Creative Report - Interview with Dafi Kuhne
DK: So what experiences have you had with letterpress?
I explained my basic typesetting skills using small point type and he was curious as to whether I’ve printed large point.
DK: Bigger is nice but my main concern is quality. If you can do lets say, an A3 size poster and you can do them perfectly you will find a bigger press and you will be able to show off in a bigger size but for now if you have small type and you do high quality work don't worry about it. I see a lot of students who just wanna buy a big press and wood type.. If the stuff they produce in the end is just crap then it’s not worth it.
JG: A bit like ‘all the gear but no idea’?
DK: Yeah exactly, exactly, that’s the problem.
JG: So how do you encourage your students to working manually?
DK: There are so many workshops and museums around that are just not used at all so it makes sense that these workshops get more traffic. Everyone wants their own equipment but I think its stupid that everyone buys their own type and press and all that because it’s expensive. And if you really want to work for someone professionally it takes more than just a press. And I had to learn this the hard way too, so I bought a press and I thought ‘well that’s it!’ but then I find out I need some ink and then I need some furniture and then I need some mineral spirits, some drying racks and all that shit. In the end though, you end up like me with 20 tonnes of type, which is nice. But if you think as a student that you want to print some posters as a hobby, it doesn’t make sense if you buy all that shit. Go somewhere and prove to the people who run the workshop that you are the guy to do it. And then they will be happy to do anything. There are so many workshops around that are really under used and that’s all over. It’s not only Switzerland it’s in the UK, Germany and US as well. Imagine all the money you could save by paying a small fee to use their workshop but you don’t have to rent the space, you don't have to buy all the equipment that is getting much more expensive right now. For me it makes much more sense to use the infrastructure that is around us.
JG: Sure and I guess working in a workshops provides more opportunity for collaboration?
DK: Right. And I understand it. I did the total opposite as well. Everybody wants their own equipment. At least I can say it kind of paid off as I proved that at least Im not one of the people that jumped out two years later. There’s tonnes of these people that just buy them and create a very nice workshop, they build up all this stuff, they arrange all the reglets and sort them out but then they’re sitting in the workshop and all they do is print an alphabet. did it for 8 years
*Moves camera to a letter pressed alphabet on his wall*
DK: This.. That’s not from me, but that’s what you get when you don’t know what to do. What can I do? I’ve got all this type in my workshop, it’s not worth it.
JG: Fair enough, so as we were saying earlier, letterpress is considered more of a passion and a hobby, how did you start generating money from using analogue processes? As they’re so expensive and time consuming as well.
DK: Well that was a big concern of course, and it is still a big concern because it’s something you have to establish everyday. Did you read my book?
JG: Yeah yeah I’ve got your book.
DK: It has this one thing in it that basically says something like ‘don’t do what you don’t want to be doing in five years.’
JG: Oh from the poster?
DK: Yes, so I knew that if I start working with letter press and if I do it for free today then I will (probably) never be able to charge anybody for good money in 3 or 4 years. For me it was obvious that if I didn’t have any money I couldn’t do for free, or super cheap, I would charge. That will bring me into a situation where I can never charge because there’s never enough money. Everybody tells you ‘Ohhh can we do this a little cheaper or cut the budget a little bit?’ Whatever. And if you start like that then I’m pretty sure that you can never make a job out of it. I have an example a good friend of mine, he's making silk screen posters. He does them really nicely and he’s won a lot of competitions, he won about 25 grand for one of his posters and he's pretty good. And he's done that for free, forever. He will never be able to charge anyone any money for that. He would send emails to big bands, bigger bands than I do, but he doesn't charge them anything. He goes ‘Can I make a free poster and then sell them at your gig?’ And they say, ‘Well yeah, that’s cool.’ So he makes the posters for free, he sells a couple of them at the gig and that’s it. But then he has a nice poster in his portfolio, his portfolio is really cool and diverse but he is now having to make websites to make money. And then he can print posters. Now lets say I take a different approach and say ‘I need to charge some good money for it right now, although I wouldn't have to because I didn't have a family, it was just me in my studio, I could have charged anybody just 200 bucks for something and it would have been fine but I knew that in five years I couldn’t make a living out of it. That’s the problem. So you’re asking how can you transfer from it being a hobby its by self establishing it, you need to sell this.People get to you and they want a website, or they want a Facebook notification; ‘can you make this look nice’, but I tell them ‘Well we could do that but if you want something really good you could just do a poster. But obviously it’s not that easy. You need to make people aware that there’s something else other than a Facebook invitation. There’s more than a website. Websites are important, nothing against that, but sometimes you get 10,000 invitations last year and then you get one poster that is nicely printed then you will keep this invitation. That is the new market.
JG: So more people are searching for some tangibility in the digital age, is that what you’re saying?
