Dafi Kühne is an designer who has been a large part of my research for my dissertation which is about Letterpress. He is a Swiss designer who uses a mix of analogue and digital techniques to create graphic typographic posters. He approaches letterpress a little differently from most people and tries to avoid the ‘given’ aesthetic of letterpress, and instead uses the elaborate process to develop the designs of his work. I recently conducted an interview with him and this was a part we discussed and he stated ‘So for me letterpress isn’t a given aesthetic, so it is not like letterpress has to look like that, I’m really looking for semantic typography, and that’s all I want. So, I want to transport feelings through my poster layouts, and I used an old technology because it fits my process.’
As I conducted this interview around the time of the brief being given out, this has been stuck in my head, and because a book cover would nearly always involve some sort of typography, I thought this would be great inspiration for my project.
I have his book True Print and it is full to the brim of typographic contemporary posters, however for this project a couple stood out which I thought would be a good starting base for exploring typography in my book cover.
These appealed in their simplicity, and also the use of texture, however not in the usual distressed wood type way. I love the textured backgrounds, with then low constrast black text over the top, but even though maybe low contrast, it is high impact in my opinion. I thought this may be an interesting mix with my idea of collaging recycled dry point prints.