Create a photographic journey zine

This week, I'm going to talk about how I created my first zines. If you have read the article Signing up for a zine fest (even though I did have a zine yet), you already know that a zine is a small-scale paper publication about any topic. And you also know that I signed up for a zine festival without ever having done a zine. Between the time I knew I was selected for the festival and the date of the festival, I had 3 weeks to create and make at least one zine and prepare my booth. 

Turning old into new

From the moment I signed up, I knew that the whole process was new to me. So the raw material for the zine had to be something I already knew how to do. Very quickly, I turned to photography and especially to photos that I had already taken. Since one of my photos had won a contest in November, I thought it would be a good idea to start there and I decided to use the photos I had taken on the Kroad theme. Kroad is a street in Auckland. I had between 7 and 9 good photos from that day. This corresponded to the shape I wanted to give to my zine; an A3 sheet, folded, which makes a small booklet with 8 pages. 

Scavenger hunt idea

I had a doubt about people buying my work, I didn't know if it would be enough, so I had the idea to make a scavenger hunt on the back of the zine. I took a concept I had used for my best friend's 30th birthday: point out several places on a map, give clues and match the two. Here, you have to put the pictures with the place where I took them in the street. This concept being easily reproducible, I thought that, if I had the time, once the first zine was ready, I could make several zines with different themes and locations. 

So I had the concept, the themes and the photos. It was time to move from the idea to the practice.

Digital layout

To begin with, I decided to handle everything digitally and print the final result. I could have done collages, hand drawings, writing, layering, photocopying, but at first the idea of just making a frame of 8 photos seemed simple and I didn't want to spend too much time on it either.

I started by using Canva which is a free website that I use regularly to make simple layouts, but I realized that Canva does not allow exporting documents in 300 dpi, which is necessary for quality printing. So I had to turn to Illustrator which is a software for creating vector images. It's not usually the software you would use for layout, but it's what I had on hand. It's while testing it for zines that I wanted to go deeper into the subject and I tried to make a collage. Go read Create a digital collage where I talk about it. 

So here I am, on a software I know nothing about. I started by spending 45 minutes not understanding why I couldn't find the recommended grid tool in a tutorial. It was a display bug and I finally found a keyboard shortcut to get around the problem. 

Grid problems

Then came a problem that was not related to the software itself, but to my mathematical understanding of intervals. I don't even know how many hours I spent to find the right number of column and rows I needed for my images to be placed in the 8 pages of my booklet. Honestly said in words it sounds super simple but I think it was the most complicated part of this whole adventure. We're not much after all.

Artistic choices

Once the grid technique was integrated, I moved on to the artistic choices. For example, in what order to put the images? I decided to put photos that had a common element such as vegetation or bottles face to face. 

I reduced the number of photos to seven to make a cover page with a title, the date of the photos, my name and my website. I would have liked to have a picture on the front page so that people could understand quickly what the zine is about but I couldn't find one I liked enough so I gave up. I made a white front page with black text and there again a little battle was fought. Because in addition to struggling to choose fonts that I liked and that went well together, I realized that I couldn't export them all for legal reasons. For those who don't know, if the fonts are not exported in the file and the printer doesn't have the font in question on his computer, the printed result will not be the one expected.

Scavenger hunt

When the front of the zine was finished, I still had some time to try to make the scavenger hunt on the back. I wanted to use the info from Google Maps and simplify it to make it look a little nicer, kind of in the spirit of the wall map trend from a few years ago. I searched for hours for tutorials on how to do this, simply because I didn't want to believe that people were drawing this by hand. I didn't find it but by combining two or three tutorials and with a lot of trial and error, remember that I didn't know how to use the software a week earlier, I finally managed to get the desired effect. I put the method on Tik Tok, if you are interested. 

The second step of the map creation was to place the points and thus to find the exact places where I took the pictures. For Kroad, it was easy. Everything is located on one street, I know the place well and I remembered where I took the pictures. I also did the exercise for my photos in Wellington and Christchurch and there I spent hours because they are photos I took on vacation where I was walking randomly on the streets, without really paying attention. But I finally managed to find everything thanks to our good old friend Google street. So I managed to make 5 zines with pictures on the themes of Kroad, Wellington, Christchurch, Waiheke and the waters of New Zealand. 

Printing

The last step was to bring these files into the physical world by printing them. At first I thought I would go through online services and have the copies sent to me. But, because I was afraid I wouldn't receive them fast enough and because it would reassure me a bit to talk to a human for this first try, after a few days of procrastination, I went to ask for quotes in the print stores around my home. 

Then a cyclone passed over Auckland so I couldn't leave my house for a few days. When the sun came back, I went back to the printer who gave me the best price. It turned out that we had misunderstood each other and that he was the most expensive. I must admit that I still don't understand how printing prices are calculated. I have the impression that there is a fixed price and that the price is then degressive per page when the number of pages and/or copies increases. You then have to estimate how many copies you can sell while keeping the prices as low as possible. 

I decided to print 10 copies of each zine, which I had bundled into one file, which cost me $120 so $2.4 per zine. I think I could have lowered the price a lot by asking for double the number of copies, but I didn't want to keep too much stock and I didn't even know if I was going to sell even one copy. 

Fold and cut

Finally, I folded and cut the copies to make the booklets. I used a folding tool and a cutter to help me. Here is a tutorial on how to make this kind of booklet from a sheet. I thought the folding and cutting activity was going to be boring but finally with a good podcast, the 2.5 hours went by pretty quickly and it was very satisfying to see the work progressing so clearly.

This zine project kept me busy for 3 weeks, not full time of course, but I thought I would get there a little faster than that. However, I'm very proud to have finished it. I created 5 zines from my photos, learned the basics of software and printed my work for the first time. 

Thanks for reading this article! Next week, we'll talk about the zine festival in question. In the meantime, find me on Instagram at @elisabnfs to tell me what new thing you did this week and if you have any ideas of things I could try on Illustrator.