#zine layout

So, I don’t know if you know but I have a bachelor’s degree in Communication Design. Therefore I will be more thorough than I’m going to be on book-keeping and other stuff surrounding zines that I do not have a degree in.

First of all, I’d generally advise you to have an actual designer on your mod team, or outsource this portion to a designer/design student who focusses on layout and typography. Despite popular belief, only because you can draw well, it doesn’t mean that you’ll be a good designer, and vice versa. There are people who are good at both (like me, if I may say so myself), but it’s not the rule. So yes, that’s a thing.

But now, what if you don’t have someone to take over this part and you need to do it yourself? Or you are a designer but just never worked in print before?

Things I will stress is, get yourself a program specifically for designing layouts.

The most widely known/used one is InDesign from Adobe, the most recent version is available through their Creative Cloud subscription (which is ridiculously expensive but guess who is Booboo the Fool and pays for it because it’s industry standard) - students can get it for 50% off though, if you register with your uni email and stuff. Same goes for faculty members if I remember correctly.

There are also old Adobe Creative Suites available (try looking for CS6, that’s the latest before the CC came into the game), which also include old InDesign versions. Maybe you can get your hand at those. I’m not telling you to pirate software, absolutely not, how could I, ABSOLUTELY *DON’T* LOOK FOR PIRATED ADOBE CREATIVE SUITE 6 for your zine endeavours.

Another, much cheaper, option that also can open idml files from InDesign is Affinity Publisher, part of Affinity’s roster of design and photo software. I tried the demo and I think it works just fine, especially if you are not familiar with InDesign anyway. If you are used to InDesign, though, it needs quite some adjustments because it’s close but different, so get acquainted with the program.

If you have the EX version of Clip Studio Paint, you technically could also make your zine within that software, however, I would only recommend it if you have no text to work with, and to my knowledge you can also not really incorporate a design grid. For purely illustrated zines, though, it can work.

I’m sure there are more softwares out there, but I can’t really say anything about them, how they might work or anything like that. One thing though: for the love of everything that’s dear to you, please DO NOT use Microsoft Word or the OpenOffice/LibreOffice equivalent. They are not supposed to do what you need to do to design an actual quality zine. Here’s a quick checklist that you really should keep in mind while searching for a proper software.

Things your layout software definitely should have:

CMYK and RGB mode (CMYK for printed zines, RGB for digital zines)

the option to add bleed to your pages (printing)

option to export as printable and interactive PDFs

option to see and export your file as spreads and single pages

automatic pagnation options

grids. design grids will be your bread and butter

text fields that you can push around on the page

MASTER PAGES/SPREADS

paragraph styles

option to add more than 2 pages to a spread (printing)

option to change page sizing for a single page (printing)

page borders to avoid cutting away from important features like text

hyperlinks and text/page anchors (digital)

major formatting customisation for text, especially with finetuning for leading and kerning

layers (akin to Photoshop layers, mostly to make your life easier)

Now, this isn’t the be-all, end-all, but this is the very baseline you need to do your zine’s design and layout. In future parts I will deal with each individual discipline like text formatting, images, design base rules and other shenanigans. Those I will cover with the Adobe CC simply because that’s the tools I use on the daily, but I’ll try to keep them as general as I can so you can apply them to your personal choice of software.

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