What's a zine?

"What's a zine?" is an 8-page mini zine that you can download and print on your own. It includes a brief introduction to zines: what zines are, some historical highlights, and common formats.

A hand holds a mini zine titled "What's a zine? A brief introduction." The title is printed in black on white paper.

The zine is available on Ko-fi for free (or pay what you want).

Download zine on Ko-fi

The PDF is sized to print on one sheet of 8.5 x 11-inch paper (standard U.S. letter size).

This zine is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), which means you're welcome to distribute and share copies for non-commercial use.

If you don't know how to fold this kind of zine, search for "how to fold an 8-page zine" on YouTube to find tutorials.

Original or the clone

The Philly Zine Fest is accepting submissions for their Anthology zine. I made a collage with a bit of text I've been waiting to use somewhere.

Black and white collage that shows a woman's face, cut in half. One hand is above her head and the other hand is resting on the opposite cheek. An eye is in the top right corner. A different eye is in the bottom left corner. The text says, "Some of you have never figured out if you're the original or the clone, and it shows."

The background is photocopied aluminum foil (for real!). I simply cut a piece of aluminum foil and made a copy of it. Then I crinkled the aluminum foil a bit and made another copy. That became the background for this page.

The woman's face and hands are stock photos taken by Ospan Ali, available on Unsplash.

The text is something I wrote a while ago and hadn't found a place for...until now. šŸ˜‰

This collage is a very different style for me, and I really like how it came out! The great thing about submitting to zines is that there's room to experiment. It feels like low stakes, since it's only one page.

Halloween collage

I contributed a page toĀ Webs Across the Campfire, vol. 2, a special Halloween zine from Vlasinda Productions. Copies are availableĀ in their shop.

For my page, I wanted to make a collage. I had paper from myĀ ink color experimentsĀ to work with. I cut these into shapes for clouds, a moon, and pumpkins.

Paper cut-outs of purple clouds, an orange moon, spider webs, and pumpkins.

For the spider webs, I drew on black cardstock with a white gel pen. Then I photocopied the webbing, so I had sections to work with.

Hereā€™s the finished page, with text I printed and glued on, a clip art house I modified, and black cardstock for the hill.

A collage of a haunted house with pumpkins and spider webbing. The background is a purple and blue sky, with clouds and an orange moon. The text says "A dark and scary night is not so scary. Sometimes fear is simply the absence of knowledge."

How to lay out a zine in Canva

When I worked on my zine, ā€œTimers for Travelers,ā€ I finished the writing first. I knew I wanted illustrations throughout the zine, some hand-drawn and some digital. I decided to lay out the zine inĀ Canva so that I could combine text, digital elements, and hand-drawn elements.

Iā€™m really happy with how the zine came out, so I want to document my process. This is less a tutorial of Canva and more a walk-through of how I used it to put together my zine.

Canva is a free tool for graphic design. Although there are paid tiers, everything in this post was done with the free version. You can use Canva directly in an internet browser and there are apps you can download, too. If you havenā€™t used Canva before, youā€™ll need to create a free account.

Create a new file in Canva

Click on theĀ Create a new designĀ button and then click onĀ Custom size. Enter the dimensions for your zine pages. For example, a quarter page zine would be 4.25 inches wide x 5.5 inches high. This file becomes yourĀ working file.

Make your zine

Make the pages of your zine with whatever method works for you. You can write text directly in Canva. I find it easier to do all my writing first in a word processor (I use Google Docs) and then copy and paste text into Canva.

Canva has a lot of graphic elements and images you can use for free. All the photos available in Canva are stock images from Pexels and Pixabay, and they are royalty-free.

Since you can upload images into Canva, you can draw on paper and scan pages. Then upload your drawings into Canva, and add them to your working file.

Note: Add page numbers last! If you're making pages and don't know what order they're going to be in yet, don't number pages. Instead, add page numbers after you have pages arranged in the order you want for the finished zine.

Print your zine

I like leaving my working file as is, like a draft. So when itā€™s time to print my zine, I make a copy of the working file (FileĀ >>Ā Make a copy). This becomes theĀ print file.

Since the pages will be printed on 8.5 x 11-inch paper, cut, folded, and stapled, they need to be arranged in the correct order for printing.

To figure out the print order of the pages, I make a mock-up version of the zine with scrap paper. There are lots of ways to do this. Hereā€™sĀ how I figure out page order.

Go to the print file in Canva and rearrange the pages for printing. You can drag and drop pages or use the up and down arrows above each page to change where they are.

When I'm moving a lot of pages around, I like working in grid view. Click on the button in the bottom right of the screen that looks like a stack of papers with a number on it.

Screenshot of a zine layout in grid view in Canva

When you're done arranging pages, download the print file as a PDF. Click on theĀ ShareĀ button (top-right). Then click onĀ Download. For ā€œfile type,ā€ choose ā€œPDF Print.ā€

Open the PDF file on your computer. Go to print settings. Find the option for pages per sheet, and change this to 4. This will print 4 of your zine pages on one 8.5 x 11 piece of paper. Make sure two-sided printing is selected.

Print your zine. Cut the pages in half horizontally and then fold them. If you ordered the pages correctly in Canva, then the pages should be in the correct order when you assemble them as a booklet.