Your Personal Photographic Project as a Zine

There are no rules for making a zine. It’s a format open to creativity and interpretation. These magazine-style, print-on-demand pieces are contemporary, polished, and affordable—perfect for displaying and sharing personal photographic projects. The possibilities for structuring images within a zine framework are endless, stretching from traditional photographic portfolios to more abstract projects that blend storytelling elements including writing, poetry, and personal journals.

Jennifer Spelman walks participants through all the steps needed to bring a group of images to life as a zine. During the first session, she shares examples of projects purposefully designed to showcase specific content and reach a specific audience. We then engage in group conversation about each project, addressing how to develop a creative brief to guide your own project through the steps of editing, layout, and design.

Curating a large group of images into a tight selection and arranging them into an intentional sequence can be a challenge for photographers, but collaborative brainstorming sessions and shared feedback makes this process fun. Once we a create a photographic sequence, we shift our focus to creating a dynamic layout in Blurb’s Bookwright software. After exploring elements of design—typography, integrated color schemes, interplay of positive and negative space—we bring the project to completion as of a PDF file, ready to be printed.

We conclude with a discussion on successful methods for distributing your new zine. Lively group discussions and targeted weekly reviews of each project ensure that you come away with the know-how and inspiration to transform your own images into a shareable zine.