My name is Dafi Kühne, I am a graphic designer / letterpress printmaker from Zürich + Glarus, Switzerland. Please feel free to contact me or visit me in my studio in Näfels (GL)...
Since 2009 I work fulltime in my studio ‹babyinktwice› designing and printing posters, invitation cards, brochures & magazines for music-, art-, theatre- and filmprojects.
I try and combine actual graphic design with the old technique, using with my Macbook, 4 letterpress printing presses from the 60ies, old lead- & woodtype, new lasercut wood-, plexiglas or linoblocks, photopolymer plates, handcut lino or cardboard and so on...
Its not all about letterpress – I am not a luddite or a romantic retro fanatic, haha. Its just about finding the right tool for producing my designs. And in my case, my printing presses are an important tool even in the process of designing. When it comes to printing I want have the full control over the whole process and make all decisions like choosing the colours & the paper, mixing the ink, setting the amount of pressure and ink (...) to fit my desingconcept.
Thats why for me it makes perfectly sense to use letterpress technique! And of course the quality! Yes.
For any short term news and ongoing projects: Please follow me on Twitter and my photostream on Flickr.
If you have any questions don't hesitate to write me an email or comment the projects on my webpage! Thanks for your visit!
Poster series of 40 different handprinted letterpress posters for a participating project to the – La Biennale di Venetia, 2012. All the type –1579 single characters have been cut out from MDF boards.
600 letterpress printed program poster for Veka-Glarus. 9 geometric blocks have been cut and 5 different layout versions have been made with these blocks. Each layout has been printed in a different colour.
350 letterpress printed new years posters for some architects. Its all about new forms of spaces and the spots where they gonna build something in 2013.
30 letterpress printed posters for a local anti vandalism campaign. ‹Lass ruhig die Sau raus!› stands for ‹Come on, get wild!› – but please on the dancefloor... If you translate it literally it would mean something like ‹Let your inner pig out›. haha
A serie of 3 letterpress posters for a popup bookstore at the ‹100 most beautiful Swiss books›-exhibition. Over three days there was every day a new poster hung up at the exhibition – to get the final message: Buy books, monkeys!
500 letterpress posters for the program of veka-glarus.ch . All handset wood and leadtype. All good old and slow hand work. No computerized highspeed shit. haha
Follow up project for last years ‹Industriefilme›-poster. For this poster I used screenshots from the actual industrial- and crafts-movies from the 1940ies and 1960ies.
Everything canceled and rescheduled — 400 letterpress posters for the program of veka-glarus.ch . Unfortunately all shows had to be canceled on that poster. But there was a pretty good alternative program...
Wood type production goes on... I produced a veeery fragile piece
of an Arabic wood type character. This character was missing in a clients set of an ultra rare old Roman Scherer A.G. Holzletternmanufaktur Arabic letters.
49 letterpress posters for my participation with the ‹Vista Sans Wood Type Project›. All participants got 5 CNC cut letters (t-o-u-c-h) from the Vista Sans typeface in wood. Each letter was from a different sort of wood and we were asked
to…
120 letterpress posters for an italian band called ‹le luci della centrale elettrica› means ‹the lights of the electric power company›. Printed in two colourruns from two MDF woodblocks and some adhesive stickers.
50 letterpress posters from two large handcut linoblocks. Printed in two splitfountain sausage colourruns on my ‹FAG Control 900›. This poster is for meatlovers and other fetishists! Yeah!
160 letterpress posters from conventional wood and leadtype. Printed in 4 colourruns on my ‹FAG Control 900›. Who wouln't dance on that evening, if that type shakes its bones like that...?
2nd serie of 4 small editions of pretty large (64cm x 88cm) letterpress posters. I did around 20 posters each for a musicprogram on Swiss Television. They are printed in 2–10colourruns from handcut cardboard and leadtype.
3c letterpress posters for the program of veka-glarus.ch . To symbolize the autumn weather, I used some old magnesium plates of watering pots that I got from an old printmaker. The type is all handset from wood- and leadtype.
5 different letterpress printed 7" recordcovers for Pommes Chips Records. Each one printed 2 colour from photopolymerplates and some additional stuff like woodtype and also a cut electric cirquit board.
4 small editions of pretty large (64cm x 88cm) letterpress posters. I did around 20 posters each for a musicprogram on Swiss Television. They are printed 2–7colours from wood- and leadtype and handcut cardboard.
4c letterpress posters for a printingworkshop held at Kunsthaus Glarus with 7 other graphic desingers. Printed from cardboard-, lead- and woodtype and a real ping pong net. Design- & printworks in collaboration with Jonas Wandeler.
This week I was working on my
‹woodtype production› project again. After several tests with different materials and production methods, I produced 3 sets of woodtype...
5 colour letterpress posters for an industrial movie project. Printed white on a thin shiny black Chromolux paper. Wrapped with a perforated thicker black Chromolux sheet.
10 different versions of a total of 600 posters for the 5 year jubilee of Veka-Glarus. Each poster is printed on origial 50 years old newspaper and has a random coloured sticker on it. The type on these posters is quick-handcut from cardboard which gives…
300 letterpress printed magazines for an exhibition about Irene Lady Shiva at message salon downtown in Zurich. I used a very shiny thin paper for the 2c magazine and some much heavier thick paper for the 4c images-poster-sheet in the middle.
