My zine is gonna be 4¼ x 5½ inches, a quarter the size of an 8½x11 sheet of paper. That's not a lot of real estate, so I'm still trying to figure out what the cover is going to look like.
I designed the logo to mimic redtop supermarket tabloids (Daily Star, Daily Mail, Daily Record, National Enquirer, National Examiner, etc.), but those all have very cluttered covers with as much information packed into as little a space as possible, like a TV news station with chyrons and over-the-shoulder graphics and sidebars. If I tried to replicate that, the cover would be an illegible mess even at the finest print settings (my print options are very limited; the one and only copy shop within 50 miles of my house just closed down, so I'd have to either print the zines myself or find a place online that'll print them for me and then waste a ton of money on shipping)
I'm thinking the cover needs to focus on one story at a time, fittingly enough like Time, or Life, or National Geographic, a single prominent image to advertise the cover story with a few lines of text mentioning the other big articles within.
I'm thinking something along these lines
A quarter-inch border around the whole thing, a square inch box for the date and issue (this was inspired by old National Geographics, but they stopped putting the volume and issue numbers on the cover in September 2000). This leaves a 3.75 inch square for the cover image
I never realized how much magazines relied on ads, not just for funding but for filler. Every single magazine I own has dozens of full-page ads just to pad the length. The back cover is an ad, the inside front and back covers are ads, they use ads as page breaks between articles, the entire last five or six of pages are chock full of nothing but ads like movie credits or TV bumpers, "this magazine was made possible by..."
I don't want to leave any pages blank, I refuse to put any ads in my zine (not that I have sponsors anyway, so that's a moot point), and I don't want the whole thing to be pointless filler as I stretch shorter articles across multiple pages, so I'm either gonna have to scale it back from 32 pages to 16 OR I'll seek submissions from friends and readers (it's presumptuous of me to assume I'll even have a big enough audience to solicit submissions, but I'll burn that bridge when I get to it; let me have my delusions of grandeur for now)
I'm gonna post each issue of the full zine on the official Some Times blog, but I still plan on printing physical copies and mailing them to subscribers, as few as there may be. That was the whole point of this endeavor, I specifically wanted to bring back physical media and recreate the feeling of having a magazine subscription in the early 2000s.
I still don't know what the back is gonna look like...
