Date Party
Shooting, designing, and writing a zine about dates from the Coachella Valley.
For Date Zine, our goal was to trace the story of the Coachella Valley through its most symbolic fruit: the date. We set out to understand how a desert crop became an emblem of California’s agricultural identity—and what’s at stake as farmland gives way to development. Through Laura’s photography and Colin’s writing and design, we combined fieldwork, archival research, and design to reveal the cultural, historical, and environmental threads connecting the region’s past and present. The result is a zine that reads like a travelogue and looks like an art object—an invitation to slow down, look closer, and taste the landscapes that feed us.
Date Zine became both a record and a catalyst—a way of seeing how storytelling can preserve what’s disappearing.More than anything, it affirmed our belief that design and storytelling can sustain the cultural ecosystems that agriculture leaves behind.
You can purchase the print edition here, or the digital edition here.
Our research also prompted an article in Sourced Journeys, a public research project aimed at developing lines of inquiry into our relationships with food and drink.
Read the full article: The Bitter Future of California’s Date Industry
