Dafi Kühne studio tour with Poster House
Ive watched a few talks with Dafi but this one was really insightful to the space he works in and the methodologies he uses in his development of ideas and technique
I really like his approaches to the traditional process and how he tries to experiment with the possibilities and push the traditional rules plus how open he is with showing the processes behind his work.
New summer school poster for Dafis in house summer school
-Typographic pollution
-The type is stretched and distorted
-There is then a seperate story created from the folds and where they are folded, looking at the grid system, especially on the back information and folds
-Paper stock, 120gsm as it will be a folded Poster to be sold. An archived print would be thicker -Paper always chosen for the design
-All about the semantics within the type and design reflection on each theme
100 - 100 years of Kulturgesellschaft Glarus
-This poster needed to be inviting, positive and happy
-Handcut lino on yellow paper with 2 hits of white first to create gloss on print, need to use several layers to achieve that before printing colour.
-If you do not want gloss you need to make sure to use minimal layers
25 - 25th anniversary of Northern Italy musuem, Tipoteca
- The print is designed to read as 25 from the front and the show fast passing of time and years above this. This type is designed to be more legible when you turn the print to the side
-Handcut lino , with a small detail of metal set type
SFG - Schule für Gestaltung Basel
-Used Elmers white glue on board of MDF and then used a chisel to crop around the letters to give more definition. Then set to type height
-Basel school of design is a very traditional school. The best symbol for design is a brush stroke
-Used very thin glossy stock, glossy stock gives very good reproduction of detailed brush stroke marks. Thin paper for folding
-Asked, what's the perfect way of using letterpress technology to recreate type and make new marks?
Sausage piece - Heute metzgete
-2 handcut pieces of lino
-Printed with split fountain colours
-The type made to look like it had eaten too much
Chair poster - Turboblock No8
-Printed on green recycled paper
-White printed first on chair then overprinted with orange later to create glossy look
-Laser cut the weave of the seat as was too detailed to handcut
-The rest of the chair was cut by hand
-The project looked at the two most sold chairs of all time. One a wooden chair and another a plastic mass produced chair
-The print run was 14 passes to make sure the colours got full saturation on the green recycled paper
Neu - Poster for Grafikmagazin
-Kickstarter magazine poster as part of the campaign
-Made with reglets and printed on 270gsm paper
-Printed with pink first double print to create opacity as letterpress is not as opaque as screen-printing.
-Have to be very careful with registration
-Made a colour chart then printed each individual colour
-Printed white MDF Neu a few times to get opacity
-Then added the small info and type on the poster
-15 print runs although only 5 colours are on show on poster
End thoughts and questions
-Don't want letterpress to dominate his designs.
-Want to experiment and go past traditional processes and boundaries
-Through restrictions of analogue process, certain sizes, styles etc can use these and experiment against these. But these do not give you the choice of digital work
-Uses offset inks and recycled inks from print shops.
-Has old inks, better quality, maybe not too environmentally friendly but using these up til they are finished with
-Always want to work with semantics connections in work and design. Ideas to see what works for each process and project
-I asked about bringing in other traditional print processes, Dafi said.. I couldn't do work on such a professional level to then bring in other printmaking processes
-Another good question was, Do you see your work as a departure from or a reflection on Swiss modernists? Few years ago would have said would have nothing to do with them but now looking at work and relating on work and can see the relations in my work to it especially against worldwide artists. Subconsciously using it, its culturally embedded in the way we learn typography In Switzerland
-Dafi has a 400sqm studio space, 1 hour from Zurich. Can afford a much bigger space, being away from the main city
Apply word.. has negative kerning which is very hard to do with metal typesetting
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