Paper Pup

Paper Pup is a scrapbook zine for the dog, the cat, the rabbit or the very old tortoise. It is for the person whose camera roll is eighty percent one animal and who wants to turn a few of those photos into something a friend can hold. The scrapbook style uses cream paper with a subtle texture, photos held down with pieces of tape, and Caveat, a handwriting font, for titles and captions, so the finished zine looks like it came out of a shoebox. The cover is a photo with the name and a subtitle. Page two stacks two tilted polaroids, page three is a full-bleed photo, page four is a single polaroid with a caption, page five is a three-frame strip for the walk, the nap and the dinner, page six is a big photo with a caption and date, and page seven is a quote page for the noise they make or the thing they are always in trouble for. The back panel has a small photo and a sign-off.

Pets move, so many photos will be slightly soft; the small zine format is kind to that, and the tape frames hide edges you would otherwise crop. Use the strip page for a sequence shot in burst mode, and give the full-bleed page to the sharpest close-up you have. Handwritten fonts need space: keep captions to four or five words so they stay legible at this size. Plain 100 gsm paper is enough, and the texture prints fine on a laser printer as well as an inkjet. Cats look excellent in the polaroid stack; dogs in motion belong on the film strip. Make one for the vet, one for the dog-sitter and one for the fridge.

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