Showcase your photos in a ZINE

Zine Up your Life!

Last week, I received my proof for a zine. I wanted to try this one out through a printer I had heard good stories about.

This Dutch printer, drukwerknodig.nl, has templates available for InDesign. Now I don't use that, I work with an open source programme Scribus. Bit like the look of Windows 94, but does what it needs to do.

As a matter of fact, I produce the quarterly issues of Darkrooms Magazine using just Powerpoint. There - once you have created a template - all you have to do is paste everything in. Since I work with PowerPoint on a daily basis, this is a great solution for this purpose. Pictures and text, no exciting typographic highlights or complicated visual collages and so on.

Recently I’ve seen zines dropped by

Xavi Buendia

,

Andrew Eberlin

,

Susanne Helmert

,

Wesley Verhoeve

and

Dennis Sewberath Misser

to name a few. Because I see more and more zines passing by on Substack, I posted a Note last week.

There are quite a few reactions to this. It seems that photographers actually do it. Great! Some are using InDesign, but most said they were using Affinity Publisher. Unlike Adobe, this is a one-off purchase, not a subscription model. Interesting.

I looked at Affinity Publisher and watched some tutorial videos on YouTube and I have to say that the interface looks pretty good, similar to Photoshop/Lightroom and On1 (the photo editing software I use). You can try it out for free and then take advantage of the low cost offer. I think I will definitely take up that offer.

But back to my zine. I have another great venue during the upcoming Art Fair Culemborg (the second largest art fair in the Netherlands) at the end of September. In addition to the work I will be exhibiting on the 7-metre wall at my disposal, I also want to have a zine ready that visitors can buy for a small price. So I wanted to make a proof to see if the quality of this printer was adequate. I have to say that I am impressed with the quality.

First proof zine

This gives me confidence that I can quietly have a more elaborate zine produced with more pages, more photos and more text.

The printing many of the people who responded to the Note had done with Mixam, a printer I had never heard of before, but I saw that they have a presence outside the US and UK in Germany, so I may have to get a proof done there as well.

But for formatting I will probably try Affinity Publisher.

I'm curious about your zines, so please comment and include a link to your zine(s). Please also indicate if it is free or if there is a charge. I will also post links to Darkrooms Magazines in the comments.

Zine Up your Life!

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That’s it for this newsletter.

Till next time,

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