advertising for your zines

Last week I added a new feature to zinepal.com: custom images in the page footers. What this means is that you can now insert different images in the footers of all pages. An image can either span the entire page or you can have one image in each column. The idea behind this is that zine creators can now insert advertising into their zines. This is already being used successfully with the kitsilano.ca zine.

The size of the images is either 2" x 7.7" for the entire page or 2" x 3.75" for one column. To determine the size of an image in inches you have to look at the pixels-per-inch or dots-per-inch resolution of the image. Most good image editors will allow you to view this information and also resize images to the size in inches that you need. If you are looking for a good image editor to use on Windows, I can recommend Paint.NET. It's easy to use and works very well.

Along with the advertising feature I've also added zine "templates". Templates allow you to save all the settings for a zine and then later on apply them to another zine. This makes a lot of sense if you spend time customizing a zine with an introduction, logos, fonts and advertising. Just save it as a template and later on you can easily reuse the settings.

You can find both of these new features when you create your zine. I've also added tabs to the user interface on the zine customization page. It makes things look a little bit cleaner and less crowded.

Finally, I should mention that kitsilano.ca has now printed 1000 paper issues of their zine for the month of April. They have been distributed all around the Kitsilano neighbourhood here in Vancouver. This is very cool and I'm excited to see zinepal.com used like this. Hopefully it's a great success and they will print more issues in future.