Five on Friday • 08.14.26
Ideas, stories, and inspiration to discover, explore, and make.
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I’ve been going down a Letraset rabbit hole this week. Letraset is basically the Kleenex of dry transfers (also called rub-down transfers). Other popular brands included Mecanorma, Chartpak, and Zip-A-Tone. They all made sheets of letters, illustrations, and patterns used for graphic design and layout before desktop publishing (aka the computer). This week’s five links are all about Letraset and its overlap with the zine scene.
Pointless Suffering
In making the zine [Pointless Suffering] I set up a couple of rules for myself: 1. All type (with the exception of the body copy) would be set by hand, meaning it would be cut and pasted, and 2. The tools used would be analogue (with the exception of a concession I made enabling me to use digital cameras when needed), 3. No rulers or other measuring devices would be allowed, everything had to be eyeballed, 4. Fonts would be used to one’s heart’s content and combined without too much thought or prejudice, and finally 5. Everything would be in black and white, because, well, punk is black and white!
“[T]he whole project should still be considered a grand success, because we had a ton of fun doing it!”
Read about the creation of Pointless Suffering on Fonts In Use →
SPLAT
Browse some of the most popular Letraset transfer sets on The Society for the Preservation of Letraset Action Transfers (SPLAT) →
“The requisite bureaucratic dullness”
Although it was used by professional graphic designers, publications with small print runs and budgets were particularly enthusiastic adopters of Letraset. Pamphlets and flyers, such as those produced by the CCANZ, often incorporated it, as did fanzines and other counter culture material like posters.
The delightfully titled 1980s science fiction fanzine, Fission Chips, is one of many in such fanzines in the collection making use of Letraset fonts for its titles and cover pages.
Read The requisite bureaucratic dullness →
Listen to Episode 09. Type & tattoos with Dan Rhatigan →
Seeing words: Letraset, zines, maximalism and why fonts feel different on the Seeing Senses Podcast
Letraset, design and music →
And it wasn’t just the designers who got inspired. Thanks to Letraset’s hyper availability, non-designers were given license to function as professional designers. The fanzine world was quick to adopt Letraset as one of the typographical vehicles of choice, along with the typewriter, the IBM golf ball and hand lettering.
This week on Makeist ↓
While learning about heat press transfers, we discovered a whole category of printers designed specifically for making T-shirt transfers. To make it possible to transfer designs on to dark fabrics, the printers can lay down an undercoat of white.
Which means, my friends, there is an entire subcategory of white-toner printers that wasn’t even on my radar until now. 🤯
Ooh, the podcast looks interesting! Saved to my playlist!
Hooray for Letraset! Great set of interesting links. My partner and I have a fairly big collection of Letraset and I use it in my drawings fairly frequently. Because our sheets are 40+ years old at this point the transfers are extremely prone to crumble into dust but I enjoy rolling the design dice.