As a child of the 80s I’m fascinated by ‘zines. I find the personal, hands-on, real object nature of them appealing now more than ever.

But it’s a pain in the ass to get the layout right if you want to produce something at scale.

A Better Place started as a zine-formatted project, but with so much text, it needed to be laid out online. I did it reasonably well in Canva, but I thought there might be a tool for this.

ZineMe was my first attempt at a web tool. It was… ok. In the end, it didn’t go much beyond that, but it is a working codebase. A Better Place moved on to a longer book format using standard book-formatting software.

I'm offering it as an open project if anyone wants to take it further. I’m also offering one of the zines I made before I had this tool: a short examination of the burnout I felt when I went on sabbatical.