s i t a h W a zine? Before blogs and twitter threads, there were zines. Zines are a DIY publishing format that falls somewhere between pamphlets and leaflets, cheap to produce and easy to consume. Zines publication is an industry that doesn’t ask for institutional endorsement or funding; their history is thoroughly countercultural and rebellious.
The word ‘zine’ comes originally from the abbreviation of fanzine, created by sci-fi enthusiasts of the early 20C who used the homegrown medium as a forum for dialogue, free from corporate editors or publishers. That same DIY attitude is what drew punks of the late twentieth century to embrace fanzines as a complement to their music. The punks used zines as means to challenge mainstream ideologies. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, zines became the main communication and publication forums for movements like Queercore and Riot Grrrl.
Lo-fi DIY The original zines took nothing more than a sheet of paper, pens and magazine cutouts, & a xerox. They were created to be easily printed & remixed in one’s local copy shop. Many zinesters still preserve this style and limit their medium to what can be achieved by folding an A4 paper. If created to empower communities to share it among themselves, zines usually have limited colour palettes for cheap reproduction. The DIY style is still often still visible in traces of production e.g. handwriting, torn edge and use or tape and staples
What
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As a completely anarc hic model of publication, zines have historically not abode by copyright ru les. Any image or text was fair play fo r their editors, as a counter-cultural a ppropriation and remixing of mains tream media. The creative sampling (modelled on punk and hip-hop) an d the rip-andmix element of zine pr oduction also muddled the waters re garding copyright. What make s an image an original piece of work ? Does chopping, reproducing and remixing count as ‘fair use’? W hat about imagery that is copyw ritten as nonderivatives (ND)?
Zines have historically been about democratising models of publication, showcasing marginal voices and making knowledge (whether about bands or political views) widely available. This lawlessness regarding copyright could appeal to historians, whose original material should technically be out of copyright for many centuries yet is hoarded by wellfunded institutions. Zine culture does not endorse theft of intellectual property but encourages challenging the concept.
Robin Hood?
Materiality and the analog experience For me personally, zines are (among others) about recentering materiality when thinking about knowledge acquisition. The zines I create are messy and show signs of the creative and rough finishing process. When choosing the form your zine will come in, think about the experience you want your reader to have. How will they encounter images and ideas? Will they be linearly and laterlarly adjacent, or would one need to flip the page to get to the next bit? How would the reader navigate the information, and the space created by the zine as it unfolds?
-it’s not just about fold and stapleThink about the way you want your zine to be encountered. Would it be exposed to the elements? Would it be part of a collection? This should dictate how you finish off your zine. Zines based on one A4 page usually just get stapled or handstitched together. Nonetheless, others can come in paper envelopes, clear card sleeves. matchboxes or tin cases, bound by elastic bands or taped together in a DIY waterproof cover.
Deciding on a theme Just like with a blog or a conference paper, deciding on a theme for a zine is a process of whittling down a topic to a very specific argument or point. Think about one piece of evidence that you’d like to show to someone – something that you could talk about for hours. How can you frame an argument around this piece? Zines don’t have to be serious – while some are activist and political, many are funny. Consider the tone of your presentation. Keep in mind that text-space is very limited in zines, and verbose zines are much less popular than those that SHOW you what they mean. Use historical images and infographics to argue your point.
Designing a zine Aside from the theme of the text, you should also consider a coherent design for the zine. Keeping a tight colour palette, similar techniques of manipulating your paper and visual sources, or even a coherent way of signalling titles or emphasizing information can go far to ensuring your zine is beautiful and grabs the reader’s attention. If your zine is very text heavy, add some visual flair through collage.
Once you have a theme, think about the main point of the argument or the few facts that you want to share. You can jot them down on post-its and experiment with sequence and clusters. You should limit your main ideas to a number following this formula: (X total pages / 4 ) - 2 This way, you have one point for each page of the folded zine, without forgetting about the title and bottom cover. While you can start your story on the very first page, people usually reserve this for a splash cover; the back cover can also serve as your bibliography, recommended reading or acknowledgments.
One of the most important decisions you will have to make is the format of the zine, or the type of folding and assembling (stapling, binding, packaging) you will use. You can take inspiration from many paper goods for this process: leaflets, campus maps, business cards, booklets etc. Classic zines are usually made of A4 or A3 papers (either printed one of double-sided) folded and stapled. You can take a cue from the historically most popular zine format that uses one side of an A4 to create a four-page booklet.
It is very helpful to have an iterative design process, where you switch between manual production and printing as you go along. This ensures that you will be happy with the final text sizes, true colours, page orientations and where the folds will fall in your final zine. A complete prototype is called a master copy – the file that you will scan and print from. If your production method is completely analog and you have a physically-assembled master copy – a ‘flat’ – make sure you allow margins, so that all your content will be printed.
Template This can be the most annoying and fiddly part of making a zine. Depending on your format and folding pattern, you will need to pay attention which direction your pages will go and whether when you print, the page should flip on long or short side. The easiest way of figuring out how to set up your pages for print – and how many pages and spreads you have for your story – is to create a blank mock-up from a piece of paper. Note the page numbers and directions directly on the page, then unfold it.
Once you have produced all your pages, you will end up with a master copy. If you have individually designed your pages you might want to keep them all the same size and ensure they fit within the flat. You can design your pages at any scale, keeping in mind legibility and how they will fit as a zine. For example, you can design eight A4 pages that you can then shrink down.
You can opt to produce your zine exclusively digitally or to keep the tradition of analog rip-and-mix and scan your final product. This zine for example has been produced as a combination – backgrounds were physically made and scanned before digital text was added.
Enhancing the material qualities of the collage techniques is a great way of making things interesting without overwhelming the reader. Traditional collage techniques rely on juxtaposition of clipping of printed material, handwriting and typed text. You can also use stamps, stickers, staples, tape, glitter or any other crafting material available. You can add threedimensionality through frayed edges or adding bits with blutac so that they stick off the page. That way, when scanned, they will leave a shadow on the page as the scan light hits them.
Sharing your
Now that you have a zine, think about how you want to bring it to audiences.
You can leave a stack of your zines at the coffee shop down the street, or donate it to your local zine library. Usually people buy and trade zines at zine fairs and in independent book shops. Don’t expect to make money off your zine – it’s about sharing knowledge and covering print costs. You can choose to have an analogonly zine, a digital-only zine, or a combination. Issuu.com and blurb.com are free publishing platforms.
Measuring impact
You can quantify your impact by keeping track of numbers and corelating it with how long ago you published the zine. Keep a record of how many zines you print and share.
If you digitise your zine and share it online, there are native tools for websites that will tell you how many views and downloads each published output garners over time. Consider sharing your digital zine through custom short links. These can then give you a lot of insight into how people share the link.