to print his green publication with Riso for its distinctive grainy texture, giving the book’s surface its grassy, golf course feel.

The project started as a “clumsy dummy” of a book, 11 years ago when Broos was studying at LUCA School of Art in Ghent, where his research led him to come across a text by historian Jonathan Haeber on how art movements influenced the designs of mini golf courses throughout history. “I found it very interesting how these simple course designs somehow always seemed to follow current styles and movements”, he explains. Inspired by layouts of the field from the 19th Century onwards, Broos fancied giving it a go himself, designing a number of mini golf courses in a range of shapes and sizes, 18 of which he later compiled into the publication: “the same amount of tracks you play in a mini golf game”.

Now, 10 years later, the project has been revised and republished by Aubergine Press, the newly established publishing house Broos runs alongside graphic designer and illustrator Tim Colmant, in Brussels. With Jonathan Haeber’s words in the introduction, along with the sources and reference photos from historical mini golf course designs, the book compiles all of Broos’ playful golf course drawings, tied up with a scorecard and some mini golf rules for a humorous epilogue. When speaking about the press, Broos tells us that himself and Tim have been sharing their work and ideas with each other for years. “After talking about publishing our own zines for a while we finally joined forces last year and founded Aubergine Press”, he says. Much like Hole, the duo plan to work on many more small runs and illustration-based editions in future, so as to platform the work of other artists and hopefully take us down the track of a few more of their niche interests.