Twelve Months

Twelve Months is the year-in-review you can finish in an evening: one photo per month, three grid pages, a highlight, a pair, a line of text, done. It is for anyone who means to make a yearly album and never does, and for New Year cards that are more than a photo. The editorial style is white pages, Playfair Display for the title and hairline frames around the photos, so the grids read like a magazine's contact page. The cover holds a photo, the year and a subtitle. Pages two, three and four are four-photo grids: January to April, May to August, September to December, with a caption line under each grid if you want to name the months. Page five is a large photo with a caption and date for the moment of the year. Page six stacks two photos for the best trip or the two people who mattered most. Page seven is a quote page for one sentence about the year.

The back panel holds a small photo and a sign-off. Choosing one photo per month is the whole exercise, and it is easier than choosing fifty. Square-ish crops work best in the grid slots, so favour photos with the subject in the centre. Mix people and places across each grid so no page becomes twelve near-identical portraits. Print on 120 gsm white paper so the thin frames stay crisp; the editorial look depends on clean whites, and a laser printer does this especially well. As it is a single sheet, you can print a copy for every household you would send a card to and fold them while the film is on. The same template on A3 makes a version worth keeping for yourself.

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