Making a One-Page Zine: A Guide Based on "Bay Area Biking Babe Issue #44: Bike Story", January 2019

Went to the sandwich shop the other day. To distract myself from the blaring Soul Coughing records, I sought around for objects, eventually landing on the latest number of the "Bay Area Biking Babe" zine. After you finish skimming this article, why not listen to this interview with the author of this rad zine?

The zine's always a good read at the sandwich shop, but this time around, I wasn't just enjoying flipping through it. My buddy Mike had just emailed me about notebooks and my thoughts on them, and had suggested I make my own notebooks, including an idea about building in a longer/wider fold-out style of page, to accommodate some of my special needs, so I already had ideas about manipulating paper bouncing around my head, and I ended up reading it as much for "Hey, I should make one of these, too" ideas as for "Let's see what's going on in this writer's world today". (Which latter moment is a little ungenerous, and I feel bad about that and will try to fix it.)

Anyway, here's a way to take an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper and turn it into a seven-page zine with a front cover.

Start with a piece of 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper in landscape orientation. Fold it in half lengthwise, with the fold at the top.

(Folded lengthwise, with the fold at the top.)

Fold it in half again, down the middle, with the fold away from you.

(Folded in half down the middle, with the fold away from you.)

Fold each half, left side and right side, in half down the middle, away from you (fold pointing toward you). From the top, this will now look like a capital W—or, anyway, it should. Flatten everything out, so you're looking at it in portrait, with two folds to the left, one to the right. Now you're seeing the cover!

(Cover and first two pages.)

You have eight panels to work with, and can put whatever you can fit in there on them, but there's one caveat: as the page is laid out unfolded, half the panels will have to be upside-down. Schematically, it looks like so.

(Diagram of the basic layout.)

It seems to me like it makes more sense to start with page one, rather than the cover. But I can see this being a matter of preference.

Once you're done, it will read like the above. Very fun, very cool, very simple!