Event Kit
Zine Making
Zines are small, self-published and often photocopied collections of texts and images in a handy magazine format. Zine making has a long tradition and can be a fun activity for your workshop, and great to collaborate and engage with technical topics in a creative way.
This kit includes tips and ideas for incorporating physical or digital zine making into your LAN Party, as well as inspiration and resources to get you started. You can focus your party entirely on creating a zine, or develop it alongside your workshop to document ideas and results.
Inspiration
Ideas
- Zines don’t have to use pen and paper. You don’t need to be good at drawing to get involved! Instead, you can make a digital zine and use photos, illustrations or fonts. You can also choose a more text-heavy approach.
- You don’t need to illustrate from scratch. There are many free resources for design assets you can use and combine. Instead of working with graphics, you can also focus on colors and fonts. (Don’t forget to check the licenses and credit the creators! Your zine could include a page for that at the end.)
- Collect old magazines, newspapers and stickers. This is the oldschool way of collage making and a lot of fun! It’s also a great way to use any tech stickers you might have lying around. Don’t forget to provide scissors, glue and paper for the participants.
- Prepare an example spread for inspiration. Starting from a blank page can be intimidating and might keep participants from contributing to the zine. To help others get started, prepare and print one or two example pages. You can also print and provide other zines for inspiration, like our Feminist AI zine from PyCon DE.
- Find out everyone’s skills and work together. During introduction, ask participants to share their skills and interests. Maybe one person loves drawing, while someone else has experience in photo editing or writing. Combine your skills, divide up the tasks and work on the pages together.
- Approach it like making slides for a talk or presentation. If you have experience with public speaking, think of a zine spread like a slide. Break down the content into small pieces and illustrate it as needed. This guide can help if you’re a beginner.
- Print a zine with contributions by each participant. Everyone gets to create a spread on a given topic that’s combined later on by the host and printed for everyone to keep. You can split the printing costs if needed. Contributions can be digital or scans of pages. Don’t forget to use a spread template to ensure each contribution has the correct dimensions.
- Photocopy! If professional printing is inconvenient, there’s always the traditional way: print everyone’s contributions, photocopy them and staple your zines together. Ideally, your event location has a copy machine available. If not, check if there’s a copy shop near you. Make sure to align the pages accordingly so the spreads can be stapled in the middle.
- Upload and share your zine with the world. Speakerdeck and Issuu are great for creating digital flipbooks.
Choosing a topic
- Use the topic of your LAN Party. For example, if you’re working on hacking LLMs, make this the topic of your zine and include texts explaining the concepts and corresponding illustrations. You can also use the zine to document the work and results of your experiments during the LAN Party.
- Zine-ify the documentation of your favourite tool or library. Zines can help make technical content more fun and accessible. Using existing documentation also gives you plenty of content to work with – see the spaCy 101 zine for an example.
- Make a conference zine. If your party is part of or hosted alongside a conference like PyCon, dedicate your zine to the conference topics and presentations. Participants can cover their favorite talks, summarize the main takeaways and what they’ve learned, or profile the speaker. You can also include photos of the speakers or interesting slides, either printed or digital.
- Explore a technical topic from a feminist angle. It’s a Feminist AI LAN Party after all! Choose a broader topic, dive deeper into relevant literature and include interesting ideas you come across. If you’re working on AI, bias and ethics is a great topic to start with. You can also include short essays, examples or even just thought-provoking questions.
- Focus on what you’re passionate about. Instead of picking an overall topic, ask participants to create content on whatever they’re passionate about or working on at the moment. This can be their day-to-day work, hobbies, interesting technologies or anything else.
Resources
Physical resources & packing list
- scissors (include a pair of left-handed scissors if you want to be extra inclusive)
- glue sticks, tape (transparent, washi tape)
- pens: sharpies, markers in different colors, whiteout
- blank paper or printed templates with crop marks
- old magazines, e.g. tech- or design-related publications (you can ask participants to bring old copies or if you have small budget, pick something up at the train station or airport on the way – at PyCon DE, we had copies of the MIT Technology Review and Missy Magazine)
- copies of cutouts from advertising leaflets, newspapers, packaging or other printed materials with interesting letters etc. (we collected some for a few weeks before the event)
- stickers (designed tech stickers, letters, empty label stickers)
- label maker with spare tape (e.g. retro embosser by DYMO for under €20)
- plastic sleeve to collect and protect contributed spreads
Feminist AI LAN Party logo (PDF)