On the masthead page of Minuet #1 there is an open invitation: riders, photographers and designers who want in should get in touch. That one line carries skateboarding’s whole print tradition. Long before clips went straight to phones, crews made their own magazines and passed them round the shop, and Mark White’s “a magazine about Kansas City skateboarding” keeps that habit alive, with photographs, words and design all by him.
For us it is a cracking way to show off a fresh collection of skate photography, printed on a solid, no-nonsense spec: A5, silk throughout and perfect bound. Rather than walk you through it page by page, here are the ideas we would lift from it for your next issue.
Caption It Like a Spot Guide
Every photograph gets the same tidy caption format: rider, trick, location. Read a few in a row and the zine turns into a map of the city.
- An ollie at PNC Plaza
- A noseslide at Commerce Plaza
- A hill bomb downtown
- A run of flip tricks at Westport High School
Half the fun is spotting what the crew found to slide along or ollie over: ledges behind an old dairy, handrails above plaza steps, a brick-walled alley in the West Bottoms. The masthead page adds a list of featured riders and a thank you roll that reads as a who’s who of the local scene, from skate shops and brands to Penn Valley Skate Park. Copy the format and your zine credits your friends and records your town in one go.
Shoot Blue Skies and Night Sessions, Then Pick Silk
The cover is classic skate photography. A fisheye ollie hangs high above a set of steps, a curved glass tower bends behind, and blazing blue sky fills everything else. A black band at the foot carries MINUET in chunky white outlined capitals, legible from across a shop.
Inside, bright days alternate with darkness. A noseslide glows in a pool of light against black trees, while opposite it three stacked frames catch flip tricks under the lamps. Those night shots are lit to give the movement and skill of the skaters full prominence, and on silk they come out moody and cinematic.
That swing from daylight to pitch black is why we ran the 54 inside pages on 130gsm silk, whose smooth face keeps the blues clean and holds detail in deep shadow, where an uncoated sheet would let the darkest spreads go murky. Shoot at both extremes yourself? Our breakdown of which papers suit an image-heavy magazine makes the comparison simple.
Stretch One Trick into a Sequence
One spread stitches a whole run into a single picture: a skater in a red T-shirt repeated across a fisheye frame as he drops in to a hill bomb. You see the trick as movement, not one frozen instant.
Sequences like this usually cross the gutter, and that was one of Mark’s first questions to us: how to handle bleed on images running across spreads. Our team talked him through it before he finalised the layout. Ask the same question early on your own project and a sequence will run edge to edge without a sliver of white at the trim.
Dig Up the History of a Spot
Between the action, Mark writes. One spread traces a spot known as Milk Crate back through newspaper archives to the old Borden’s dairy plant, before landing on the low ledges in the alley behind it. He even admits that skaters like him, with “little pop”, can slappy those ledges. The writing is nerdy in the best way.
The page design gives those words space. White caption bands, borders round many of the images, generous white margins and touches of illustration guide you from one section to the next, so nothing looks like a random dump of photos. For more on balancing text and images, see our guide to mixing writing with photographs in print.
Run Your Title Down a Skinny Spine
With this many pages we talked Mark through binding, and perfect binding won over staples for a sturdier finish and a square spine. At A5 that spine is slim, roughly 3mm, but Mark still squeezed MINUET #1 down it, repeated along its length. Plan spine text into your cover file and your zine stays findable on any shelf. Still deciding which side of the line yours sits on? Our piece on where a zine ends and a magazine begins helps.
Whichever label you settle on, perfect bound A5 issues on silk like Minuet #1 are everyday work for our zine printing, so test a few page counts with us before the layout is locked.
The 300gsm silk cover carries a matt laminate on the outside, a tough, low-glare skin for a magazine that will live in backpacks and car door pockets. It also gives that black band a smooth, velvety finish.
Hold One Copy Before You Commit
Mark asked for a single printed copy before signing off the run. Seeing it on paper led to a few small text tweaks for readability, the sort of fix a screen tends to hide. Then the full run went ahead and shipped to him in the States, and Mark has since come back to print with us again. Mark’s route works for any first issue: get your skate mag in front of our team and hold one copy before you commit.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
Product cataloguesA5, 28 pages, stapled£166for 100
