Zehn Dinge

I’ve been itching to bring some more type into my collages lately & for whatever reason I’m not okay printing it directly from my computer. I’ll use found typography all day long, whether it’s laser-printed, photocopied, letter-pressed or what have you. But if I were to just print something from my laptop, there just aren’t any stakes. It’s not interesting to me.

So, if I want type, I’ve got to cut it and print it myself, which means linoleum until I become that middle-aged guy who buys a letterpress and starts their own “bespoke letterpress studio”. I only joke because I have neither the space nor cash to actually do it.

I’m happy to lay the type out digitally though. I don’t need to create each letterform from scratch. So I jumped into Illustrator and quickly realised that none my typefaces were interesting m. Time to start searching for small foundries. There are a million of them. Many of them excellent. Eventually I came across this amazing, blocky, and awkward reverse-contrast slab called “Monster”. It’s by Monokrom, a small Norwegian foundry, who offer free demo fonts. I laid out “ZEHN DINGE” in Monster plus five or six other fonts before realising that Monster was it. I bought the font (support independent type foundries) and got to work.

Lay out the type.
Flip it.
Print it.
Find tracing paper.
Trace.
Cut the linoleum.
Gather paper, go for variety.
Print.

Unlike almost every other print I pull, I was happy from the first to the last. I wound up with 18 sheets of fat, blue, blocky, and awkward type on old book pages, music scores, receipts and even a few pieces of proper printing paper.

Next step (after they dry which takes forever in the winter), start cutting them up and making more collages!