In this personal project together with Dafi Kühne we tried to interpretate a text passage by german philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In „Loss of dignity“ he deplores the decline of serious thinking in times when everybody is stressed and in endless hurry. With this change in front of the course of time we worked in different ways.

For this poster I designed a hairline font that combines both grotesque and fracture characteristics – a mix of old and new so to say.

For the letterpress printing blocks we lasercut the hairline type into a woodblock, placing each block contrawise aslope into the lasercuter. This little trick causes that the laser loses focus from a certain inclination on – and the monoline font shape gets more and more blurry.
Finally one printing block is sharp on top and blurry at the bottom; the second one the other way round.

With both woodblocks printed one upon the other, two contrawise sharpness-gradients appeare, reaching their only congruency in the most important word of the quote: „silence“. Printing the poster on a lovely old Schneider Proof Press (year 1960, 50x70) was also a funny experience for Dafi and me.

(c) by Johannes Breyer und Dafi Kühne
More information: johannesbreyer.com