Teeny Zines: A Guide to Simple Zine Making

 Zines! You know them, you love them, and since you’re here, you must want to create them. Below, you’ll find three ideas (with detailed steps) for the formatting and creation process of your zine, ranging from under ten to over one hundred pages--if you’re ambitious enough. But first, an overview of zines (just in case you don’t actually know and love them yet).

What Are Zines?

There is a concrete answer to this as well as a whimsical answer to this, and I’m delivering them in that order. Zines, basically miniature magazines, are self-published works generally created at little cost and in small quantities. They have a long and interesting history within many communities, serving as a valuable form of expression and method of distributing information and ideas. Though webzines have popped up in recent decades, print zines are often characterized by DIY elements throughout the creation process, from the content on the actual pages to creative forms of binding said pages together.

Less concretely, zines can be almost anything! Both the content within and the creation approach have very few limitations. Your zine can be drawn or painted, collaged or printed, digital or written--perhaps even a combination. It can hold art, poetry, political ideas, personal narratives, and so on. It can also be completely abstract; it’s entirely up to you! Pretty whimsical, methinks.

What do you want to get out of the creation process? What do you want readers to get out of the finished product? These questions are the only help I can offer toward the content within your zine as the substance is yours to create, but I can lend you some ideas on the formatting end of things based on three different lengths of zines that I’ve created (or collaborated on) in the past.

Option 1: Easy Six-Page Zine

You can make a simple six-page zine (or eight if you’re including the front and back cover) with just one sheet of printer or sketchbook paper. This option is particularly easy because it doesn’t require any stapling, sewing, or other binding methods--you only have to fold it! The bare necessities for this project are the aforementioned piece of paper, a pair of scissors, and a pencil. Of course, I’d recommend additional crafty items for the page designs, but these three things are all you need to make the skeleton of your zine.

I’ll detail the folding (and cutting and labeling) process below, but if you’re more of a visual learner, I recommend checking out this short YouTube video from The Oregonian that explains the same idea. Here’s my attempt at offering an explanation though.

1. The first step is simply folding the paper a few times to make sure it has the proper creases that divide it into equal sections. To do this, fold your paper hotdog style. Next, without undoing the previous fold, you will also fold it hamburger style. Finally, you will fold it hamburger style once more. You should be left with a small rectangle, and when you fully unfold the paper back to its original size, you will find that the creases create eight of those rectangles. 

2. Now you will fold the paper again, but this time to cut it. Beginning with your now creased paper, you will fold it once hamburger style. You should now have a piece of paper folded in half, showing four rectangles on each side. Along the folded seam (equivalent to where the binding of a book would be), you will take your scissors and cut halfway across the center crease. From here, you can unfold the paper again.

3. If you thought the last step was confusing, let me apologize in advance for this one. Now, take your cut and unfolded paper and fold it once more hotdog style. Next, you want to pop open the middle of your paper into the shape of a rhombus. To do this, you can take both ends of your hotdog-folded paper and push them together so that the cut area in the middle is pushed out to take this shape. Once you have the rhombus shape, you can flatten the sides of it together and fold it over into the booklet. Again, if this does not make sense, I cannot recommend the video enough. The steps truly are simple, but explaining them without a visual aid makes it sound pretty wacky.

4. With your zine folded into its proper booklet form, you can now take your pencil and lightly mark the order of your pages. This way, you can unfold the paper to work on the pages in the correct order before refolding the finished product.

Though this sounds like hours upon hours of folding, I can assure you it only takes a minute. My explanation is much more convoluted and long-winded than the actual process.

Option 2: Sew It Up

While the first option is great for how short and simplistic it is, there may be times that you need more than six pages to complete your zine--and more space per page than one-eighth of a sheet of printer paper. When that time comes, I recommend this more flexible option.

