13 Comments
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polytropos's avatar

this is something I've been thinking about recently as a beginner zinester so thank you for this!!

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Brigitte's avatar

Starting out with zines can be like an essay where you can write whatever you want, so it becomes hard to think of anything at all. I hope this is helpful and enjoy making zines!

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Nicole Bradbury's avatar

Love this, thank you! I have a long history of making Microsoft Word my bitch, and that needs to end 😝

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Brigitte's avatar

Haha yes! And you're so welcome.

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Mari's avatar

Saving this for my next zine!

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Brigitte's avatar

That's awesome!

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Jill Florence Brooks's avatar

What do you use to format your zines? I love quarter page and have been trying to figure out for a while the best way to do it using indesign but I think they only have a half page option for their book formatting. Thanks for this resource!

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Brigitte's avatar

You're so welcome! Personally, I use Canva, but that's after a very long time doing the traditional cut/paste/copy. I you take a blank piece of paper and pre-fold it, then number the pages, when you unfold it you can easily see where the pages go. You can either print your pages to fit the template, glue them in, and photocopy it; or, you can create a document in Canva and "paste" the pages in digitally (flipping them upside down in Canva is easy). You can see what that looks like in my previous post (the free mini zine). I hope this helps!

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Yvette's avatar

Extremely helpful—thank you for writing this and making it widely available.

I’ve only experimented with zines three times and not sure if I’ll make a fourth. But if I do, I definitely want to try a different format.

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Brigitte's avatar

Oh wow, I really appreciate your comment! I wasn't even sure the article was necessary or it if was too "inside baseball," so knowing that it was a benefit really means a lot <3 I think we all have formats that work best for us (half page is mine) so maybe experimenting will help you find your match.

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Lien's avatar

thanks! will be helpfull in the future.

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Ross Hori's avatar

In Europe and other bits of the world, the A sizing system is really useful. A4 is the common size for a sheet. Fold it in half and that's A5. Half again is A6.

Makes life nice and neat as the proportions are the same for each size.

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Brigitte's avatar

Oh yes, I'm aware. Sadly we have to use the copy machines around us, so these sizes have become fairly standard in the US. You'll see a lot of zinesters using A sizes in my Zine Rec posts though.

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