Furiously Curious

New from the print shop today is a broadside I’ve been working on for the last month:

Buy Furiously Curious

The words are Sir Jony Ive’s, from BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs (you can hear them at 3:50 in the episode):

I was so curious, not in a gentle, passive way, but furiously curious. It drives me crazy if we just accept someone’s dogma.

I just absolutely loved the feeling of that level of curiosity, and felt a drive to capture the words in print. 

My original thought was that they could become a This Box is for Good box, to the point where I mocked one up:

I realized, assembling the mockup into a box, that it didn’t really work: reading around a box isn’t natural, and the impact of the words was diminished rather than amplified. So, instead, I pivoted to printing a broadside.

I experimented with many different arrangements of type; the breakthrough came when Lisa suggested encasing the words inside a solid-coloured rectangle. Once I mocked that up, it all fell together for me visually.

I printed the yellow rectangle on our etching press, using an uncarved piece of Japanese vinyl. My yellow-loving heart sang when I saw the result it was possible to achieve with the press, something that would be very difficult to replicate on the letterpress:

After fiddling with the packing on the press, I was able to produce a solid set of eight:

For the body type, I chose a battered old font of a sans serif typeface that I purchased from Atelier Domino in Montreal years ago. It’s got some quirkiness, including a wonky S, and a very chunky comma:

The “furiously” and the “curious” are set in a wooden typeface that I purchased from Letterpress Things in 2022; it has its own jaunty quirkiness, and I think the two typefaces are a good match.

The ink, in both cases, is from the Dutch company Van Son. The red is actually florescent pink, from a tiny sampler I purchased a few years ago, when I decided I needed to print in more than just black and red. When it’s printed over the yellow background it appears more red than pink.

By the time I experimented with layout, packing, and other elements of makeready, the project emerged as a limited edition of 4 prints. I put them on sale in the Queen Square Press shop today.