Let's make a zine! (Patreon)

Okay! So now that I have at least two "seasons" of the food zine done, I thought it would be time to turn them into proper zines! How does that happen anyway...

Well, it all starts in Photoshop!

My friend Sfé is a zine master so they gave me this template to use. It's set up to use one regular 8.5x11" sheet of paper. As you can see, to make the pages work right when it's folded, you have to put them in this kind of funky order. 

The next bit is as easy as drag and drop! I have all the pages here in my folder. *.TIF files are the high resolution ones I keep for printing. 

There's a bit of tweaking that happens here... you want the pages to be not too close to the center fold, and you also don't want anything to get cut off by the printer. The template doesn't show where the printer will cut it off (because it's different for every type).

I can see here in my print preview that I have to nudge things a bit more inwards so it doesn't get cut off. Ok! Time to print :)

Sexy, exciting print action. I forgot to turn off the guidelines, oops. That's why we do test prints! I set up the second set of pages using the same process. Honestly, figuring out how to turn the page so it feeds in the printer properly is the hardest part of this. 

And voila! I use this little paper cutter to chop things, and with two quick folds it's magically transformed. (When I make zines "for production" I borrow a much higher quality guillotine, but it's too large to keep at my house :( )

I make some notes (like page number, and how I think things should be nudged) and then fix it in the photoshop version. 

Next, I move to a program called INDESIGN to make the pdf version. 

As you can see, I'm ripping off the template for Go Veg because they're all the same size. If I were printing this as a half page booklet, Indesign would be able to do the print layout for me! I don't know if it can do 4-up, but if it can I haven't figured out how yet. If I could do that I wouldn't need to bother with Photoshop, and everything would be a lot more intuitive, I think. This is the same process I use to lay out a bigger book by the way (like the Wasted Talent books).

Okay! Go Veg OUT, food zine IN! The little printed one is very handy for making sure I put pages in the same order. (Normally I have the plot to carry me through, but this zine's page order is kind of arbitrary. I just chose what I thought looked good!)

That's about it for now. My next step is figuring out the cover, so I can't finish this yet :0 We'll see that...  next time...