Little Milestones

Little Milestones is a monthly baby zine you can make in ten minutes and post to grandparents who are not on the family group chat. One sheet of paper, one side printed, one fold and cut, and it fits in a standard envelope. The style is warm and rounded: cream pages, coral accents and Josefin Sans for the titles, with rounded corners on every photo so the pages feel soft. The cover shows one photo with the name and the month. Page two is a polaroid with a caption line for the age. Page three puts two photos side by side, good for a before-and-after or two grandparents each holding the baby. Page four is a big photo with a caption and date. Page five is a four-photo grid for the small moments of the month.

Page six is a photo with a journal block for firsts, weight and length, the new sound, the thing they suddenly hate. Page seven is a single framed photo, and the back panel carries a small photo and a sign-off. Photos of babies are mostly close-ups on a phone, which is exactly what these slots want. Use the two-side page for grandparents, the grid for hands and feet and yawns, and keep the framed page for the one photo you would put on the fridge. If you make one every month you will have twelve small books by the first birthday, and they stack in a shoebox. Print on 100 to 120 gsm paper so a well-handled zine survives being read every day; it does not need photo paper. Because it prints single-sided there is no back-to-back alignment to worry about, and it costs one sheet per copy, so print a few extra for aunts and uncles.

Printing this zine is the easy part: it goes on one side of a single sheet of A4 or US Letter (choose A3 or Tabloid for a zine twice the size), so any printer works and there is no double-sided alignment to get right. In the print dialog pick 100% or Actual size, never Fit to page, or the fold lines drift off the panel edges. Plain 100 to 120 gsm paper folds crisply and stops colour showing through; glossy inkjet photo paper is fine too because nothing prints on the back. Fold in half lengthways, fold in half twice more, unfold, cut the centre slit, then push the ends together and flatten. The template uses 12 photos across its 8 panels; the editor shows which slots are still empty.