Party of Eight

Party of Eight is the birthday zine you make the morning after the party, while the balloons are still up, and send out with the thank-you notes. It is built for children's parties but works just as well for a fortieth: the layouts hold a lot of faces. The kids style gives warm cream pages, a coral accent and rounded photo corners. The cover is a full-bleed photo, ideally the moment the candles go out, with the title over it. Page two is a big photo with a caption and the date. Page three is a four-photo grid, page four puts two photos side by side with a shared caption, page five is a polaroid, page six is a five-photo collage with one large image and four small ones, and page seven is a quote page for the birthday wish or the best thing anyone said. The back panel has a small photo and a sign-off.

This is the densest zine in the collection, so it wants a lot of pictures. Use the grid and the collage for the guests, so everyone who came appears somewhere, and keep the polaroid and the cover for the birthday person. Group shots crop badly into small squares; choose photos with one or two faces for the grid slots and save the group photo for page two. Because the zine is single-sided, a home inkjet on plain 100 to 120 gsm paper produces a good copy in about a minute, and each copy is one sheet, so making fifteen for a class is realistic. Cut the centre slit with scissors, fold, and slip one into each thank-you envelope. Older children can fold their own, which is half the fun.

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 15 photos across its 8 panels; the editor shows which slots are still empty.