A5 Booklets
4pp Cover onto 170gsm Uncoated
52pp Text onto 120gsm Uncoated
Black print throughout
Trimmed, collated and staple bound
Motion Sickness is a black-and-white photography zine from London-based photographer Ed, capturing a pivotal moment in hardcore, punk and metal. Shot on tour across the States, it mixes sweat-soaked live shows with quiet roadside scenes and fragments of life between venues. We printed the project as a lightweight A5 booklet on uncoated stock, giving fans an intimate, easy-to-handle zine that feels made to sling in a gig bag.
Motion Sickness brings together photographs from 2024, charting heavy bands, growing crowds and the wider culture around the shows. From Slipknot’s masked intensity to huge festival audiences and DIY skatepark gigs, the zine documents how hardcore, punk and metal are bleeding into one wider community.
The sequence balances high-energy stage shots with portraits, empty streets, backyards and car parks, giving a sense of the long drives and strange in-between spaces that shape tour life. It’s the first in a planned series of music publications from Ed, designed to be collected, shared and re-read as the scene moves on.
We produced the zine at A5, a classic format for music titles that’s compact, affordable and easy to flick through or post.
A self-cover approach keeps everything on tactile uncoated paper: a 4-page 170gsm cover and 52 inside pages on 120gsm. The slightly lighter text stock gives the booklet flexibility, so it sits comfortably in the hand and opens wide for those full-bleed double-page spreads. Black ink throughout leans into the grain of the photographs, giving crowd shots and night scenes a raw, documentary feel.
Staple (wire) stitching at the spine keeps the production simple and cost-effective while still robust enough for repeated handling at shows, exhibitions and in the post.
The cover drops the reader straight into the pit: a high-energy crowd image with limbs, denim and zebra shorts colliding around the bold “Motion Sickness” title. The white, serif typography cuts cleanly across the busy photograph, anchoring the chaos without diluting it.
Inside, Ed plays with pacing. Some spreads pair a tight portrait with an empty landscape, others go full bleed across the gutter for panoramic festival scenes or upside-down crowd shots that echo the disorientation of live music. The grain of the uncoated stock softens highlights and gives skies, masks and smoke a velvety, almost cinematic texture.
The opening page is stripped-back and typographic, establishing the title and credit with a large numeral and simple black-on-white layout. It feels like the intro card to a film before the noise kicks in.
As a photographer used to shooting live shows and exhibitions, Ed needed a format that would feel at home both in a merch queue and on a coffee table. The A5, staple-stitched zine we produced is a popular choice for music publishers because it keeps costs manageable, works in short runs and stays lightweight for international postage.
Opting for uncoated stocks throughout keeps the look consistent and reinforces the documentary mood. It’s a practical choice too – readers can comfortably hold the zine open one-handed while they point out favourite images to friends. Our team’s experience with zine printing means we can guide photographers towards specs like this that balance tactility, print quality and affordability.
Our role was to translate Ed’s music photography into a format that supports both the visuals and the story he’s telling about heavy music in 2024. We drew on our zine-printing experience to pair a compact A5 size with lightweight uncoated stocks and simple wire stitching – a combination that suits touring photographers and fans who want something easy to carry from gig to gig.
High production standards keep the monochrome images crisp across a mix of close-ups, night shots and hazy dust clouds over festival crowds. Consistent ink coverage and accurate trimming mean double-page images line up across the spine, so those panoramic scenes hit with maximum impact. And because this is the first in a series, we’ve set a spec that can be repeated or tweaked for future issues without needing to reinvent the wheel.
