Listen up, fellow travelers, punks, nerds, and riot grrrls—it’s time to talk zines. You remember zines, right? Those scrappy little booklets full of art, poetry, political rants, and deeply personal overshares that we swapped at record stores and coffee shops in the 90s? The DIY, anti-corporate, cut-and-paste magic of the counter-culture? Yeah, we’re making one. Right now.
Step 1: Find Your Vibe
What’s your zine about? It can be anything—your road trip misadventures, your cat’s increasingly bizarre food preferences, a deep dive into the parallels between “The Legend of Zelda” and late-stage capitalism (ask me about how Link is the working class). My latest zine, Packing Pride: Traveling While Queer and Trans, is all about navigating the world as a queer traveler. Think about what you’re passionate enough to staple together and distribute to unsuspecting strangers.
Step 2: Get Your Supplies
Old-school zine-making requires:
- Paper (stolen from your day job? We won’t judge.)
- Scissors and glue (or a willingness to embrace chaos)
- A printer or a copy shop with lax oversight
- A stapler with enough rage to punch through multiple pages
- Magazines, newspapers, doodles, ransom-note-style cut-out letters—whatever speaks to your soul
But hey, this is 2025, so you can also go digital. Tools like Canva, Affinity Publisher, or even a Google Doc can get you there. The DIY spirit is what counts. For my zine, Packing Pride, I took the new-school route, laying everything out in Canva—I reasoned that my preferred software, Adobe InDesign, is too high-end for this endeavor—and getting a small batch printed at a local printer. The professional art director side of me clashed with the DIY punk in me, but in the end, they found a way to coexist—sort of.
Step 3: Layout and Design
Old-school method: Cut out text and images, glue them down, and photocopy that sucker into existence. The weirder and more chaotic, the better.
Digital method: Lay it out on your software of choice, but don’t make it too polished. A zine should feel like you assembled it at 2 AM fueled by caffeine and righteous anger.
Pro tip: If you’re printing, make sure your pages line up so that when you fold and staple, the order doesn’t look like a cursed manuscript.
Step 4: Print and Assemble
DIY copies? Run them off on your home printer until it groans in protest. Copy shop? Pray they don’t ask questions. Riso printing? If you’re fancy.
Fold, staple, and BAM—you have a zine. You are now a published author, congratulations.
Step 5: Get It Out There
Back in the day, we’d leave stacks of zines at punk shows, bookstores, and random coffee shop bathrooms. You can still do that. But also:
- Mail ‘em out (zine swaps still exist!)
- Sell on Etsy or Big Cartel
- Upload a digital version on Itch.io or Gumroad
- Bring copies to zine fests and make awkward eye contact with other zinesters
Just Make the Thing
I spent my youth wanting to make a zine but always putting it off. Now, with Packing Pride, I finally did it. (How did I have a major Bikini Kill phase as a teen and not realize I was trans?) Zines are messy, weird, and deeply personal—and that’s exactly why they’re worth making. So grab some scissors, embrace the chaos, and start creating.
Stay weird, stay loud, stay DIY.
✂️📎🖤