I got myself an old Frontex Automatic stop-cylinder press. This one is a small a3+ automatic press, working up to 3000 prints per hour. That really speeds up my productivity! Not sure if my brain can catch up with it! Hell yeah! haha
For the ‹Italian design is comin home – to Switzerland› project I was invited to do a poster each in collaboration with Marco Nicotra. We decided to use the Google-Maps-Route from Zurich to Milano and each would design and ...
3c letterpress posters for a one day/night poster workshop with 13 international poster designers. Printed from cardboard strips cut and brought to typeheight, lead- and photopolymertype.
1c letterpress posters for the monthly program for veka-glarus.ch. Printed on an offset preprinted photo I took with an analog camera. The whole type was handset with wood- and leadtype.
Since 2008 I have been experimenting with woodtype production. My BA-thesis ‹Woodtype-Now!› was a very experimental approach to it. But in this
project I produce woodtype in a more tradtional sense. Single wood pieces to be typeset and printed...
600 2colour splitfountain posters, 10'000 2c cards, 500 magazines and some tickets. All letterpress printed. A huge project with alot of printing on different printing presses. Watch the video at the end of the images to see how complex that project was...
Serie of 3 posters for an art project. Calls to protest. The different statements where printed from adhesive foil mounted on a rough OSB-Woodblock, which makes the whole 1c posters very wild.
3c letterpress posters for the monthly program for veka-glarus.ch. The first printing-colour was white, to give
those browserwindows a nice light background on that lightgreen paper. Then gray and black.
2c letterpress posters for the Pussywarmers. I used extracts from Pussywarmers lyrics to layout them like cheap newspaper ads using just one font in two weights. By giving the lyrics a new context, they lead to interesting new associations.
1c letterpress posters for the naming ceremony for my new ‹FAG Control 900›. The black maiden voyage of my press is symbolised by a
gradation from top to the bottom of a black woodblock.
8c letterpress magazines for the monthly program for veka-glarus.ch . I used the maximum size of my polymer processor for these plates (25cm x 35cm). For those 400 magazines, I pulled more than 3200 impressions.
3c Letterpress Tickets for a ‹Monsters› concert at veka-glarus.ch . Printed from lead-type, old magnesium plates and photopolymer plates. Autonumbered while printing and letterpress-perforated after printig...
2c letterpress posters on pink/green paper for a ‹Captain Moustache & Fredo Ignazio› concert at Kunsthaus Glarus. Printed from linoleum and photopolymer plates.
2c letterpress posters for a monsters concert at veka-glarus.ch . Two reversed 2c splitfountain prints. Printed from lasercut linoleum and some old magnesium plates I got from a printmaker.
For the ‹Kunstschaffen Glarus und Linthgebiet 2009› exhibition at Kunsthaus Glarus, I pulled huge proofs of cut trees in the forest. The exibition was from december 05, 2009 until january 17, 2010.
...before they book your mother! Promotion stickers for ‹Captain Moustache & Fredo Ignazio› to send out to bars, clubs & concert hosts. Printed on white, red & yellow pre-cut adhesive foil.
2c letterpress posters for the monthly program for www.veka-glarus.ch. I drew the whole poster on a plywood plate. The impression of the pen was deep enough to print some 500 copies.
Temps, a gigantic project by Remo Caminada. 365 different black letterpress prints over fluorescent screen printed circles. Every Compact Disc with an individual date and phase of the moon.
I moved my studio. I just got too much stuff. It was a whole lot of work but now it's done. Right now i have two presses, a ‹Schneider› (50cm x 70cm) and a ‹FAG Control 405› (40cm x 55cm).
Yeah, I got me an old ‹FAG Control 405›. Yes, this is really the name of the press. Haha. Its a Swiss made halfautomatic! Watch me as I am running it for the first time. Not printing, just running the press just for the use of running it...
4c letterpress posters for the monthly program for veka-glarus.ch using photopolymer plates. Since my photopolymer processor was to small to handle these printing plates, they have been exposed to sunlight and washed in a bathtub. Yep!
2c letterpress poster for a cd release. Printed glossy black on matt black from lasercut MDF woodblocks. Bon Jovi did it ‹BACK to BACK› with Richie Sambora! Dryconditions do it ‹BLACK on BLACK›... Haha
10 - 9 - 8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1- Happy New Year! New Years Countdown for veka-glarus.ch. Oh man, this guy got stuck between 8 and 7... It felt like the year 2009 would never come.
Posterwork for an aperitif of the visual communictions departement at Zurich University of the Arts. 4 different posters were hand drawn with edding pens.
3c purple letterpress posters for a new year's party at veka-glarus.ch. Printed from MDF and plywood blocks. Since it was not possible print it anyway, the overlapping of the letters was completely faked.
During summer 2008, I could do an Internship at Hatch Showprint, one of the oldest and largest still producing letterpress poster printshop in the states. They started business in 1879 and are still printing with a huge archive of woodtype and ...
