Dafi Kühne

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Dafi Kühne (*1982) is a graphic designer and letter­press print­maker. He stud­ied Visual Commu­nic­a­tion at the Zurich Univer­sity of the Arts (ZHdK) and and he holds a Research-Masters Degree in Typeface Design from the Univer­sity of Read­ing, UK. Since 2009, he has been work­ing full-time in his studio babyink­twice.ch in the Swiss Alps.

Kühne uses a mix of analog and digital tools to create posters for music, art, archi­tec­ture, theater and film projects, as well as for consumer products. He is guided by one cent­ral restric­tion: “No digital PDF ever leaves the studio as a final product.” Dafi Kühne prints all his posters using analog letter­press print­ing presses.

Dafi Kühne’s first mono­graph, True Print, was published by Lars Müller Publish­ers in 2016 and the follow-up Poster Cult! just came out last year. He teaches on a project basis at vari­ous univer­sit­ies in Switzer­land, Europe and the USA and has estab­lished his own inter­na­tional summer intense Typo­graphic Print­ing Program. Since 2018, he has been publish­ing a series of enter­tain­ing web videos entitled The Dafi Kühne Print­ing Show™, which in 2021 received both a Swiss Design Award and, in Japan, a Tokyo TDC prize.

Kühne’s original posters can be found in public collec­tions and archives in Switzer­land (includ­ing the mudac collec­tion), Germany and the USA, and his poster work has won inter­na­tional awards and been shown in exhib­i­tions around the world.