There's a strand of zine-making that owes less to DIY photocopier culture and more to the visual vocabulary of mid-century American magazines, film posters and editorial design. An-Naname Issue 01 sits squarely in that tradition. This is, as we observed when the files landed, the zine equivalent of watching Mad Men — a stylish, immersive love letter to the United States of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, built from layered Photoshop collages that feel simultaneously archival and original.
Creator Andrew Rhodes spent months working through the technical challenges of building a print-ready collage zine from scratch — navigating RGB-to-CMYK conversion, spine templates, bleed settings and export quality — before arriving at something genuinely accomplished. The result is an A5 perfect-bound publication with a full-bleed monochrome cover portrait, 52 pages of varied, vibrant imagery, and a personality so assured it could sit confidently on the shelf of any independent art bookshop.
An-Naname draws its content from the visual culture of a specific American era: baseball and atomic clouds, vintage road maps, revolvers and rust-belt cars, rodeos and roadside Americana. The collages layer photographic found imagery, graphic elements, typewriter text and bold typographic treatments in a way that feels both nostalgic and designed. Nothing looks accidental. Every page has been considered.
The editorial range is broad and that is part of the pleasure. A spread featuring a sea lion balancing a pool ball on its nose above a detail from a Bruegel painting sits a few pages from a full-bleed documentary photograph of two soldiers standing on a Central Asian steppe beside Kazakh flags. The tonal shift is deliberate — An-Naname is not a single-theme zine but an anthology of visual ideas held together by aesthetic sensibility rather than subject.
Follow the zine at @annanamezine.
At 52 inside pages, An-Naname warranted perfect binding — the page count and 170gsm inside stock give the spine enough substance to hold the glued bind securely, and the resulting 6mm spine gives the zine proper bookshelf presence. A wire-stitched version at this weight and page count would have fought against itself physically: stiff pages, overstretched staples, a booklet that wanted to spring open. Perfect binding was the right call.
The 170gsm uncoated inside pages are a noticeable step up from the 120gsm used in lighter zines, and you can feel the difference immediately — these pages have a solidity and a slight texture that suits the collage aesthetic perfectly. Colours land with depth and warmth rather than surface gloss. The blood-splatter graphics on the Texas map page, the olive greens in the baseball collage, the vivid yellow type on the bus-stop spread — all benefit from the way uncoated stock absorbs and softens rather than reflects. You can read more about choosing the right paper for zine printing in our guide.
Matt lamination on the 300gsm cover protects the surface and deepens the contrast of the full-bleed black-and-white portrait — bold red titling in a distressed typeface set against a high-contrast close-up face. Gloss lamination would have put a shine across the monochrome tones and weakened the effect. Matt keeps it cinematic.
The cover is the first thing and it earns its role immediately. A tight close-up black-and-white portrait — a man's face occupying almost the entire frame — with the title AN-NANAME set in bold, slightly distressed red capitals at the bottom right alongside a small ISSUE 01 label. It is confident, graphic and immediately legible as something worth picking up.
Inside, the collage work is technically accomplished and visually inventive. The baseball spread layers a smiling player against an atomic mushroom cloud and a nuclear-era diagram of a human silhouette — typewriter text runs diagonally across the gutter, breaking the grid deliberately. The Texas map page is a masterclass in layering: vintage road map, revolver graphic, period car and blood-splatter marks combine at different scales and opacities to create something that reads as a single image rather than a pile of assets.
The contrast-shifting between moods — archival Americana, deadpan surrealism, Central Asian documentary, graphic typography — keeps each page turn genuinely surprising. That variety is harder to sustain across 52 pages than it looks.
Andrew came to us as a first-time printer with a clear vision and a set of genuine technical questions. The first email, nearly a year before print, asked about RGB-to-CMYK conversion for Photoshop collage work — a common and important concern when colour-critical files need to survive the journey from screen to press. Mike walked him through the process: convert in Photoshop for maximum control over the output, rather than leaving an automatic conversion to happen at the RIP stage.
Several months later came a follow-up question about black setup in CMYK — the difference between flat black (0/0/0/100) and rich black (30/30/30/100) for backgrounds — which Harriet answered promptly. When the artwork arrived in February 2025, the page count had grown since the original quote, pushing the spine from 5mm to 6mm and requiring an updated cover template. Harriet caught this immediately, explained the implications clearly, and supplied the correct template the same day.
"Thank you for my first copies. I'm really pleased with the final finish; they very much exceeded my expectations." — Andrew, An-Naname
Sort your CMYK workflow before you start designing. If you're building Photoshop collages that use filters requiring RGB mode, convert to CMYK as a final step for each asset rather than toggling back and forth repeatedly. Doing the conversion yourself in Photoshop, using a proper press profile, gives you control over how colours shift.
Perfect binding opens up at higher page counts. Once you're above roughly 48 pages on 170gsm stock, a perfect-bound spine makes structural sense and gives the zine proper bookshelf presence.
170gsm uncoated is a serious inside stock for a collage publication. It sits noticeably heavier in the hand than the 120gsm typically used in lighter zines, and the thicker paper gives layered collage imagery more physical weight and warmth.
Build your cover template from the correct spine width. Adding pages to a project increases spine width, which changes your cover file dimensions. Always request a new template if your page count changes after your initial quote.
Test before you run. Andrew requested a proof copy before committing to the full print run — a straightforward and sensible step for any first-time project.
If you're planning a collage zine, photography publication or first-issue project, explore our zine printing service and photobook printing options.
