How to fold an 8-page zine from one sheet of paper

The 8-page one-sheet zine (also called a mini zine, foldy zine, one-cut zine or PocketMod) is the most common zine format in the world. One A4 or US Letter sheet, printed on one side only, becomes a booklet with a front cover, six inside pages and a back cover. Each page is one eighth of the sheet: about 74 by 105 mm on A4, or 2.75 by 4.25 inches on Letter.

The format is popular because it needs nothing but scissors. There is no stapling, no gluing and no double-sided printing, which means no registration problems on home printers. The whole thing takes about five minutes once the sheet is printed, and the folding is the same whether you are making a comic, a poetry zine or a pocket photo album.

Before you fold anything, look at the printed sheet in landscape. It is a grid of four columns and two rows. The bottom row, reading left to right, holds pages 8, 1, 2 and 3 the right way up. The top row holds pages 7, 6, 5 and 4, all printed upside down. That is not a mistake: those panels flip over during the fold, so they have to be rotated 180 degrees on the sheet for the finished zine to read correctly.

If you are laying a zine out by hand this is the part that trips people up. Foldpic arranges the panels automatically from the same fold script it uses to draw the instructions, so the printed layout and the folding steps can never disagree. If you are working in another tool, fold a blank sheet first, number the pages while it is folded, then unfold it and copy the positions.

The diagrams below use the standard origami line conventions: dashed lines are valley folds (the crease points toward you), dash-dot lines are mountain folds, and the solid red line with the scissors is the only cut. Panel numbers are drawn as they appear on the printed sheet, rotated where the print is rotated, so you can check your sheet against the picture at every step.

Print on one side only, landscape, at 100 percent or “Actual size”. Never choose “Fit to page”: it shrinks the image into the printer's printable area and shifts the centre, so the folds no longer land on the panel edges and you get a white border around everything. Most home printers cannot print right to the edge of the paper (the unprintable margin is typically 2.5 to 7.6 mm), which is why the outer panels of a mini zine have a small white frame unless you use borderless mode on photo paper.

Plain 80 gsm copy paper works and folds crisply. If the zine has heavy photos on both faces of a panel, 100 to 120 gsm hides show-through better and feels more like a book. Anything above about 160 gsm gets hard to collapse in step 5, because the eight layers stack up at the spine.

Pages in the wrong order almost always mean the slit is in the wrong place. It must run along the centre crease and only through the middle two panels; if it goes all the way across, you have two strips, not a zine. A white border and folds that miss the panel edges mean the print was scaled, so reprint at 100 percent. If the cover ends up on the inside, wrap the arms the other way in the final step: the zine has two possible collapses and only one puts page 1 on top.

When in doubt, sacrifice one sheet as a blank practice dummy. Fold it without printing, number the pages with a pen while it is closed, then open it out and compare with the printed layout. It takes a minute and settles every question about orientation.