OUGD502 - Creative Report - Dafi Kuhne - Questions

Making notes on and potential questions throughout my research into Dafi and other designers made it useful to develop relevant questions. To achieve this, I aim to remove the generic questions and jump straight into the specific and broad questions based on Kuhne's individual practice and what I want to find out. This will demonstrate my awareness of his practice.

• Start by describing your practice in just three words...

• Letterpress is often considered a passion due to the fact it is hard to get a steady income, how did you manage your studio/practice so that you can make money out of it?

• What role does print have in the digital age?

• I recently visited Erik Spiekermann’s print studio P98a where there was a clear focus on the perfections of letterpress. Your practice is clearly a lot more experimental, do you aim to take advantage of the imperfections of print?

• Your posters suggest experimental and innovative ways of locking up type, does working manually give you confidence to break tradition?

• Your posters have a unique signature, non are the same, where do you drawn inspiration from? Are they influenced by the client or material process?

• You describe letterpress as an unfinished medium, do you think their is a limit to how far the tradition can be pushed?

• How do you balance the role of working digitally and by hand when approaching a project, do you start by sketching or mocking up digitally? What is your design process?

• There is a definite resurgence for analog as vinyl and film photography sales have dramatically increased, what are your views on this? 

• Your dissertation project WoodTypeNow! explores the potential of combining digital with analogue letterpress. What compelled you to do this?

• You are clearly passionate about design education, what key values can students learn from working with traditional type?

• You mentioned in Double Dagger that you would like to experiment with transforming the letters (stretching) - Have you made any progress with this? 

Imbed my knowledge from p98a - Keeping print today and know what im talking about

Applying my knowledge



As Kuhne has agreed to have a Skype interview, this will allow me to make the interview into more of a conversation more than a questionnaire. A conversation will also allow me to cover a range of topics, therefor I changed the proposed a diverse range of questions:

• I recently visited Erik Spiekermann’s print studio P98a where there was a clear focus on the perfections of letterpress. Your practice is clearly a lot more experimental, do you aim to take advantage of the imperfections of print?

• Your posters suggest experimental and innovative ways of locking up type, does working manually give you confidence to break tradition?

• Your posters have a unique signature, non are the same, where do you drawn inspiration from? Are they influenced by the client or material process?

• You describe letterpress as an unfinished medium, do you think their is a limit to how far the tradition can be pushed?

• How do you balance the role of working digitally and by hand when approaching a project, do you start by sketching or mocking up digitally? What is your design process?

• Letterpress is often considered as a passion due to the fact it is hard to get a steady income, how did you manage your studio/practice so that you can make money out of it?

• There is a definite resurgence for analog as vinyl and film photography sales have dramatically increased, what are your views on this?  

• Your dissertation project WoodTypeNow! explores the potential of combining digital with analogue letterpress. What compelled you to do this?

• You are clearly passionate about design education, what key values can students learn from working with traditional type?

• You mentioned in Double Dagger that you would like to experiment with transforming the letters (stretching) - Have you made any progress with this?