My Photo Zine
I had a dream, like many other photographers, to have there work printed in a book. And like many others, that is still a dream but what about a small "photo book" called a Zine. There are websites dedicated to designing and printed these Zines. However, I decided to go down the do it all yourself route. Design - Print - Finish.
Apart form the images needed to put in the Zine, you will need some sort of design / publishing software. I had that covered because I have being using Affinity Photo for the passed few years now and when they released Publisher it was a simple choice to make. The Affinity software collection : Photo - Designer - Publisher interact together perfectly jumping to Photo to edit a image inside the Publisher app. So enough of the free advert for Affinity.
I'm not going to boar you with the long drawn out process of selecting what images to go into the Zine. You have to go through that process yourself. So, after many days, weeks of selecting the images or maybe like me I decided on the amount of pages I wanted in the Zine first. Then all I had to do was select 12 images to put in the Zine making the process a little bit easier.
Below is the Bective Abbey front cover layout in Publisher. And yes your are seeing double. I have a interesting way of producing and printing my Zines:
The design is centered around a A4 size page ( 210mm x 297mm ) . The Zine is A5 in size and this is half the size of A4 so I can fit two Zines onto one page.
Still with me ?
Next I print the A4 design on to A3 paper in a booklet form ( now I have lost you ).
The final printed pages are then cut and folded to produce the final A5 Zine.
Full disclosure time....
My daytime job is a Engineer for Gannon Office Solutions. I install and repair Canon Photocopiers., Large Format Inkjet printers and the small output production printing imagePress machines. I have access to a imagePress in our showroom for customer R&D. All the hard work of printing the final layout of the Zines is done on this Canon imagePress machine. I also have access to a vast selection of different paper stock. After trying different paper for the cover and inside pages I wasn't happy.
The next process is what way you are going to finish the Zine ( i.e. binding ). In many ways this was the hardest decision to make. After many attempts, I settled on a black cotton wool to tied the pages together through a small hope punched in the spine to keep with the Do it Yourself idea. I could have let the machine in work staple and fold them into the finish product but where's the fun in that.
And that's who simple it is to make a Zine or you can go online and let them do all the work.....
My Photo Zine Etsy Shop link here < LINK HERE>