The number of pages is up to you, but it does have to be divisible by four. (That shouldn’t be the end of the world though; add a dedication page or some artwork for filler if needed.) Other than the amount of paper already decided by you, you will need a needle and some thread or very fine yarn. Plus, you’ll still want a pencil. While it's not necessary, I personally recommend a piece of construction paper or card stock as well in order to create a cover for the book that differs from the pages within.

Unfortunately, I did not find a video tutorial for this option, but I think the written instructions are simpler to follow without the many hamburgers and hotdogs of the previous method. Maybe it’s just as confusing though! You tell me.

1. For this option, you will only have to fold each paper once, so relax. First, determine the number of pages you want within the zine. As an example, I’ll be choosing forty pages. Now, I’ll divide that by four to determine how many individual papers I’ll need to create it. In this case, I will need ten. Now, I will take my stack of ten papers, one on top of the other, and fold them all in half hamburger style. Thus, the ten papers (equally twenty pages when you count both front and back sides) become forty pages.

2. With the papers folded, you should already see the shape of a book. From here, you’ll want to take your pencil and number the pages in the order they appear in while folded over into this book. Numbering is important because the outermost paper is both pages one and two as well as pages 39 and 40. The only piece of paper that is truly linear is the very center one, which becomes pages 19 through 22 in my example. If you choose to complete all of your pages on their own and then to assemble and bind them together afterward, it is extremely helpful to have them numbered to avoid any confusion or mistakes.

3. This third step is optional, depending on whether you’re using a different type of paper for the cover of your zine. If you are, simply fold that sucker hamburger style too and put it around the other pages like a jacket (or, you know, a book cover). With the cover in place, you can carry on to the next step.

4. Finally, it’s time to bind your zine (assuming you’re done with your pages, or bold enough to design them after the zine is fully formatted). To do so, you will now thread your needle and open your zine to the center pages. In my example, this would be pages 20-21. To keep the pages together, carefully sew along the center seam, making sure to push through all of the pages. A thicker stack of papers might make this a bit more difficult, but I believe in you. You are stronger than pieces of paper. You can do this.

While I’m biased toward the six-page zine for how quickly the craft can be completed, I do prefer the look of zines with sewn-up binding. I think it looks quite charming, but if you don’t find this method as appealing, you can swap out the needle and thread from step four and replace it with a few staples down the spine instead.

Option 3: More Than A Day’s Work

This last option is for massive overachievers and/or groups collaborating on zine creation. While the previous two methods have detailed the creation of one-off zines, this time I will explain how to produce a bigger batch of them, if you so desire.

First and foremost, this option is a bit more costly. You’ll need access to a copy machine, ink, and paper of the right dimensions. In my experience, this has been somewhere around 11 x 17 inch paper. Also from experience, printing in black-and-white has been more effective, not only for the cost, but for the clarity of the copies. Additional materials will come up throughout the rest of this section.

For this more significant project, rather than telling you the small-scale step by step instructions of folding paper, I’m offering a broader description of my own experiences with zines of this size. Because the scope of this project is vast, your methods may deviate from mine at various points, so the fine details would be overkill. However, I still hope that sharing the process as I’ve experienced it will give you some helpful pointers for your own work if you’re drawing any blanks, wondering how to proceed past a certain point, or unsure of what to expect from the whole thing. If you find yourself left with any lingering questions, feel free to leave them below and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability.

The two times that I have worked on zines of this caliber have been in a university setting, in collaboration with about a dozen peers. Before we ever put pen to paper or laptop to charging cord, we had a lot of groundwork preparation to get through. Let’s gloss over that extensive process now!

Our zine required many interviews with groups of people whose voices we wanted to showcase. We had to contact those individuals, set up interviews, assign peer groups and prepare ourselves as facilitators for the discussions--and, of course, follow through with said interviews. From there, we came together and compiled our information, organized all of the themes that would appear in our zine, and assigned themes so we knew which pages we were responsible for completing. Then the more creative aspects came into play.

