Not faults of the stars, just my own
I’d like to use this brief intermission to share a few things I’ve learned the hard way, so that you don’t have to.
I’m not great with rulers. I often find the line tilts ever so slightly; I’m learning to make peace with it because it seems that’s easier to manage than a steadier eye. Figure out if you need to do the same.
Freestyling your font isn’t as bad as you think, but you have to practice different sizes and versatility, or you’ll quickly feel whack because all your zines sorta look the same.
Sometimes less gives you more of what you wanted, and more will leave you less satisfied. It takes a few zines to find this happy medium, but most of the time, go ahead and add the thing (people tend to appreciate artsy accents).
As a follow-up: trust the process. Even if you mess up, you can manage to recreate the cover and you might tweak it to be even better, but you gotta trust that you can figure that out on your own.
Document the process, so when you talk to people about being a zinemaker and they ask you for examples, you have something to reference other than in-progress pictures or “…” thought bubbles.
Use as much of what you have before you go get extra supplies, and DON’T think you need the fancy stuff! All of my supplies have been sourced from home, the Dollar Store, or the creative reuse center I work for (the best place EVER if you have one in your city, look for it!). It makes you all the more creative to figure out how to make designs work without tech assistance.
Divvy your duties! Do not try to cut and glue and make copies for your zine, let alone multiple zines, all in one day. You will burn out and need a week to recover; use the week instead to break up the tasks.
MAKE A MASTER TEMPLATE. Do not try to assemble the cover, the individual pages, and whatever else EACH TIME you have to put together a zine. That’s how we started with Emotional Baggage, and if I tried to keep going, I’d never make another damn suitcase. Imagine the design, create it on one sheet, then copy/cut/paste as needed into your zine format. I recommend having your OG copy and one good copy, so you can preserve the former and have the latter handy dandy (see #5).
Of course you should make what you like, but you’ll love what you make if you can craft it to be relevant & useful to others as well.
Don’t listen to gatekeeping haters who think a zine has to look and read a certain way. It’s your art, it’s your say.