DK: Yeah I just think that there’s a new awareness of that. If it’s cheap and fast on one side, and that’s the big commercial thing now, then there will be people saying ‘Well, isn't there anything better than that?’ And for me that’s it. I’ve found my niche.
JG: There’s also a clear resurgence of vinyl, and film
DK: Yeah and you could even go further you could say people start buying their food at the farmers market because they think it’s better for their Karma, their body. They give the money to a family they know, who grow the vegetables and it’s really a direct market. I think it’s honest. You have to be careful. I think the vinyl market, that trend is increasing dramatically now but it can go the other direction soon. If I built my whole studio on a trend, that can be really really dangerous. I’m trying not to do retro design, if I made retro design in Switzerland then maybe there would be a market for a very short period. People would love these Western posters, like the posters I’ve done. Do you know Hatcho print?
JG: No I haven’t heard of them.
DK: They're from Nashville, Tennessee and I went for an internship there and it as great but they’re doing really retro designs. If you do posters that look like they were from 50 years ago then it might be dangerous because there’s not a big market for that longterm. People will love your style for two years then they'll go. That is the reason why I focus on contemporary design and it’s also because I studied visual communication.
JG: During your studies when did you realise you would prefer to use manual processes?
DK: It is very much established in the classes when I studied. We did some typesetting but most of us switched back to computer very sonar it was just an introduction and typesetting is just for three weeks and then that’s it. Then I got an offer for a press and Im pretty sure if someone had offered me a silk screen press or a risograph, I would have taken that. But I'm also very sure that if I had taken one or the other. The press was really cheap, about the same price as a smartphone, so its not something that you buy if you have rich parents. I came back from my internship and explored the digital aspect of my practice, we had a later cutter at our school and made my first wood type alphabet from it in 2008. Nobody did it back then. That’s how I really got into it but I never thought it would be my job but thats fine, Im a designer. Then it grew and grew and grew and at some point you cant stop those 20 tonnes of metal type, they’re heavy. You get infected by them.
JG: I am curious about how you actually start a project. Do you start with sketches or mock it up digitally, or is it all manually working with the type?
DK: Well its not always the same but during the process theirs always a switch between the press and the computer. I might start sketching something and I often work in illustrator for the posters. Then I look at my collection and choose a couple of letters a prove them on the press. Or I simulate them on the computer using helvetica compact, I stretch the letters until the proportions are correct and then. Obviously this is something you normally wouldn't do but its just so you know how much space I can fill. And then its a back and fourth process again between what it looks like on paper and then I need to show the client paper samples and the letters and then I show them a digital sketch.
JG: You mentioned in your book that you get a lot of the copy for the content from the client, do you get some freedom to design?
DK: No it doesn't work like that. Normally I get copy and I ask them to tell me all of the mandatory information and what is the information I can play with. With some posters you’re happy if you have more content and some posters you’re happy if there is less content, and I need to be able to play with that. And I also need to be able to change some of the structures or formulations for how you want to say something. Fact is when you have bad content you can’t make a nice poster. If a CEO of a company thinks they’re super funny for a younger audience but he's a 60 year old stupid guy. He wont get the humour of the younger generation because he's old, or his practice is a different style. You have to be careful and tell them what they're saying isn’t appropriate for a younger generation. This is the target audience. In these cases you need to talk to the client about the content and this is something that designers don't want to do, they don't want to talk about the content because they are not advertisers, they're graphic designers so they take what the get and if the topic is cool they’ll design something really cool out of it but if its medium cool; ‘thats the best I could do’, but thats not good if you do the best you can do and its crap..? Five years later no one will ask you if the client was stupid or if the content was crap or the time schedule was shitty, you are stuck with this piece of work.
JG: From making my posters I can relate to if the content is boring its really hard to make a nice poster out of it. There’s evidence of you locking up type at angles, would you say working manually encourages you to breaks traditional rules?
DK: I wouldn't say it was because of the technique, I think it goes back to how I started. I bought that press, I got a whole load of type. The type was a bit of a mess, I sorted it but if I hadn't taken that time it would have gone to scrap. So I saved it and I said, ‘if I do one good poster with this type then its already worth it. I don't care if I break anything, I don't care if Im breaking traditional rules, I don't care, I wanted one cool poster. At least I did something good with it. I started exploring in a really weird way and of course, if you don't have a nice portfolio, if an old guy watches over your shoulder and says ‘hey what're you doing here, its all crap’ but then a couple of years later I know much more about the process and technique than the traditional guys because all they do is print photo plates, risoplates, lead type and maybe wood type and thats all. Im much more flexible because for me it didn't matter I just used things on the press. That gives me a lot of freedom. But as you probably know, breaking the rules is only okay if you know the rules and I think that is really really important with typography.
JG: I found one of the quotes from your True Print poster really inspiring. It was the one about how traditional and expensive processes shouldn't justify bad design.
