This post syndicated from https://pilotirwin.com/
When I was invited to be a part of Reclaim Open 2025, I decided I would use the opportunity as a challenge to do something I’d been mulling over for a long time: creating a zine.
I tried my hand at zine making while I was at Reclaim, for a project that unfortunately had to be put on the backburner. Since then, I’ve been curious about revisiting it, and seeing what would be possible. I’ve had a couple of ideas bouncing around. This seemed like a good time to try.
The challenge I set for myself was to make two open-source zines, print-ready, and blog about it in time for the conference. And, well, here’s the writeup!
Results
CTRL+S: Preserving Your Work for the Long Haul is a short primer on planning resilient digital projects and preserving and archiving them, so that when the time comes for them to be sunsetted, it’s easy for you to preserve their core attributes and archive them as best as possible.
Web-Native Cryptids & Creatures: A Spotter’s Guide is a little trifold fun-facts style starter guide to various web safety and digital literacy topics, in the style of an Audubon birdwatcher’s pamphlet.
Both of them are available as a for-print PDF and a more web-readable PDF (no need to download if you don’t want, you should be able to click through and view online). I’m not going to embed them here so that this post doesn’t become unreadably long.
Process
Before I started, I had the idea that I would actually try and make three zines. Then I sat down, tried to think of concepts, and blocked out a project plan for each zine. And then I changed my mind. Two would be plenty, actually.
Of the concepts I picked, I went with one serious one and one fun one. CTRL+S is based on work I did at both Carleton College and Reclaim Hosting, on how to create and preserve resilient digital projects. Web Native Cryptids & Creatures is based on the fact that when I was little I had a trifold birdwatcher pamphlet that was basically the coolest thing ever.
Naturally, the fun zine turned out to be a lot more stressful than the serious one.
Planning
The first thing I did was to decide on the structure. That would inform any outlining and writing, so even if I wasn’t actually doing layout right away, planning it still had to come first.
I wanted each zine to fit on a double-sided sheet of printer paper. The cryptid zine was going to be a trifold “spotter’s guide” style thing, so it could have six pages (three front, three back). There was no particular style in mind for the preservation zine, so I decided to go with eight pages (four front, four back). I figured if I had to divide each topic onto its own page, sixteen was way too many and four might not be enough.
The thing with laying stuff out for print is that stuff ends up in a weird order, upside-down, or both. I have several index cards that I folded and numbered in order to figure out what layout would end up having to look like.
Drafting
When in doubt, start with outlines.
Since the preservation zine was based on work I’d already done, I reviewed the original handout, identified the two main topics, and made a list of other topics that I’d learned more about since then. There was nothing that strictly followed anything else, but I organized it into an order that seemed like it would flow well for people new to the topic, and then started making bullet points.
The cryptid zine was meant to be a silly piece. I only needed five actual profiles, since one page would be for the title/credits, so I made a list of monster puns and then tried to narrow it down to the most plausible. But the actual writing was a balancing challenge: how do I make sure this is at least semi-useful… while also keeping it fun… and not too long… and also, what even is this strange thing called “humor”?
It turns out that writing about topics you’ve presented on countless times is significantly simpler than trying to be funny on purpose. Go figure.
Layout
Layout was my shining star amidst the trenches of writing. I spent more time doing it than I expected, but that’s because it felt like such a breeze that I would look at the clock and be surprised by how quickly the time had passed.
I had a genuinely great time playing with where the words would go, and how big, and what font, and what size margins. The slowest it ever got was when I spent an hour or two trying to manually set up a guideline grid that would match the cryptid zine’s trifold structure. Then I googled “affinity publisher column layout” and figured it out immediately.
This also served as an extra editing pass. Moving the words into Affinity Publisher meant looking for ways to trim the bits that were too long, and rearrange anything that didn’t make sense.
Illustration
I checked my notes from while I was doing illustrating and all I found was screaming. The illustrations were all for the cryptid zine, and they were part of what was so stressful about it. I used to draw more, but I’m very rusty, and the first day I tried it was dispiriting. All my ideas seemed terrible, and nothing I drew looked at all like I wanted it to.
I hit a point where I was just relieved that the preservation zine didn’t have space for illustrations, because the cryptid zine was freaking me out so much. It didn’t help that I hadn’t thought about the time I would need to draw, so it was getting very close to the deadline I had set for myself.
In the end I took a step back. I came back the next day, did some extra warm ups, found more reference images, and went, “This is the fun zine. What matters is that illustrating it is also fun.” I could be silly with it, I told myself.
And then I drew the Loch Ness Monster in sunglasses and a trenchcoat and had a great time.
Reflections
I’m glad I did this. For all my grumping, I had a great time with this project. Every time I hit a point of frustration, I would pause, take a break, come back, and almost immediately get in a groove. Giving myself two zines to switch between also helped a lot — when I was well and truly stuck on one, there was always something to do on the other, so I could just change gears.
There’s a bunch of stuff I was hoping to have done in time for the conference that, in the end, I don’t. I wanted to put together web-page versions and get them archived on the WayBack Machine, and I’m going to do that. I wanted to try interviewing other zine makers and blog about those conversations, and I didn’t get to it. But the goal for the conference was to have two print-ready PDFs, and I did manage that.
So if you’re thinking about making a zine, let this be your sign!
And these zines are openly-licensed, so if they’re helpful to you, please go ahead and use them! I’d love to hear about it if you do.
