The making of ‘het kan hooguit mislukken’

The making of ‘het kan hooguit mislukken’

On a later moment the image will be added.

The brief

Design a word/phrase you appreciate/funny/ weird in the Dutch language. Design the text and add a translation and a brief explanation. Print at least 15 copies in your favorite printing technique on A5 size orientation and paper choice free.

The concept

The phrase that I use quit a lot to convince myself or others to do stuff that is difficult /exciting/challenging or to try out stuff that you never done before. 'het kan hooguit mislukken’ the worst thing that can happen is the it can fail.

How to design?

at the moment my favorite printing technique or more my favorite printer is a daisywheel printer that I found on marktplaats and picked up last year (2022) the brand is Brother and the type is em-701fx it’s from the nighties.

It uses a daisy like wheel that prints letters on paper though impact mostly know for the use in typewriters. I also find a daisywheel typewriter with a printer connection. This one I going to use for this edition.

It is a challenge is to make a design if you only aloud to uses letters the Typewriter has on its daisywheel. I was thinking about some kind of code. I always liked html with css. So I a designed a page in html with inline css very basic simple white on black. To annoy graphic designers it is alway fun to use comic sans as a font.

This design reminds me at the first publication station logo it only needs a 🌈 gradient. That’s easy to do in css so I did.

Proof print

Now I have one text file so let’s print. I have a laptop with Linux installed the and the typewriter instals as line printer. The command ’lpr -P’ sends the file to the printer and the starts printing. The printer did not print the ‘<>’ karakters so it wasn’t possible to print the complete html file.

Other options to consider print it with a matrixprinter but that’s not as cool as the daisywheel or in letterpress . I really want to use the daisywheel. Print with out ‘<>’ ? At it later with pen. Or replace the <> with other characters? Not an option for me so I come up with a pseudo code I stripped al the tags and adjust I so if it is as a machine could render the code.

the paper

In 'Grafisch Atelier Minnigh' I found a stack of heavy paper 300gr/m I like to use for my prints the challenge was to feed it through the printer because it is a bit to sturdy. During the production I found out that it helps to feed the paper completely to the rol and than feed it again.

Production

Working on this part.

Print 15 times.

For cutting the paper I use my rol knife but this was to blunt for the paper. First I thought I just to roughly cut the paper and than trim it at the big guillotine. The aesthetic I liked so much finally I used the blunt roll knife to trim the paper to the correct size after printing

Singing the print

The appropriate thing to me to sing this print with stamps. I have my own stamp wicht I used to sign my work at the beginning of my career. And always use a dark purple colour. As a gift I also have a Chinese stamp with traditional Chinese ink I like the ecstatics of the red and the square shape it got me thinking to make a stamp as a QR-code stamp it on the right side under the print.

I choose to not hand sign and number the edition.