Join the fight against typographic pollution with Dafi Kühne‘s 2021 Typographic Summer Program. The program is an intense 2 week course taking place in Switzerland for international graphic design students and professionals. The project was initiated in 2016 by Dafi as he “…felt the need for a short intense workshop focusing on contemporary typographic poster design in combination with a hands-on letterpress workshop”. Over the past 5 years, the program has taught approximately 75 participants from 16 different countries, many of which came from outside of Europe. The workshop’s goal is to bridge the gap between analogue design, production tools, and professional contemporary typographic posters.
The participants will partake in a number of analogue tasks to experience the qualities of simple type-only layouts. All the experiments and layout exercises will be realised with traditional letterpress printing presses and physical type. Through this very slow but accurate analogue process, attendees will learn to put emphasis on concept and micro typography. The Typographic Summer Program is a great opportunity for students to see and learn first hand from an internationally successful contemporary letterpress poster designer.
“The facilities I have here (around 25 tons of letterpress equipment on more than 400m2) are unique. Together with the know how that me and my team can provide, the participants can really do great work in a short period of time!” Dafi Kühne, Founder.
After a rigorous design process, the participants will each produce a letterpress printed typographic poster printed with a variety of production tools including physical type (wood and metal type), chipboard, lasercut mdf, linoleum, handcast Ludlow type slugs, and much more. Every aspect of the analogue design process that is taught is easily translated to the contemporary design practice, enhancing the students future career.
Skills trained include:
-Typographic theory: micro-typography and macro-typograpy
-Conceptual design work, critical analysis of content
-Hand typesetting, kerning, lines pacing, rags
-Handling of letterpress proofing presses and other printing equipment
-Analogue typographic design iterations to produce a typographic poster layout
-Full analogue production of a poster, print form making, printing in several colour-runs, quality control, presentation
Main instructor Dafi Kühne is an internationally renowned graphic designer and letterpress printer. Since 2009 Dafi has built up his unique studio and workshop, babyinktwice, in Näfels in the Swiss Alps, specialising in posters for music, art, architecture, theatre, and film projects. The participants will also be joined by visiting instructors including long-standing faculty member of the Visual Communication Deparment of Zurich University of the Arts Professor and expert in type history and letterpress printing, Rudolf Barmettler, typography expert and educator Jonas Niedermann, and designer and art educator Julia Marti.
Session 1: June 27th–July 10th, 2021
Session 2: July 25th–August 7th 2021
www.typographic-summerprogram.ch
Want to know more about our membership? Give us an email at members@peopleofprint.com.
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