I’d like to develop some kind of scale to show what a reader can expect from a zine I author, in terms of their reading experience and perception of the effort and care that went into a given zine. For example, was it hand-lettered in one sitting with a few grayscale images pasted in, or does it have extensive digital design work (and digital font, possibly allowing denser legible text)? Does it represent significant research and/or creative writing, or is it something quicker (like a short quick blog post)? I’d like to create all kinds of zines, and I think having language for different kinds of approaches could help people know that when I share I’ve made a new zine, it might look different from my zines they’ve seen in the past. I think these are all great forms of zine to have in the world, though, so I don’t want to use language that treats one level of time/effort/etc. as inherently higher “quality” or better, than another.

I liked the idea of “trash games” that Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux shared at a past workshop for the Scholars’ Lab—the idea was to create more quick, probably crappy art/games, as a way to enjoy making things, make more things, expand your game design knowledge in ways that could ultimately contribute to non-“trash games” as well. I like the “make more bad art” idea I saw on a laptop sticker somewhere.

I’m a bit uncomfortable with using “trash” to describe this kind of zine (assuming I make some), given classist/racist/gross applications to people and cultures it’s been part of. I also don’t think such games, zines, other art actually are trash—they’re worth sharing, preserving, discussing, and I don’t want people unfamiliar with the term to assume otherwise. I do dig how a term like “trash zines” could be freeing in terms of lowering a mental barrier—just sketch a thing! Don’t worry if the writing is legible to others! Include arrows when you realize you ned to move chunks of text elsewhere! And maybe you just have some personal creative enjoyment, which is enough in itself. But it might also help you get comfortable with sharing or polishing a zine?

I’ve been thinking of “initial rise” for Zine Bakery homemade first-draft zines, but that depends on my running bread puns. I also think initial draft is not the same as deliberately crappy zine sketching in spirit or outcome. Regardless of what terms I end up using, I think developing a list of features I sometimes include in zines I make could help in how I describe them—things like what kind of research went into a zine, amount of time spent on art and layout, maybe other kinds of media formats I think a given zine approximates (e.g. journal articles vs. quick blog post).

Ideas for other ways to refer to this kind of “do bad art quick” than as “trash art”/trash games/trash zines? Let me know! (e.g. on Bluesky; check out my friendly academic/DHy guide to Bluesky if you aren’t on yet!)

I recently published my first zine! I actually fully drafted another zine just beforehand (on letterpress printing!), but for whatever reason I finished this lasercutter cheatsheet zine draft first.

Very excited to finally finish making a zine!

I’ve drafted a couple zines online using Google Docs in the last year or so, but never completed them. (One was from notes on Miriam Posner’s cool Scholars’ Lab talk on the tech underlying the ethical choices of global logistics systems, and one was on the “#DHmakes: Baking Craft into DH Discourse” article I cowrote with Quinn Dombrowski and Claudia Berger.) I’ve wanted to make my own zine for a while, and I think it happened now because:

• I took a 4-day intensive letterpress printing training I was really excited about, and taking notes to help me remember what I learned each day involved a fair amount of sketching. That probably made me think of using a standard 8-page minizine layout as a way to organize the notes—that layout folds a sheet of paper into 8 parts (fold in half once across vertical axis, fold across horizontal axes to divide those two parts into eight parts).
• I realized that I liked hand-drawing/lettering the zine a lot better than I did struggling with GDocs not wanting to support zine layouts well (GDocs no longer allows custom page sizes, and its tables have issues for page sizing too; Canva felt like it would end up looking too not like my personal style, though I still want to try using it in the future.)
• I met with Ammon Shepherd, Scholars’ Lab’s makerspace expert and lead, to get a training refresh on our new lasercutter. I took a few notes on paper, then more afterward while preparing to try lasercutting something by myself the next day. Again, the combination of a sequence of steps and needing to sketch rather than write/type some parts made a zine feel comfortable as the format.

5 things I learned while drafting these two paper zines

(Noting the second zine, on letterpress printing, isn’t finished/published yet—but a first draft was done 8/2024.)

1. Leaving space on the sheet around each zine page, during the first draft, really helped with organizing and layout (and with not worrying too much about placing things wrong then needing to move to a new sheet of paper). For the letterpress printing zine first draft, I used both sides of the minizine-folded paper instead of the intended eventual one side, which let me use the page space below each real page as a pre-drafting zone. You can see where I drafted the idea of a Vandercook press sketch in the lower-left, then sketched the full thing in the upper-left:

   

   For the final version of that zine, I’m switching to a larger page zine and different folding format (see #2 below) that will print to legal-size paper. I didn’t have any of that size paper yet, but I made drafting templates that fit two pages per sheet, with lot of space around them for layout notes:

2. Folding standard 8-page minizines is annoying—you have to pay a lot of attention to lining up each edge, and creasing carefully. I started a table to track what different sizes of paper + folding techniques produced, in terms of final page dimensions and number of pages, so it’s easier to select something that fits my needs (such as making such a zine fits into an acrylic brochure holder I’d bought for sharing small zines).

   

3. I forgot to leave space around the margins for printing. The lasercutter zine PDF looks fine, but when you print (even using “borderless” or no-margin settings, on some printers) the place the printer grips the paper might not get inked, and text/images at the edges get cut off. (If you don’t fold precisely or leave space around the folding lines, stuff can get cut off/moved to the next page that way, too.) I started to use Photoshop to move things in the PDF around away from those places needing more space, so the whole zine could print. I’d assumed that simply scaling down the zine wouldn’t work, given that the folding-in-eighths would still hit in the same places on the sheet—but it occurred to me to try printing at a slightly smaller scale (96%), and that actually solved the whole issue? A little annoying to have to tell people to scale when printing, but for a first zine, that’s fine by me.

4. I enjoy doing small, neat lettering, so handlettering in the minizine’s small space was fun. I made it until the final line before my brain glitched and I wrote the wrong letter in a word. Luckily, I was able to use what I infer is a time-honored zine technique: covering the typo with a pasted-in image. I promptly purchased some whiteout, too. (And I can always fix things after scanning, using Photoshop—but I like the idea of the final paper copy being accurate to the PDF.)

5. I researched and bought a $70 scanner, so I could take better zine scans from paper zines at home. I used standardish white copier paper for the lasercutter zine, but the texture of the paper still kind of came through in the scan? So I’ll need to experiment in the future, if I want zines digitized from paper to have their backgrounds look as clean as digitally-produced zines. Or maybe just accept that’s part of the charm.