Monster trucks, crushed hatchbacks, tyre smoke under floodlights, and a caravan wall papered with posters. Do You Wanna See Some Damage is photographer Terry Graham's zine about Big Pete International, a Yorkshire based monster truck team run by two brothers. It's Nice That featured the series in November 2024, describing how Terry looked past the performance to the family behind it. We printed the zine a few weeks earlier, against the clock, for a show in South London.
Terry's designer had built the zine at 237 x 145mm, a tall, slim format that suits the subject. Trucks are big and wide, but a narrow page makes you scroll down through a picture, from sky to crowd to churned grass. Our first quote nudged the size by a few millimetres. Terry explained that the layout was fixed at 237 x 145mm, so we kept his size exactly and noted it on the job for every step that followed.
The spec is simple and well judged. It is 40 pages, self cover, all on 170gsm uncoated FSC certified paper, printed in four colour and wire stitched. A self cover means the cover is the same sheet as the inside, so there is no lamination, no heavier board, nothing glossy. The front is a near black photograph of a driver leaning on a truck grille, with DAMAGE scrawled across the top in acid yellow brush lettering and little yellow dashes flying off it like debris. On a matt uncoated sheet that yellow leaps off the dark, and the whole zine has the slightly rough handle of something made for the event rather than a coffee table. Got a documentary series that wants to be held? A 170gsm uncoated self cover is a smart way to keep the object honest and the making simple, and our photo zines in any trim size you design page shows other options.
Terry had graded his pictures carefully: warm reds, faded blues, a soft analogue look. When he exported his PDF, the colours looked different in a preview app from the way they looked in Photoshop, and he asked what would actually print. Mike talked him through it. Export with no colour conversion and with all profiles included, so the images keep the colour they had when they left Photoshop. Then compare like with like, using Overprint Preview in InDesign or Output Preview in Acrobat, because two programmes showing two different things is usually a viewing setting rather than a broken file. And when in doubt, trust the PDF, because that is what goes to press.
It is worth doing the same check on your own files before you send them. Our notes on export settings that keep photographs looking as you graded them cover the basics. Once the final PDF arrived the pages printed with the reds glowing and the blacks soft and deep, from a spread of crushed cars beneath a black truck to a close up of a car door ripped open, debris arcing through a pale summer sky.
Terry got in touch about timing when the files were nearly ready: his exhibition opened on the Thursday afternoon. We booked the job on press as soon as the proof was signed off, the staples went in, and the zines arrived that Thursday morning, hours before the doors opened. Wire stitching suits a 40 page zine: it is quick to finish, and it lets a narrow book open wide enough to read a picture across the fold. Here is a short read on why staples suit a slim photo zine.
I just wanted to say thank you very much for such a quick turnaround with my zine.
Terry, photographer
He added: “Also, a big thanks to Mike for helping me get the colours correct.” When Mike finally sat down with a copy in December and called it “Such a cool booklet and photography”, Terry replied that he had “had a lot of great feedback on it”, and had pointed plenty of people our way. If you have a project with a date already in the diary, price a tall stapled zine and give yourself a little more time than Terry had.
