Zine-Making Night

Welcome to Your Zine-Making Night

A zine is a tiny magazine you make yourself, badly, about whatever you want. That's the whole thing. No publisher, no quality bar, no audience beyond the people in the room.

The version I'd start with is the one-page zine — a single sheet of printer paper, one cut, a few folds, and you have an eight-page booklet. It costs nothing, it takes forty seconds to make, and the constraint is the magic: eight small pages is almost nothing, so there's no room to be precious.

The fold

Do this once yourself before anyone arrives so you can demo it without reading instructions.

1. Fold the paper in half, short edge to short edge. Crease hard.
2. Fold in half again, the same way. Crease.
3. Fold in half one more time. You now have a little stack. Crease everything well — this is what makes the final booklet sit flat.
4. Unfold completely. You should see eight rectangles in a 2 × 4 grid.
5. Fold in half the short way (so it's long and thin — the fold from step 1).
6. Cut along the centre crease, from the folded edge inward, stopping at the middle. You're cutting through the middle two rectangles only, making a slit in the centre of the sheet.
7. Unfold, then fold the long way (hamburger-style), and push the two ends toward each other. The slit opens into a diamond, the pages collapse together, and you have a booklet.
8. Fold it flat. Front cover, six inside pages, back cover.

If that reads like furniture instructions, it's because written folding instructions always do. Demonstrate it slowly, twice, and let people copy you. Everyone gets it on the second go.

Important for the demo: number the pages 1–8 on an unfolded sheet first, then fold it, so people can see which rectangle becomes which page. The back and some inside pages end up upside down relative to the sheet. Knowing that before you start drawing saves a lot of swearing.

Nobody needs to be able to draw

This is the sentence to say out loud, early, because at least two people will arrive believing they're disqualified.

Zines that are entirely text are great. Zines that are lists are great. Zines made of magazine clippings, with no original marks at all, are great. The form is about having something to say and eight small boxes to say it in.

The materials to put on the table reflect that: alongside pens and markers, put out a stack of old magazines, scissors, and glue sticks. The collage option is what unsticks the non-drawers, and it reliably produces the weirdest, best zines of the night.

Prompts that fill eight pages

The hard part isn't making the booklet, it's deciding what goes in it. Vague prompts ("make something about yourself") produce ten minutes of staring. Prompts with a built-in structure produce finished zines.

The good ones have a natural list shape, because a list maps onto eight pages without anyone having to plan:

• A guide to something extremely small. How to make your specific cup of tea. How to greet a cat. How to get off your particular subway platform fastest.
• Eight things currently in my bag, one per page, drawn badly, with commentary.
• A map of somewhere you know by heart — your walk to work, your childhood house, the inside of a shop that closed.
• An unsolicited review of a chair, a street, a month.
• Every meal I ate last Tuesday.
• Advice to myself at nineteen, one piece per page.

Say that finishing is optional and mean it. Plenty of people make two half-zines instead of one whole one, and that's a perfectly good evening.

How the night goes

1. Fold first, decide second (15 minutes)

Everyone makes their booklet before anyone has an idea. This matters more than it sounds: holding a physical, empty, eight-page object changes the question from "what should I make?" to "what goes on this page?", which is enormously easier to answer.

Have everyone make two while you're at it. The spare removes the fear of ruining the first one.

2. Pick a prompt (10 minutes)

Read the list out, let people choose or invent. If someone's stuck after a couple of minutes, give them the bag one — it's concrete, it's funny, and it works for literally everybody.

3. Make (45–60 minutes)

Music on, talking allowed. Zine night is not silent; the cross-talk is half the fun and people steal ideas off each other, which is the tradition working as intended.

Two things to keep topped up: blank sheets within reach, and a bowl of cut-out magazine scraps you prepared earlier. A pile of pre-cut images is far more inviting than intact magazines, because flipping through a magazine looking for the right picture eats twenty minutes.

4. Read each other's (15–20 minutes)

Don't do presentations. Put every zine in the middle of the table and let people pick them up and read them. It's less exposing than standing up and explaining, and people linger over them properly.

Then swap. Everyone goes home with somebody else's. This is the bit that makes people come back.

Making copies

If somebody wants their zine to exist more than once: unfold it flat, photocopy or scan the sheet single-sided, then fold the copies the same way. One sheet in, one zine out. No stapling, no collating.

A library or a corner shop copier is five cents a page. Twenty copies of an eight-page zine costs a dollar and feels genuinely like publishing.

Variations & Ideas

• Jam zine. Everyone makes one page, you assemble and copy the collective result. Good for groups where some people are nervous about the whole object.
• Monthly issue. Same group, same title, new issue each month. By issue four it has in-jokes and a letters page.
• 24-hour zine. One sitting, start to finished copies. Exhausting, extremely fun.
• Reading-adjacent. Make a zine about a book everyone's read — pairs well with a book club.