Much of the type in LDN on 8 was made by skate wheels. The crew coated their wheels in paint, pinned an alphabet canvas to the concrete and rolled over the letters, and the team digitised the tracks into custom textures. Flick through and the headlines still look mid-move, smeared and fractured as they skid across photographs of London’s roller skaters.
Photographer Sam Bénard, art director Paul Rider and writer Dan Parker built the zine out of Sam’s three years following the scene through a basement car park in Vauxhall, the Emirates Stadium concourse and a patch of Greenwich concrete with Canary Wharf behind it. It is busy, attention grabbing and action packed, a feel good magazine that captures a scene and its vibe. Plenty of its ideas travel, so we’ve pulled out five you could lift for your own zine or short run magazine.
Let your subjects build the type
The zine explains its own method. Led by a skater called Hugo, the crew rolled across the letters one by one, which made them contributors to the zine’s style as well as its subjects. The tracks they left are imperfect on purpose, and they echo the grit in the photographs. Editorial content mixes interviews and quotes from the skaters with reminiscent adventures, set over the photography in those same fractured letters.
You don’t need skates to borrow this. Letterforms made by whatever drives your subject, whether brushes, tyres, footprints or tools, give a publication an identity no font library can match.
Print the making of
That method lives on a page titled How We Made Our Zine, with studio shots and overhead photos of the paint-streaked canvas. The team also planned a film about how the zine came together, covering the photography, custom typography, design and print, and Sam asked whether our press crew could help. We sent them footage of the printing and captured the binding too, ready for their edit.
“We’re all good with the proofs, looks great! Thanks for capturing imagery of the production.”
Paul, art director
If your project has a story behind it, give that story a page. Readers become insiders, and you have content ready to post when the copies land.
Step off the A4 grid
Paul returned for this one with a clear request: the same size and paper as Drag, the magazine he had printed with us the year before. That size is 270 x 210mm, a little shorter than A4, and our studio notes on the finished zine are blunt about it: the custom size instantly makes it look and feel cooler. A few millimetres off standard can separate a title from everything else on the shelf. Our guide to matching a zine format to its content runs through the options.
Go lighter on the cover, rawer inside
The cover is 250gsm uncoated, sealed outside with a thin matt film. It is a touch lighter than the norm and friendly on the fingertips when you open it, with no stiff spring fighting your thumb. Inside, 120gsm uncoated keeps everything raw. Ink sinks into the sheet, the photographs pick up a gritty, documentary texture and the distressed type grows rougher at its edges. Skates on concrete, a crew lined up along a wall at dusk, a spin shown frame by frame: none of it wants a glossy finish.
If your subject lives on the street, try the same pairing. A cover that bends easily invites people in, and an uncoated text paper keeps the energy honest.
Reuse a spec that worked
Paul asked for the Drag numbers again, tried a couple of page counts with us and settled on 96 pages. When Sam joined the thread to settle the invoice, Mike attached a cover template for InDesign, spine width already measured in, plus a note that any layout program would do as long as the cover arrived as a spread. Paul’s verdict: “Thanks for sharing that template, that worked a treat for the covers.” Glued into a square 7mm back, the orange spine names the title and all three makers.
A spec you already trust is a head start. Keep a note of what worked last time and pour the saved effort into the pages. When you build the next one, our page on laying out a cover around its spine will save some head scratching.
Price a custom size zine online, then go and document a scene of your own.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
Product cataloguesA5, 28 pages, stapled£166for 100