With a dozen people making zine pages of our own design, many of us chose different methods to highlight our unique styles. For me, the variety within both zines from these these projects will always be exemplary models of the endless creativity that zines allow for. While some of my peers went for a handwritten/drawn route with their pages, others created their pages digitally on Canva or Medibang. Personally, I tried both and found digital pages to be easier in this case, given the time constraints of our project and the ease of correcting digital mistakes. Despite the ease, the hand-drawn pages were very rewarding to finish too!

Though zines do allow for much creative freedom, our success would not have been possible without a set of guidelines to tie all of our work together. For one thing, we had to adhere to specific dimensions for our pages, including a half inch border around all sides. The inner border accounts for the zine’s binding, to avoid any of the page’s actual design getting sucked into the crease. The borders around the rest of the sides are safety nets that allow for the pages to shift around slightly during the copying process without losing any of the actual content.

For those of us creating handmade pages, our materials were limited to things that would lie flat on the page to later copy correctly. For example, we could glue a magazine cutout onto the page, but not tape it in. We could include stickers, but not a raised rhinestone, and so on. Creating digital pages entirely avoided the chance of running into issues with this guideline.

Lastly, and also in relation to the copy machine, we had to make sure everything on our pages would show up and read well. For people making pages by hand, this meant opting for markers and pens over the faintness of pencils. It also meant taking pictures of a page and applying a black-and-white filter to it in order to gauge whether or not the colors on the page would translate nicely into grayscale. When it came to creating the digital pages, using filters to assess the translation to grayscale was a viable method too--though I chose to make my pages in those hues from the get-go.

When everyone had created the first drafts of their pages, we brought them all in for review among our peers, and then edited them accordingly. At this point, we also revisited our list of themes and organized them to create a table of contents down to the exact page number, thanks to everyone bringing in their drafts. It was also time to generate and narrow down name ideas for the zines. (Not to brag, but totally to brag: my name idea won the first time I participated in this project.) Deciding on the name also meant that we could work on the front cover's design.

After editing, all of the final drafts of our pages were gathered and handed to the editing team to prepare for the master copy of our zine. First, all of the pages were counted, put in order, and numbered. Then, because the size of our zine differed from standard printer paper, each page was cut out if necessary (without cutting off the borders). Next, it was time to glue all of the pages in their correct order for the master copy. As I discussed in the last method, the zine was made with many pages folded in half, and our page count had to be divisible by four. Refer back to that section for the explanation on how the folded pages and page numbers interact. The only difference here is that the last method deals with forty pages while these projects totaled over 200 pages.

With all of the pages glued in, it finally became time to use the copy machine, scanning all of our pages in to create a master copy that the rest of the copies of the zine would be created from. The master copy is necessary because it gives you a first look at how the pages truly appear when put through the copy machine, which somewhat differs from the handmade and printed pages glued in. If pages aren’t showing up correctly in the master copy, you have an opportunity to fix that before creating a hundred zines that are hardly readable.

The master copy was then handed off to the copying team--shocking, I know. For our projects, we made copies for everyone we interviewed, everyone within our own team, plus a few extras. With all of these copies made, they could then be handed off to the binding team.

Despite the hundreds of pages within our zines, we were able to bind our copies by stapling them down the center. This method is straightforward and likely a time saver compared to others if you have a lot of copies to get through. However, our zines were thick--nearly too thick for this option to work. If you have much more than 200 pages, I would seek out other methods of binding, though they may be more costly.

After binding, the zines were complete! From here, we just had to distribute them. All in all, each of these larger-scale projects was completed in about eleven weeks--the length of a school term. A lot of time and energy went into the process, and in both cases it was a race against the clock to get through the editing, copying, and binding, which were all crunched into roughly four days each time. In a perfect world, an additional month of time would have helped the processes and final products turn out more polished and less chaotic.

I don’t mind it though. The chaos is what makes the zines so special.