Welcome!
Dafi Kühne is a Swiss graphic designer and letterpress printmaker from Zürich+Glarus, Switzerland. He studied Visual Communication at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), and in 2019 earned a Master of Research in Typeface Design from the University of Reading (UK). Since 2009, his studio babyinktwice—based in Näfels (Glarus)—has designed and printed posters, invitation cards, brochures and packaging for music, art, architecture, theatre and film projects. It normally all starts with a printed poster or a card, but can then be expanded to broader visual identities including other digital formats.
For his poster work, Dafi combines contemporary graphic design with old analogue printing technologies. And his printed poster are the center of his practice. He follows two simple rules: no digital-only design projects—and no PDF leaves his studio as a finished product. Every poster is printed in-house using letterpress presses from the 1960s, along with metal and wood type, laser-cut and pantograph-cut wood or polymer blocks, hand‑cast Ludlow hot‑metal slugs, hand‑cut linoleum, chipboard and more. Over the years, he has amassed roughly 40 tons of redundant printing equipment—embodying his belief that production is an integral part of the design process.
It’s not all about letterpress—Dafi is neither a Luddite nor a nostalgic retro fanatic. For him, it’s about finding the right tool to produce typographic design. In that sense, he is not only the designer of a poster, he is also the designer of the tool that the poster is being printed with. He designs and thinks with the printing process in mind, always pushing the boundaries of what design can be. Never afraid to get his hands dirty in the workshop, Dafi embraces the labor involved in every step—from the initial idea to the finished product. By fusing modern methods with the century-old tradition of letterpress, he develops a new visual language for communicating through type and form in a truly contemporary way. Never retro, his work is a thoughtful response to the ongoing search for new modes of graphic expression.
Since 2011, Dafi Kühne has taught design and letterpress printing in short workshops and full semesters at universities in Switzerland, throughout Europe and the United States. He also runs the Typographic Printing Program, a 13‑day international intensive workshop founded in 2016, with satellite courses in 2022 and 2023 at the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography at ArtCenter in Pasadena.
He has published two monographs: True Print (2017) and Poster Cult (2024), both with Lars Müller Publishers.