Making self-produced zines to slow down and rediscover presence online

Everything seems to move faster lately—ideas, trends, inspiration, dreams. We scroll, snap, save, and collect until it all starts to blur. There’s so much to see and so much to catch up with that sometimes creating feels like running on autopilot. Design turns smooth and effortless—beautiful, but also predictable, because there’s rarely time to pause and think about something truly new.

Lately, I’ve been trying to find ways to spend less time lost in the social scroll—and more time doing things that actually inspire me. One of the most impactful ones turned out to be making a zine.

Words by Giovanna Crise, interdisciplinary designer, brand lead at illo, Readymag ambassador, IAAD professor, and part-time daydreamer.

Looking up from the screen

I started thinking that we might be the last generation to remember and actually know what unfiltered creativity feels like. Before AI, everything that was written, drawn, or published came from a real person, complete with typos, messy drafts, and bad kerning choices. From around 2021, things started to shift. Since then, I’ve learned to look at printed things differently: books, posters, zines, those old design magazines collecting dust at flea markets. They feel honest. They come from a time when creation still had fingerprints—and maybe a few coffee stains, too.

Maybe that’s why, after I got back from Korea, I had these 2000+ photos and videos just sitting there and thought, “Okay, what now?”. They were too good to delete, but too digital to really exist.

So I made a zine—something I could hold, flip through, and even bring to life online in a way that felt personal. A small, imperfect thing that finally pulled those memories out of the cloud, literally. It helped me step out of that loop and look at those moments again, this time with both hands (and it’s just a few scrolls away).

A brief history of rebellion

It’s funny when you think about it. I turned to zines to slow down, but they were actually born out of urgency. In the beginning, they were fast, loud, and a bit chaotic. 

Fire!!, one of the first zines, came out of the Harlem Renaissance wanting to burn down old ideas, talking about race, art, and sexuality in ways that polite society never would. A few decades later, sci-fi fans picked up that same spirit. The word fanzine was born (fan+magazine) as a hybrid born out of obsession, science and photocopy ink. 

Then came punk, and zines exploded. Zines became the loudest thing you could make on a shoestring. Photocopiers became weapons, paper turned into freedom, and Sniffin’ Glue or Crawdaddy! were basically blogs before blogs, just with more glue and less SEO. By the ’80s, Factsheet Five connected zine makers around the world, and in the ’90s, Riot Grrrls turned zines into feminist manifestos, screaming truth and sisterhood in black and white. 

And then came the internet, which let that same DIY energy spread even further. The photocopier became the upload button, and the stapler turned into HTML. Suddenly, the underground could reach anywhere, instantly.

The new DIY web

The internet didn’t kill the zine spirit, it just swapped paper cuts for pixels. Early digital zines like Phrack, Boing Boing, or The Thing BBS carried that same chaotic energy online, mixing hacker culture, art, and independent publishing long before content was even a word.

That early DIY energy, once confined to copy shops and bedroom floors, is still alive today, only we have more tools. Designers, writers, and artists now build their own micro-sites, digital journals, and small experiments that feel closer to zines than polished portfolios. Others write newsletters that feel like personal diaries, or build secret Notion pages shared with ten readers and zero algorithms. 

Tools like Readymag, Canva, or Figma make that possible. Not by automating design, but by making experimentation less intimidating. You can test, play, and publish without permission. You can create a space that reflects your taste and vision. And while AI keeps generating infinite versions of everything, there’s something deeply refreshing about these small, self-produced digital spaces—things that feel crafted rather than manufactured. The web doesn’t have to be a feed: it can be a canvas again.

Korea travel zine

With that thought in mind, I decided to create a zine too. The Korea Travel Zine is a physical and digital reinterpretation of my trip to Korea during illo’s creative retreat: a mix of motion, photography, web, and print.

The whole concept revolves around movement: the feeling of looking out from a train window when your eyes never stay still. They focus, shift, and follow fleeting details. Some are blurred, others sharp, and sometimes just a moment in motion. It’s about learning to notice, even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for.

I designed the printed version to be interactive. Inside, I added transparent pages, shifting layouts and even a few Instagram filters that brought some pages to life (until Meta decided to kill them off). The result was a zine that blended photography, motion, and tactile elements into one small, strange object that felt alive.

This project wasn’t about money at all: it was about sharing a vision, a point of view. So the digital version felt like a natural next step. Built in Readymag, it became a space where people could scroll, explore, drag, break part of it, and be surprised. A little playground where the layout changes as you move through it, and hopefully, one that steals a smile.

The whole thing took me a year, one small move at a time. Some days it was super smooth, while others were full of questioning (both myself and my abilities). But that slow rhythm became part of the story too.

The results went way beyond what I could’ve imagined. People started asking to buy it, I reprinted it three times, and now more than 60 copies are spread across 31 cities around the world. It was exhibited in France at the Peinture Fraîche Festival 2024 and shown at Neologia 2025 in Turin, where it was selected as a finalist by AIGA Women in Design.

This isn’t a flex, I swear. It’s just proof that slowing down can actually boost your work and your confidence. More than anything, it reminded me how much joy there is in creating something at your own pace, forgetting algorithms, following curiosity, making a mess, and somehow turning it into something that moves. Not only pixels, but people.

The beauty of slowing down

Zines don’t need to be perfect or polished—they just need to be honest, a space to experiment and care a little less about the outcome and a little more about the process. They don’t even have to make sense all the time, or to everyone—they can be weird and messy, just like most of us.

That’s what I love about zines: they remind you to create because you can, not because you should. Maybe that’s all creativity really needs right now.