A5 Booklets
4pp Cover on 200gsm Uncoated
Matt lamination
8 Insides on 120gsm Uncoated
Full colour printing
Staple Bound
Elektra is a celebratory, image-led zine that captures 2024 on tour with Charlie Sparks — a fast, loud year distilled into 20 pages of gig photography. It’s built to feel like a proper memento: compact A5, quick to flip, and full of full-bleed crowd energy.
From a printer’s-eye view, the big win here is how the material choices support the mood. Uncoated pages add a gritty, atmospheric slant to the photography, and the matt laminated cover keeps the black cover looking rich while staying low-glare under venue and studio lights.
If you’re planning something similar, start with our zine printing service and the Printed Project Builder to lock in size, page count and paper before you export artwork.
Elektra sits at the intersection of music culture, community and tour life. It’s made for fans of Charlie Sparks, live sets, and that “right there in the room” feeling you only get from crowd-first photography.
The cover keeps it simple and bold — black, minimal type, and a single striking symbol — which makes the zine feel like a piece of merch you’d actually keep, not just a flyer you forget in a tote bag.
This was produced as an A5 stapled booklet: a classic zine format that stays cost-effective, opens easily, and feels made for quick flipping between full-bleed photo hits.
Uncoated is doing a lot of the vibe work here. It softens highlights, keeps dark scenes feeling moody rather than glossy, and gives the whole zine a more “lived-in” tour-document feel — perfect for high-energy gig photography.
Need a quick file checklist before you send artwork? Our wire stitching (stapled booklet) set-up guide and 3mm bleed guide are the fastest way to sanity-check trims, bleed and pagination.
This zine leans into full-bleed spreads — the kind that drop you straight into the action. Crowd shots, stage moments, and lighting-heavy scenes carry the rhythm, so each page turn feels like a jump cut to the next night.
There’s also a quiet bit of craft hidden in the “seamless spread” ambition. With stapled booklets, the centre gutter will always swallow a few millimetres, so we encouraged a best-practice approach: keep faces, eyes and crucial details out of the dead centre if you want spreads to read cleanly.
The project started with a common first-time zine question: “can you double check the format, bleed and trim marks for a seamless product?” We ran the usual preflight-and-proof flow, with a clear sign-off step before anything hit the print queue.
Two practical moments shaped the job. First, the page count: stapled booklets must be in multiples of four, so we moved from 18 pages to a clean 20pp structure. Second, proofing the cover order — an easy swap, quickly corrected, and then everything was ready to approve.
We also talked through double-page spreads in plain English: faint lines on-screen can be a PDF display glitch (not a print issue), and no stapled zine will align 100% perfectly across the gutter — so the goal is giving images the best chance through smart placement.
Our team kept this one calm and practical: quick quoting, friendly guidance for a first-time booklet set-up, and clear proofing notes so the client could approve with confidence. We also flagged the non-negotiables (pagination rules for staples) and the real-world spread behaviour (gutter loss) so expectations matched how the finished zine would actually handle.
If you want the same support on your next zine, you can follow our print journey, get an instant ballpark via the quote calculator, or go straight to ready to order when your files are set.
