# Zine Making/Writing the pages

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To some extent the way you write your pages depends on what you\'re
doing. If it\'s a zine of your hand-drawn cartoons then your best option
is to hand-draw some cartoons. If it\'s an art zine then the appearance
is going to be defined by what you\'re trying to achieve artistically.
And so on. But here are some things to bear in mind:

## General considerations

-   For most copying purposes, **colour is much more expensive than
    black-and-white** (for photocopying, printing, etc). That\'s why
    most zines are in black and white. There are lots of things you can
    do to add a bit of colour, such as using coloured paper/card for the
    cover, or including one or two full-colour sheets in your zine
    (rather than the whole lot; it depends on your production method
    whether you can do this), or adding some colour after the zines have
    been produced.
-   If you\'re going to use a photocopier or a computer printer to print
    the pages, you\'ll probably find they don\'t print all the way to
    the **edges** of the paper, so you should probably experiment a
    little bit and make sure you don\'t go all the way to the edge on
    your \"master copy\".
-   Especially if photocopying, you\'ll probably find that **subtleties
    of lightness and darkness** won\'t come out very well. Stark
    black-and-white will photocopy most clearly.
-   If you have access to a scanner, try scanning the master copy to a
    computer instead of photocopying. Benefits include the ability to
    see exactly how the printouts will look, and the ability to make
    adjustments, without having to use paper and ink.

## Materials

### Pen/pencil etc

![](Pencil.jpg "Pencil.jpg") Hand-written / hand-drawn things can be
brilliant.

-   Remember the point above about being able to copy it - if you
    photocopy something done with **pencil** on paper, often it comes
    out really **faint**. **Biro (disposable ballpoint pen) can come out
    faint too.** You can fiddle with the photocopier\'s brightness
    settings to make it clearer, or if you can scan it into a computer
    you can make it come out much clearer and have a lot more control
    over it. Alternatively, just trace over the pencil lines with a dark
    pen. You might not like the way the lines can look doubled-up, but
    often the photocopier pretty much loses the pencil lines altogether
    and the end result looks pretty good.

### Typewriters

![](Smith_Premier_Typewriter.jpg "Smith_Premier_Typewriter.jpg")
Typewriters are great and can make good-looking text that\'s not as
boring as printed-out text from a computer, yet more legible than
handwriting\... but typewriters are becoming rarer and rarer these days
so for many people they might not be available. However you can get a
typewriter on eBay for pretty cheap, also check garage sales and thrift
stores or even ask friends or relatives who have updated to computers.

### Computers

![](Toughbook-cf-m34_4.jpg "Toughbook-cf-m34_4.jpg") OK, so computers
are capable of quite a lot, and we can\'t possibly cover all of it here.
You can type/draw things directly using your computer, you can add
photos from your camera/phone/etc, you can scan drawings/writings/etc
in.

-   If your zine is really quite text-based then a full
    **word-processor** like Apple iWork Pages, LibreOffice
    Writer, Google
    Docs, Microsoft
    Word or
    AbiWord can be fine.
    -   If you want to make your zine look pretty and have things laid
        out interestingly then a word-processor gets a bit limiting and
        it\'s difficult to stop things looking a bit samey, so you might
        find it better to just use a graphics program. Alternatively you
        can write your text, then print it out and then use
        cut-and-paste or whatever to organise/decorate the text more
        interestingly.
    -   In most word processors you can use the **columns** feature to
        help arrange things. For example, use the page setup to set the
        pages as landscape, then use the \"columns\" options to specify
        that there should be two columns on each page. Hey presto, you
        now have a layout that can easily be typed and then folded to
        make the standard *codex* (book-like) folded zine.
-   If you\'re going to be scanning and printing a lot, then a good
    **graphics program** is helpful. (The \"paint\" software that comes
    with your computer can be a bit frustrating!) Commercial programs
    like Photoshop and Paintshop Pro are well-known and they\'re very
    good. If you can\'t afford those, or even if you can, you should
    definitely check out the free and open-source equivalent, which is a
    piece of software called GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation
    Program). Despite the weird name, it\'s a
    full-featured and very good piece of software, and you\'re very
    likely to be able to do everything you want to do with it.
    Inkscape is also good, especially for vector
    graphics.
-   For **desktop publishing software**
    Scribus is free too.
-   LaTeX, a piece of Free software
    used for professional type setting, particularly in the maths and
    sciences, is another possibility.

### Cut and paste

A lot of zine-making involves cutting and pasting, to compile your
images and/or words. People also use it to incorporate things from other
sources.

We\'re not going to consider anything about the legal/moral/political
dimensions of making cut-and-paste works out of other people\'s stuff
here. It can look brilliant; but at the same time if you\'re just taking
someone else\'s work and dropping it into your own zine then you
haven\'t really done anything.

Practically, remember the thing about contrast if you\'re going to be
making copies. Also remember that if you\'re cutting-and-pasting from
**glossy** paper (such as magazines) then it can sometimes photocopy
really badly because the gloss on the paper just shines when it gets in
the photocopier, and you end up with a bright white thing instead of
your desired image (at least partially).

If you\'ve cut and pasted your stuff all together then it can be very
helpful to **photocopy** it to get a kind of \"master copy\" that
doesn\'t have bits everywhere.

### Photos

Photos rarely photocopy nicely. Choose ones with lots of contrasts, not
too much detail (e.g. a face rather than a crowd of people) and that
aren\'t too dark. If you can, you can probably improve results by
scanning a photo, adjusting it (fiddle with the brightness, **increase
the contrast**), and printing it back out again.

### Sewing

I\'ve seen some really good zines that make use of sewing, cross-stitch,
and crafty things like that. If you\'re going to be photocopying or
something like that, then you can still do crafty things like this, as
they can often come out quite well when copied (you\'ll need to have
good colour contrasts though). If you\'re going to hand-make the crafty
bits on each copy then of course you have more freedom and can make
perhaps more exciting items, but of course you need dedication\...

