A5 Booklets
4pp Cover onto 300gsm Uncoated 100% Recycled
Matt Lamination to outer
40pp Text onto 100gsm Uncoated 100% Recycled
Four colour print throughout
Trimmed, collated and staple bound
Notes on love in the time of heartbreak is a warm, confessional A5 graphic zine created by writer and newsletter publisher Hannah Connolly. Part diary, part essay collection and part illustrated love letter, it gathers contributions from writers and artists across the internet. Our team helped Hannah move from newsletter to print, producing a recycled, stapled booklet that feels cosy, candid and easy to post to readers around the world.
Notes on love in the time of heartbreak accompanies Hannah’s Substack newsletter and gathers a run of thoughtful pieces on romance, friendship and everyday tenderness. Inside you’ll find essays, poems, lists and love letters, all written in an honest, diary-like tone that feels as if a friend is talking directly to you.
Throughout the zine, Hannah leans into nuance – interrogating heartbreak, joy, TikTok trends, hangovers in your late twenties and even the crossover between true crime and internet micro-celebrities. Writing, for her, is a space where things don’t have to be reduced to a hot take, and the layout supports that with generous columns of text, handwritten headings and space for readers to breathe.
We printed the zine as an A5 stapled booklet with a 4pp cover on 300gsm uncoated 100% recycled stock, finished with matt lamination on the outer. The lamination adds a subtle protective layer while keeping the natural, paper-like feel of the recycled sheet.
Inside, 40 pages run on 100gsm uncoated 100% recycled paper. The slightly off-white shade gives every spread a softness that suits the subject matter much better than a harsh bright white. Hannah and her designer achieved this by building a gentle 5–10% yellow tint into the backgrounds so the printed pages sit in a calm, creamy tone.
Four colour print throughout allows for full-bleed photography, collage spreads and hand-drawn illustrations in the same piece, while still keeping the overall look cohesive.
The cover illustration is a table scene drawn in shades of red and pink – heart-shaped plates, flowers and scattered snacks – framed by a neat border and handwritten title. It reads like the cover of a favourite magazine you’d keep on your bedside table.
Open the zine and you’re welcomed by a heart motif and a set of “rules”: make a hot drink, light a candle, put your phone on Do Not Disturb, press play on the curated playlist, then read and enjoy. This sets the pace and encourages readers to treat the zine as an intentional little ritual, not just a quick scroll.
Inside, single-colour illustrations sit alongside more complex collage pages and typographic spreads. Quotes are picked out in bold red script, while the body copy runs in neat columns for easy reading. The limited palette of pinks, reds and warm neutrals keeps everything visually tied together, even as the content shifts from essays to artwork.
Hannah first rang the studio to discuss making a zine to accompany her newsletter, with multiple contributors and an eye on keeping postage costs low enough to ship copies to the US. She requested quotes across several quantities and stocks, and asked for guidance she could pass straight to her designer on colour and bleed.
We began with a simple self-cover booklet on recycled uncoated stock, then worked through refinements including thicker covers, different page counts and final weights so she could budget postage accurately. A key step was our suggestion of a single physical proof copy at cost price; this gave Hannah a chance to hold the zine, mark up tweaks and feel confident before committing to the main run.
When her first PDF arrived, we helped fix export issues – switching from spreads to single pages, adding 3mm bleed and adjusting the total page count to a multiple of four so the booklet would fold and staple correctly. Once the proof copy landed on her doormat and got an enthusiastic thumbs-up, we moved ahead with a litho-printed run of 1,000 copies, keeping her updated with dispatch dates and DPD time slots. Hannah’s verdict on the finished stack: “they’ve arrived and they’re AMAZING!!”
Find more of her work at https://hannahconnolly.substack.com/
From the start, our role was part print partner, part sounding board. We helped Hannah compare different recycled stocks, advised on envelope sourcing rather than building that cost into the print, and estimated final booklet weights so she could plan US shipping.
On the artwork side, we provided clear guidance on bleed, export settings and why stapled booklets must have page counts in multiples of four. We also flagged a single low-resolution image; after weighing up aesthetics versus timing, we agreed to keep it as-is so the books would be ready for her launch window.
Technically, we separated the digital proof copy from the litho production run, explaining how colour would soften slightly on the final 1,000 copies as ink soaks into the recycled paper. That expectation-setting helped avoid surprises and let Hannah focus on promoting the zine to her newsletter community.
