Pleat — Photo Zines

Print. Fold. Give. Pick your photos. Pleat sets them out, prints them onto one sheet of paper, and shows you where to fold. Eight pages, no staples, no glue — a zine you can hand to somebody. SIXTEEN PAGES, AND BOTH SIDES OF THE PAPER The standing objection to a one-sheet zine is that half the paper goes to waste. The 16-page format is the answer: two sheets, printed on both sides, folded into nested signatures and stapled once through the spine. Every side of every sheet carries pages. If your printer can't print double-sided, Pleat runs the job one side at a time — never a stack of paper to put back in the wrong order — and prints a small mark at the spine so you can see which way the sheet goes back in. Get it wrong and it's one tap to fix, once, and Pleat remembers your printer after that. Or split the sixteen pages into two 8-page zines, one sheet each, and skip the flipping entirely. WHAT'S IN IT Nine art directions — Dossier, Duotone, Diary, Cut & Paste, Gallery, Session, Agitprop, Brutalist and Primer — with 38 colorways between them. Twenty-four page layouts, from Full bleed and Framed to Wedge, Flood, Emblem and Overprint, dealt into a rhythm with a couple of grid-breakers. Eight cover styles: Block, Editorial, Type, Paperback, Obi, Triband, Steps and Pivot. Duotone prints your photos as two inks on cream stock, the way a two-color press does. Grain is its own dial, and the second color can sit a hair off the first — the drift a real press gives you — or dead-on if you'd rather. Write on the page. Twenty-three of the twenty-four layouts have somewhere for words, set in the zine's own typeface, where a printer would put them. Change the layout and the same words are re-set to suit it. Put your own link on the back cover and it prints as a QR code in the zine's ink, with the handle underneath so it reads to someone without a phone. Letter or A4. Print it yourself, on the printer you already have. Share a digital copy too — every page in reading order, as a PDF that opens on any phone with nothing to install. There are no font pickers and no color wheels. Every dial is a short list of positions drawn to work together, so there is no way to end up with an ugly zine. No account. No sign-in. Nothing leaves your phone. PLEAT PLUS — $2.99, ONCE 16-page zines — two sheets, both sides, saddle-stapled. Every theme — Cut & Paste, Gallery, Session, Agitprop, Brutalist and Primer join the three that are free. The poster layouts and covers — Wedge, Flood, Emblem, Headline, Bar, Echo, Porthole, Overprint, Paste-up, Shingle; Paperback, Obi, Triband, Steps, Pivot. Unlimited saved zines. Free keeps three. Removes the small "made with Pleat" line from the back cover. Your own colophon stays where you put it. Four more app icons, in the inks. Free is a whole zine: three saved zines, three themes, eight pages, printing, captions, the back-cover QR code and the digital PDF.