How to create your own zine
Essential tips on drafting, design, and formatting
Last time, we published a basic guide to e-book design for the indie writers who want to publish decent books with little effort. Inspired by the idea of helping amateur publishers cast a light on their work, this time we created another guide — for designing real-life printed zines.
What is a zine
For someone who is here by a lucky chance and new to the genre, a zine is a limited distribution media, often self-published, and containing a variety of possible content: texts, photographs, art, etc. Zine is a short from Magazine, being most often a very simple and DIY form of one.
Zines may not only perform as a product of personal creativity and entertainment, but can also be a real-life marketing tool — for a small craftsman business, a restaurant, or a gallery. It is an elegant way to express your vision, tell your story, incorporate UGC (User Generated Content) into your strategy, and generally just showcase what you do and what you want people to know about it.
Now let’s get busy!
What you need before you start
Just like cooking a dish, zine design needs some ingredient prep. Make sure you have everything at hand so you can jump into the process like a warrior.
Idea
What is your zine about? The whole design and production will depend on it, as you must communicate the core agenda, values, and moods through all the details.
Think carefully of what is the message you want to share with the readers using your content. What benefits do you want the readers to get from reading your zine? What feedback do you expect? Do you want to lead the audience to any next steps?
Once you are sure what your future zine is about, create a moodboard and outline the key points in your notes app or a blank document.
Structure
The structure is the most fundamental part where you build a map for a reader that will help them go through the journey and arrive just where you want them to. It may come to you naturally, or it may need some workaround.
Have a look at your notes. Highlight the most important topics to make them your future chapters and arrange them. Make sure to include a good intro and tailor it to your reader’s portrait.
Your zine might be a simple, visual-first album of pictures and graphics. Or it might be a more complex, text-rich piece that needs an elaborate skeleton.
Content, lots of it
At this point, you know better what goes into your zine. Depending on how prepared you are, there are some tricks that can make your content more engaging and performative. Here are a few tips, feel free to grab:
Be generous with visuals. Even the text-first zine should include some illustrations and graphic elements. Many people are visual thinkers, and supporting their reading with resonating images can improve the digestion of information.
Include reader’s content. It may or may not fall into your concept, nonetheless, everyone likes a feeling of community and belonging. By adopting a UGC strategy for your zine, you can acquire genuine loyalty. That is, if you plan to issue more volumes and build a community around your media or brand.
Invite collaborators. On the one hand, working collaboratively on a zine can ensure greater flow of ideas, and on the other — secure a wider audience reach. You can make a whole collaborative publication, or include sections built together with fellow creators.
Offer perks. Nothing makes people more engaged than an offering that goes beyond paper. Think free sticker packs, recipes, or partner gifts (if you are creating a zine as a business). You don’t want to seem desperate for engagement, so make sure your perks are organic and in harmony with your agenda.
Moodboard
As mentioned before, prepare some sandbox to get an additional creative boost and draft your visual concept. A moodboard will help your direction, and make your output look and feel whole.
You can use some easy, automated moodboard tools like Pinterest or Are.na, or have some fun with paper and scissors.
ONLYOFFICE
What you will definitely need to design and build your publication is software. ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors is a free, open-source application for document editing where you have all the necessary tools for working with text and fonts, layout features, a palette of visual objects, and ability to export to any format including PDF for printing. Go for a cloud version to add collaboration with your pals and create your zine as a team.
A little magic
Now that you have everything you need, sleep on it, take your time to think of your future zine. It will surprise you how many new ideas your brain will throw in over time.
Rest well, put the busy world aside, and get down to it!
How to create a design
Now to the most important and exciting part. Any media begins with a layout which should comprehend the readability, the visual impression, and the print work.
Impress while keeping it readable
Possible layout can range from regular and modest, like that of a book or a magazine, to quite experimental and quirky, all depending on your creative vector. Do not be afraid of unusual ways to place and wrap texts or divide them by multiple columns. The most important part is to keep the content accessible for the audience: what is meant to be read should be readable without much effort, and the navigation should stay intuitive even if looks complex overall.
Keep in mind the typical eye movement patterns. Most left-to-right readers tend to skim pages left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Hierarchy of elements on the page should always follow this rule.
Two most common eye movement types are a Z-pattern and an F-pattern. The Z-pattern is used for content that has mostly visual information, and the F-pattern is for rather text-rich pages.
Stick to the visual hierarchy. You must emphasize on the most important and primary information, and arrange the general or complimentary content around. For example, use font types, size, color, and contrast to lead through the headings and highlight the important quotes. Page-wise, contrasting areas will attract the attention first, and you can lure the reader to important parts using colors and shapes.
Organize with proximity. Put the elements closer or further from each other to let the reader know how they are related. Draw visual blocks on the page to organize the information.
Manage the imagery. Fine-tune the wrapping and use blank spaces to make your illustrations stand out, or avoid those spaces to make them blend in with the texts.
Add styles. You can even mix different styles for images, texts, and backgrounds on the page to group your content blocks.
Give space to visual materials. When your zine or its part is about showcasing some visual objects like images containing art or product photos, the images should take up as much space as necessary. 1:5 ratio between image and its description is only justified when the description is five times more important than how something looks.
Lay a foundation for printing
When working on your design, you should already think how you are going to print your zine. This is where you should add margins and bleeds. What are those?
Margins. Use the margins to leave white space between important page elements and the edges of the page. Those are here to keep you content safe when the pages are being cut, folded and bound. The minimum margins should be around 20–25mm. In ONLYOFFICE Docs, you can set them yourself or select from a wide range of standardized margins to avoid struggle with manual settings.
Bleeds. This element is also crucial in printing and is used for elements that go beyond the trim edge of the page, for example, pictures or illustrations. Make sure to have a bleed allowance of at least 3mm on each side. This means that your page should be 6mm longer on each of the sides.
The best way to control all these elements is having your page rulers on. Check the Rulers box in your View tab to enable them.
When everything is set, print a page using your printer for a test. This can be a rough sample of what it will look like, so you can add all necessary changes before sending it to print.
Export your zine in printable format
Once your zine is ready, it’s time to export it. You can use a PDF format, which will allow you to print the zine without any distortions, as well as distribute a digital copy that everyone will be able to open in a browser or a PDF reader.
To export a file in PDF in ONLYOFFICE editors, go to File >> Download As / Save As >> PDF.
Summary
A zine is quite an interesting niche media that can be an artwork in its own sense, or a way of communicating ideas and showcasing products, or an instrument for building a community. Originally a part of DIY craft, zines do not follow the casual rules of how you create, design, or produce them. Nonetheless designing one requires knowledge of how to organize content and communicate your message.
Knowing the basics of design and having a handful of well-structured ideas will let you create a nice zine for any purpose, be it your personal endeavor or a form of marketing.
And when it comes to actual work, ONLYOFFICE is here to help!
