“If you can’t do it properly” poster

Letterpress printed poster for Typographic Printing Program 2026. Printed from hand-cut linoleum (LL Ruder Plakat), the first letter of the first line starts in its original shape and gradually morphs into the last letter of the last line, which is totally deformed.

The larger white information is set in Helvetica bold 72pt, from traditional metal type. Since the interweaving lines on the smaller size (24pt) are very labour-intensive to set in hand-set metal type, these blocks have been cast from Ludlow’s Record Gothic bold in 24pt.

Record Gothic has often been referred by old printers as Ludlow Helvetica because of their similarities. In this case, since there is no capital R and no numbers on the small copy of this poster, it is really hard to tell the difference between the two faces. This made the production much easier than setting the smaller blocks from hand-set type.