Zine-Making and User Experience

I have been making zines for a long time, since the moody pre-teen days of 2013. I started as a middle schooler, making zines for a small collective in Baltimore. Since then I kept creating on my own and even collaborated with groups like University of Maryland’s Book Lab, Technica, and NextNOW Fest. 

For me, zines have been a way to create little moments of beauty, meditations on seemingly never-ending pandemics, and a stress-free way of getting my thoughts down. My go-to folding for a zine is the classic “instant book,” created with a hot dog fold, then a hamburger, another hamburger, a slit cut down the middle, and voila -- a zine! However, recently I’ve started exploring new ways of folding, tying in accordion folds, combining individual zines, cutting in triangles and hexagons. From these explorations, I discovered an unexpected insight into user experience.

Comparing UX to zines is a bit of a stretch. There are many differences and shortcomings in my model, like material. A zine is made of paper, markers, collage, and anything else lying around. UX exists in the digital space, as people interact with a website or app. However, there are some important similarities. How someone experiences the zine, what pages come first, how the folding leads to the next ideas, and how concepts are integrated into the form are all translatable into UX. It’s also pretty low-fi/pen-and-paper, which is my favorite way to start a UX project anyway.

So what’s the lesson from this? If you’re a UX designer, I encourage you to try your hand in zine-making. If you’re a crafty ziner, explore how the user feels when they receive and interact with your work. Let me know your thoughts!