Some print specs earn their place by being repeated. The FRAMES MONO zine series, published by Tomasz of FRAMES magazine, is one of them: A5, a 200gsm uncoated cover, 44 inside pages on 120gsm uncoated, full colour throughout, wire stitched. It is, to the gram, the spec on the most popular card of our zine price box, and the Cynthia Gladis issue is the second time FRAMES has asked us for exactly that build. When the artwork arrived in May 2026 the note with it read: "These are exactly the same specs as for the previous FRAMES MONO zine (Adrian Hill), which we printed with you a few months ago."
Gladis photographs the city the way a graphic designer would: a curved glass tower gridded with sky, pigeons queued along a wire beneath a traffic light, laundry flaring red and yellow off a New York fire escape, a chrome bus front that grins back at you. Colour is the point. The instinct with work this saturated is to reach for silk or gloss, and for a hardback photobook we often would. For a zine that has to feel like a zine, uncoated is the braver and better call. The ink sinks into the fibre, the whites go soft, and the colour reads as pigment rather than as a screen. Mike's note from handling the finished copy says it in six words: raw colour jumping off the uncoated pages. There is no lamination on the cover either, so the lilac-grey outer with its handwritten title has the same matt tooth as everything inside it.
The edit is built in pairs. Nearly every double-page spread puts two photographs side by side inside generous white margins, and the pairings do the talking: a night-time alley opposite a blue-and-yellow house with a single yellow chair; a hazy beach walkway opposite a couple striding up the sand; a face-like bus grille opposite a red door and a fluttering flag. On a stapled A5 booklet the spread opens flat, so the two images sit level with each other and the gutter all but vanishes between them. Wire stitching works from 8pp to around 72pp in multiples of four; at 48 pages on 120gsm this zine still has a soft, floppy hand, the staples sit neatly in the fold and there is no sign of the inner pages creeping past the outer ones at the fore-edge.
FRAMES works to a rhythm we would recommend to any publisher printing a series. First, a single physical copy: for the Gladis issue we printed one wire-stitched proof at the end of May 2026 and shipped it to Tomasz in Switzerland by tracked courier. It is the only honest way to judge how a specific paper handles a specific set of files, and it costs a fraction of a reprint. Once it was approved we ran the final copies copies in June and delivered the edition straight to the magazine's newsstand distributor in Whitstable, Kent, rather than routing it through the publisher first. That saves a leg of shipping and a week of somebody's time, and it is how a magazine based abroad can print in the UK without ever touching a box.
If you have been looking at our zine price box, this is the book behind the numbers. A5 stapled zines between 16 and 48 pages are one of the formats we print most, for photographers, illustrators and small publishers alike, and the all-uncoated version is the one people come back to: it is economical, it photographs well, and it feels like something made rather than something produced. The previous issue in the series, Adrian Hill's FRAMES MONO zine, shows the same build carrying a different photographer's work, and our zine printing page has real jobs with real prices and an instant price calculator.
Got a series of your own in the making? Get an instant price at exwhyzed.com, or talk to Harriet and Mike about running a single test copy before you commit to the edition.
