Dafi Kühne

Dafi Kühne is a Swiss designer, letterpress printer and graphic design educator. In his studio babyinktwice he uses a wild mix of analog and digital tools to produce posters for for music, art, architecture, theatre and film projects, and also for products. With this one main rule in his studio «No PDF ever leaves the studio as a final product», he prints all his posters with letterpress printing presses. His mostly typographic posters have won international awards and been in exhibitions all around the globe. His designer monograph True Print has been published by Lars Müller Publishers in 2016.

Dafi Kühne started his journey studying visual communications at Zürich University of the Arts and got more focused on letterpress through an internship with Hatch Show Print in Nashville. He first got noticed by the international letterpress scene in 2009 through his diploma project «Wood Type Now!», which he could present in Italy, England and the USA in 2010 and 2011. Since 2009 he has been full-time running his design studio in the Swiss Alps. He produced his first complete sets of laser-cut wood type already in 2008, then started cutting pantograph-type from pear wood and solid plastic in 2013 and started casting plastic type in 2016. In 2019 he got his research MRes masters degree in Typeface Design at University of Reading, UK.

Dafi Kühne has been a teaching several workshops and giving presentations at previous Wayzgooses. At this year’s AWAYZGOOSE, Dafi Kühne will be talking about his research on Alternatives to wood type in the 20th century – poster type made from pantograph plastic and light-metal, as well as cast plastic type from the 1960s.