How I Turned a Family Trip into a Foldable Zine

Some trips leave you with hundreds of photos you never look at again. After our family trip to Lanzarote, I didn’t want those memories to stay trapped in my phone gallery. I wanted something I could hold in my hands — something imperfect, playful, and alive. So I turned the trip into a foldable zine.

What I love about this format is that it doesn’t ask for perfection. A foldable zine feels more like building a visual diary than designing a finished object. There is room for photos, small drawings, handwritten notes, scraps of color, and details that would probably never fit into a classic photo album.

I started by selecting moments that felt vivid rather than important: a beach snack, what we carried in our backpack, the road to Famara, a color I wanted to remember, the feeling of wind.

Then I mixed everything:

• printed photos

• quick illustrations

• handwritten captions

• little objects and symbols

• fragments of memory

Some pages became very simple, others more layered. I liked how the folds created natural pauses — almost like breathing spaces between moments.

The foldable format also changes how a story is read. You don’t see everything at once. You open it, unfold it, move through it physically — almost like retracing the trip step by step.

For me, this kind of zine is not just documentation. It’s a way of understanding what a trip really left behind.

It also reminds me that memory is rarely linear. A family trip is never just landscapes — it’s snacks, backpacks, tiredness, jokes, unexpected details, and tiny scenes that become bigger later.

Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to zines: they allow memory to stay messy, visual, and human.

And maybe that’s also why a folded piece of paper sometimes tells more than a perfectly organized album ever could.

I’ll probably keep making these small foldable travel zines because they feel closer to how memory actually works.

I create my zines digitally using Procreate, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe InDesign, but you don’t need fancy software to make one.

You can also use collage techniques and then digitize everything simply by photographing it with your phone.

Love, Micol