Pocket Trip

Pocket Trip is a one-sheet travel zine for a city break, a long weekend or a single unforgettable day. It suits people who come home with two hundred photos and want to pick eleven, print them on the nearest printer and post the result to the friends they travelled with. The layout is clean and white so the places carry the colour. The cover holds a photo with the destination and the dates beneath it in Inter. Page two is a full-bleed landscape, the shot that says where you were. Page three is a large photo with a caption and date, good for the first evening. Page four stacks two photos, page five is a photo with a journal block for the story of the trip in six or seven sentences, page six is a three-frame strip for food, doors, signs, anything that repeats, and page seven is a single polaroid for the group shot.

The back panel holds a small photo with the made-at-home line. Write the journal page on the train home while it is fresh; the block fits about seventy words at a comfortable size. Captions work best as place plus a detail: the name of the café rather than the word café. Landscapes suit pages two and three; portrait phone photos are better in the strip and the polaroid. Because a zine panel is small, resist the temptation to use wide panoramas, which turn into thin slivers. If you want a bigger book, print the same template on A3 or Tabloid and the panels become A5-sized. Make one for each person on the trip and post them with a stamp; a folded zine weighs less than a letter.

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