DK: Yes it’s not only expensive. I work with students and for example, they mix ink to get a certain tone. They show me the pantone colour from the swatch, they choose the colour and mix it for half an hour. They come back and the colour looks nothing like the pantone they decided on before. So they’ll say, ‘well this one is much nicer’ but it’s only nice because you’ve made it with your hands. You fall in love with what you’ve just made but if this is the perfect colour why did they show me the pantone swatch. I don't know if you’ve seen my print using refrigerator magnets?
JG: Yes
DK: Everyone thought wow you’ve used these letters, this is crazy. Yes, but if you don't make a poster layout to fit that technique or the aesthetics of the magnet, then its not worth it. This is a real problem, a problem of getting experienced enough to take enough distance from what you love and think is nice. People fall in love with a poorly printed letterpress even because they did it with their hands, yes but if you did that on the computer and printed it on a photocopier it would look crap. That’s the problem because you need to step back, its so easy to fall in love with these objects.
JG: You mentioned when you got your first set of wood type it was old and worn. You also create your own metal type, is that recycled/damaged lead type? Also is sustainability part of your practice?
DK: I think its nice if we can reuse materials or cheaper materials such as chipboard because it’s going to be a one use solution. It’s cheap, it’s easy to recycle and there’s not a lot to throw away. In other cases if I take the time to cut the alphabet for a particular poster, I might print the whole set and keep it because I can reuse it. I think its all a question of purpose and the budget because sometimes you don't have the money to get pear wood type. If I’m honest, it takes a lot of energy to melt metal. The heater burns all day long, I love the machine I think its great, because you can cast the type and then melt it back in and then you can have different type. If you think of it as an ecological fact, not 100% sure if its that good to have that heater running for three days. But its definitely nice to have something that you can reuse and work with the same collection of objects. You can use type from 50 years ago that used to print newspaper headlines every week and now I’m using it for a completely different purpose. Thats really cool, I like that.
JG: You’re passionate about education, especially with your summer program as I see you want to get more students to come over professionals. How important do you think it is to educate students on manual processes?
DK: Im not sure it’s important. If you find a good teacher who can teach in digital Im 100% sure that this could work as well. I feel that a lot of students, including me, would crave for something that is manual because they were on the computer for 8 hours a day. For me that’s really refreshing. It offers a lot of potential to teach the students to decide about certain details step by step. When I work with students, we normally design between 250 - 500 sketches in A5. So that’s really a tonne of variations of one design and its all done manually. Im teaching them how to create a diversity and ideas typographically. When I was studying I was worried that at some point my brain would just be empty because I don't have any ideas. I thought my draw of inspiration would empty if Im work so fast and often. Of course then I found out that creative people aren't filled with ideas, they learn to create things. Thats the thing. I try to give the students tools to create a mass of ideas in a short time. I hate it when you’re at a wedding and they give you a book and they say ‘oh you're a creative person can you draw something funny’ and it takes me forever to figure out something funny. It’s down to hard work, its not just ‘we are creative people’ thats not how it works. And I think that working manually breaks down the students to work slower and avoid falling back into digital processes. A lot of students resort to ways of designing that they’ve always done before such as illustrator and then I search my font library. I want to break this up because its the only way they will learn something new. If they use it later or not I don't care, it’s just one new approach.
JG: If you could choose a favourite typeface, what would you choose?
DK: In my work its not about choosing a typeface, I could easily choose one thats easy, I only use around 15-25 typefaces in all of my posters. For me, I start working with proportions. I need heavy type here, what can I find within my 25. But if you want.. I like Akscensz Grotesque Bold.
JG: Good shout. I also saw you in Double Dagger, I really enjoyed the publication and the fact it was all typeset. You said in that that you would start stretching and manipulating the type, have you made any progress with this?
DK: Im working on different things right now. It’s something that is there and if I find the right project I will start with it. I did some but its not something that I need to pursue now. It’s in the draw I can take it out whenever I need it. It’s slightly more important that it’s not about me, its about finding the right idea for the client. You can’t do what you want to do, however you can argue for it.
JG: Giving your concept a purpose.
DK: Right exactly. Hey why don't you apply for my summer program! That would be a good idea.
JG: Yeah I’ve looked at it, I would love to. It’s just funding the trip. I would love to come to Switzerland as its a beautiful place.
DK: The problem is that Switzerland is very expensive to travel. I’ve thought about it for quite a while and I understand it is expensive but you get a tonne for it. If I lowered my fee by 20% or something, it is still very expensive to travel and stay and it’ll make it harder to pack everything into the program. This still wouldn’t matter because the big part of it is affording to travel and stay in Switzerland.
JG: One day it would be great to visit your studio. If I ever come to Switzerland I’ll let you know. Thanks a lot for taking the time out of your day to speak to me, its been awesome.
DK: All the best to you.
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