The Electric Zine Maker (⚡️📝✂️) is a printshop and art tool for making zines.
This tool includes a drawing interface. You can import images, size and place, write text with any font that you have installed, smudge, paint, and a number of other options. You can also save your zines, and easily re-import them by dragging the saved zine folder back into the main menu. It is built with collaboration in mind.

The Electric Zine Maker has a new beautiful website where you can learn more about it! Click here to visit it.

macOS users that have trouble opening the Electric Zine Maker (the file keeps getting blocked), please read this guide for how to open it.

Windows users that have trouble saving their Zines (or other issues) please read this guide.

If you liked The Electric Zine Maker please consider paying for it so I can cover development costs and make money from it. Thank you kindly.

The Electric Zine Maker is still under development!!!
This is an early beta.
Be gentle! It has early beta feelings!!!  💔❤️!??

More art tools are being built for it.
There are a number of bugs. It is rough around a few edges.
You can read more about what is planned for it here.

The Electric Zine Maker is planned to be an "art toy". It's a playful tool with which you can create cute little things. The finished version will feature a silly little back-story, and other characters, maybe even some small game-like interactions to build a story around it, so that it's an all around playful piece of freeware.

Things planned:

* Many strange and interesting art-tools for the drawing interface
* Bugs need to be fixed and the UI's still need more work
* A back story, and little characters that reinforce the fictional universe it is placed in.
* A number of other art-tools (that are packaged with it), that allow you to create effects and glitch art for your zines.
* Clip art will be bundled with the Zine Maker so you have more art to work with.

Things from other devs:

* Jeremy Oduber made an html template for turning zines made with the Electric Zine Maker into a web ready html zine (web zines!). You can host those on itch. It's easy to use! Check it out: https://jeremyoduber.itch.io/js-zine

Kind Words:

"I think that just about everything Nathalie Lawhead makes is wonderfully energetic, raw, and approachable. Top of the charts, for me, is their Electric Zine Maker project, which makes single-page-zine creation a breeze."
- by Kat Brewster on Rock Paper Shotgun

"The arrival of this software into my life restored a sense of play to my creative practice and brought back a flame I thought had dimmed for good. It gave me the courage, too, to send scrappy, earnest writing to the people who wanted to read it, without the intense pressure of online publishing or the quick-fire takes of social media."
- by Sarah Maria Griffin on The Guardian

"What Lawhead and the Electric Zine Maker suggest is that seriousness is not always the best way to fight back against a system that doesn’t care about you; choosing lightness, lack of coherence, silliness and restful creation can be just as effective."
- by Nicole Froio on The Observer

"Zines und OpenSource passen wunderbar zueinander, findet Nathalie Lawhead und entwickelt seit 2018 den Electric Zine Maker. Nun ist ein großes Update für das Printshop-Tool erschienen."
-by Lena Simonis on PAGE

Awards:

IndieCade - Innovation in Interaction Design Award ("Honoring the craftsmanship and innovation behind unique interaction, hardware, and system design")

The Webby Awards - Honoree in General Websites and Mobile Sites - Weird

Special Thanks To...

Clinic for Open-Source Arts, University of Denver

The STUDIO at CMU - OSSTA

Partly funded by the Queer Games Bundle