What size is a zine?

There is no official standard, but nearly every zine you pick up is one of four sizes. In North America that's half-letter (5.5 × 8.5 in); everywhere the A series is sold it's A5 (148 × 210 mm). Both come from folding one sheet of ordinary printer paper in half. The smaller quarter-size and A6 formats come from folding that sheet again.

The sizes people actually use

• Half-letter, 5.5 × 8.5 in (also called digest): a Letter sheet folded once. The default zine size in the US and Canada, and the one most distros and zine fairs expect.
• A5, 148 × 210 mm: an A4 sheet folded once. The same role in the UK, Europe, and most of the rest of the world. Slightly narrower and taller than half-letter.
• Quarter-size, 4.25 × 5.5 in: a Letter sheet folded twice. Cheap, pocketable, and the traditional size for the photocopied punk zine.
• A6, 105 × 148 mm: an A4 sheet folded twice, the A-series equivalent of quarter-size. Also a postcard.
• Full size, 8.5 × 11 in or A4: unfolded sheets bound along one edge. Used for art and photo zines where image size matters more than postage.

The sheet decides the size

A zine page is whatever you get when you fold the paper you own, so the size question is really a question about sheets. Two sheets, two families of size.

The A series is built for this. Every A size has the same 1:1.414 proportion, and halving one gives the next size down with the proportion intact: A3 folds to A4, A4 folds to A5, A5 folds to A6. Artwork laid out for one A size scales to any other without cropping or leftover margin.

US Letter does not work this way. A Letter sheet is 1:1.294, and folding it in half gives 1:1.545, a noticeably narrower page. Fold again and you are back to 1.294. So a half-letter zine and a full-page Letter zine are different shapes, and a layout built for one will letterbox or crop in the other. This catches people out when they reuse artwork across sizes, and it is the reason scale-to-fit leaves uneven margins on Letter but not on A4.

Mini zines are a different shape again

The eight-panel mini zine, made from one sheet with a single cut down the middle, splits the sheet four across and two down rather than folding it in half repeatedly. That gives a taller, narrower panel than any of the sizes above:

• From A4: panels of 74 × 105 mm, which is A7.
• From Letter: panels of 2.75 × 4.25 in.

Eight pages, no stapler, no binding. It is the fastest zine format there is and the best one to start with.

How many pages should a zine be?

For anything saddle-stitched (folded and stapled through the spine) the page count has to be a multiple of four, because every sheet carries two pages on the front and two on the back. 8, 12, 16, 20, 24 and so on. A 14-page zine is a 16-page zine with two blanks in it, so it is worth designing to the nearest four rather than discovering the gap at the printer.

Most self-published zines land between 16 and 48 pages. Past about 48 sheets of ordinary paper the fold stops closing flat and a standard stapler stops reaching, which is a binding limit rather than a design one. See how imposition works for why the multiple of four is unavoidable, and creep for what thickness does to the outer pages of a fat booklet.

Mini zines are always eight panels, since that is what one sheet gives you.

Which size should you pick?

Pick the one that matches the paper sold where you live, because that decision is made for you by whatever fits your printer. If you buy A4, make A5 zines. If you buy Letter, make half-letter zines. Fighting this means trimming every sheet by hand.

Beyond that: go smaller for text, larger for images. Quarter-size and A6 are cheap to print and post but cramped for anything but short prose. Half-letter and A5 hold a readable column of text and a full-bleed image without either feeling squeezed, which is most of why they became the default.

Getting the size you want

Zine Creator asks for the sheet size you are printing on, not the finished page size, and the fold does the rest. For a half-fold saddle-stitch booklet:

• A4 sheet gives A5 pages, 148 × 210 mm.
• Letter sheet gives half-letter pages, 5.5 × 8.5 in.
• A3 sheet gives A4 pages, 210 × 297 mm, if your printer takes A3.
• A5 sheet gives A6 pages, 105 × 148 mm.

So the finished zine is always half the sheet you feed in. Choose the sheet your printer and paper supply agree on, and check which paper weight holds a fold at that size before buying a ream.