Create a Zine in a Day: From Shoot to Print in 5 Hours

It seems like a lot of people are curious about how to make a zine, but many hesitate when it comes to making their first one. But as I wrote in a previous edition, "Zines Are Like Mix Tapes. They Don’t Have to Be Polished." 
I truly believe that you should just make one without worrying too much about the quality.

Once you make one, you’ll start to notice things like the size, layout, and other details, which will lead to new ideas for your next project.

So, for those of you who are thinking, "I want to make my first zine!", I decided to take on a little challenge today.
I completed the entire process from shooting photos to printing and binding a zine, all in a single day! It actually took me about 5 hours.

After reading through this, I hope you’ll feel inspired to start making your own zine. Alright, let’s get to it!

Table of Contents

• 🚀 From Shoot to Print: How to Complete a Zine in …

  • ⏱️ 2:00 PM: Head out with my camera

  • ⏱️ 4:30 PM: Editing the photos

  • ⏱️ 5:00 PM: Printing at a convenience store

  • ⏱️ 6:00 PM: Binding at home

  • ⏱️ 7:00 PM: Finished!

🚀 From Shoot to Print: How to Complete a Zine in 5 Hours

⏱️ 2:00 PM: Head out with my camera

In a previous edition, I talked about how important it is to have a theme when making a zine.

Since my challenge was to complete everything in one day, I chose the theme "Instant" and headed to Shinjuku to capture how quickly things are created and destroyed in Tokyo.

I wandered around Shinjuku. The sun was strong today, so I was able to shoot a lot of high-contrast photos.

⏱️ 4:30 PM: Editing the photos

After walking around for about an hour and a half, I took over 100 photos. From there, I selected a few and did some quick edits.

⏱️ 5:00 PM: Printing at a convenience store

Here we go, it's time to print!

This time, I went with the quickest option—printing at a convenience store. I’m not sure what the options are in your country, but if you're in the U.S., you could print at places like FedEx Office.

Since the theme for this zine is "instant," I kept the layout in chronological order. I loaded the photos saved on my SD card into the copy machine and started printing. I ended up printing about 50 sheets.

⏱️ 6:00 PM: Binding at home

I could’ve used the prints from the convenience store as the cover, but since the paper was thin and gave off a cheap vibe, I decided to buy some nicer paper for the cover from a stationery shop while I was out shooting.

To give it a more polished feel, I went with a traditional Japanese binding method called "watoji." I’ll explain how to do watoji in another edition.

I also printed out a title page at home.

I wanted to trim the white borders off the convenience store prints, so I stacked the cover, title page, and inner pages and cut them all together.

After that, I used clips to keep the pages from shifting and punched four holes. Then, I sewed it all together to complete the binding.

⏱️ 7:00 PM: Finished!

And just like this, my zine Instant is done! I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

After making a final selection from all the prints, I ended up with 37 photos, and including the cover and title page, it’s an 80-page zine in total.

Here’s the breakdown of the costs:

• Convenience store prints: ¥430 (≒2.78 USD)

• Cover papers: ¥39 (≒0.25 USD)

• Total: ¥469 (≒3 USD)

See? I managed to go from shooting to a finished zine in just 5 hours! And honestly, I’m kind of surprised myself at how good it turned out—way better than I expected, haha.

That’s it for this week’s newsletter.

Thanks for reading until the end! You should definitely try making your own Instant zine too! It would be amazing if people all over the world started creating instant zines, and one day we could even host an event just for instant zines. How cool would that be?

And I’d love to feature zines made by subscribers, so if you’re working on a zine or have already made one, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram.

Alright, see you next time!