The one-sheet zine is the simplest book there is. One piece of ordinary printer paper, printed on one side, becomes a booklet with a cover, six inside pages and a back. There are no staples and no glue. It takes three folds and one cut, and the first one you make takes about a minute.
One sheet of Letter or A4 paper, printed or blank. Scissors. A flat table. A ruler or the back of a butter knife makes sharper creases, but a thumbnail does the job.
Lay the sheet flat with the long edge toward you, printed side up. If it is blank, either side.
Fold it in half the long way, top edge down to the bottom edge. Crease it well, then unfold it.
Fold it in half the short way, left edge over to the right edge. Leave it folded.
Cut along the middle crease, starting at the folded edge and stopping at the centre of the sheet. Halfway and no further. Unfold the sheet flat. There is now a slit running across the middle two panels.
On a sheet printed from Pleat the cut is the one solid line; every other line is dashed.
Fold it in half the long way again, this time with the printing on the outside. The slit runs along the folded edge.
Hold the two ends of the strip and push them toward the middle. The slit opens into a diamond. Keep pushing until the panels close up around each other into a little book.
Flatten it and sharpen the creases. The cover is on the front. Add a staple to the spine if you like, though it holds without one.
If you are making the sheet yourself, this is the part that catches people. The eight panels are not in reading order, and the top row is upside down, because the fold turns it over.
The cover is the bottom right panel. The back cover is the bottom left. Pages 2 and 3 face each other when the book is open, and so do 4 and 5, and 6 and 7, so if you are laying out by hand it helps to think in pairs. The printable templates below have these numbers on them in a faint gray.
The fold is the same on both. A Letter sheet gives you pages about 2¾ by 4¼ inches; an A4 sheet gives you pages about 74 by 105 millimetres, a touch narrower. Neither is better. Use the paper in your printer.
The templates on this site are the same eight panels with fold lines, the cut line and faint page numbers, ready to print on Letter or A4 and draw, paste or write on.
Pleat does the layout part for you. Pick your photographs and it puts them in the right panels, the right way up, prints the fold lines and the cut line on the sheet, and shows you these same steps on your phone. It's on the App Store.
More: how to print a zine at home · free printable templates · how to make a photo zine · zine layouts and themes.