Lever

A risograph studio in Sheffield that prints for other people and teaches anyone who turns up. A riso lays one ink per pass, so the identity is built the way the machine works: two inks, flat shapes, and one angle that everything on the sheet has to obey.

Client
Fictional, self-initiated
Sector
Print studio and workshops
Scope
Mark, angle system, print, screen
Method
After Rodchenko and Lissitzky
Built
CSS transforms, no images
01

The mark

Five letters in two slabs, one black and one red, butted with no gap. It is a word set as a machine part rather than a logo drawn to be admired.

Primary lockup with an angle panel

Split
Always after the third letter. The red carries the last two and never the first three.
Butted
No gap between the slabs. If they separate it stops being one object.
Rotation
The mark itself never rotates. It is the fixed thing the angled sheet is pinned to.
Reversal
On red, the black slab stays black and the red slab becomes paper. The pair never both go to one colour.
02

The angle

Each season is assigned one angle from four. Every bar, slab and line on every sheet that season is set to it. Nothing is levelled up to look tidier, and nothing gets its own angle.

Open
Press
Sat 14
Angle

Fixed
Four angles exist. Minus twenty four, minus fourteen, plus eleven, plus twenty two.
Assigned
One per season, printed on the studio wall so nobody has to ask.
Applies to
Every element except the mark, the folio and anything a reader has to read at length.
Why
A shared angle makes eleven unrelated posters look like one studio without anyone matching colours.
03

Colour

Two inks, because a riso prints one at a time and a third pass costs a third of the day. Red is for anything the public is invited to. Blue is for anything you have to book.

Red#E8262AEvents, open days, anything free to walk into.
Blue#1B4FA0Workshops and courses. Anything with a fee and a limit on places.
Black#17150FAll type and every rule. Present on every sheet without exception.
Newsprint#EFE9DCThe stock. Its tooth is part of the palette, not a defect.
Two passes
Black plus one. Red and blue never appear on the same sheet, because that is three passes.
Registration
Half a millimetre of misregistration is accepted and never corrected in artwork.
Coverage
No solid fill above sixty per cent of a sheet. The machine cannot lay it flat and the paper cockles.
04

Typography

A condensed grotesque that goes very heavy, for everything set in a slab, and an ordinary workhorse for the paragraphs nobody should have to read at an angle.

Slab
Big Shoulders 800
Open Press
Sub
Big Shoulders 600
Two colour workshop
Copy
Barlow 16 / 26
Bring a design or bring nothing. The studio has paper, four drums of ink and a person who will tell you honestly whether your file will print.
Label
Barlow 600, tracked
Sat 14 · 10.00 – 16.00 · £65
Slabs
Display type always sits in a filled box. Type on bare paper at an angle is where legibility goes.
Level
Running text stays horizontal on every sheet. The angle is for the structure, not the reader.
Case
Display is uppercase, copy is sentence case, and there is nothing in between.
05

Poster series

Three sheets from one season, so all three share an angle. Two are red because anyone can come, and the middle one is blue because it has twelve places and a fee.

Sat 14 MarFree
Thu 19 Mar£65
Sat 28 MarFree

Spring season, angle minus fourteen

06

Applications

The wedge survives all the way down to a ticket stub. On the timetable it moves to the left page so the right page can stay level and be read.

Lever Two colour
workshop
Thu 19 Mar · 10.00 – 16.00
Place 07 of 12

Workshop ticket, 180 × 80 mm

Spring season

What is on

DateSessionPrice
Sat 14Open pressFree
Thu 19Two colour workshop£65
Sat 28Zine swapFree
Thu 02Stencil and overprint£65
Sat 11Open pressFree

Season timetable, A4 landscape

PrintingWorkshopsShopVisit

Bring us
a file

Short runs from twenty five copies, on stock we keep in the building. Quotes back the same day, usually within the hour.

Get a quote

Website

Open
press
Second Saturday · 10 til 4

Window card, A3

07

What breaks it

Three of these make the sheet look tidier and all three kill it. The fourth is what happens when somebody wants to use both inks because both inks are nice.

×
Do not level it up Set square, the composition is a stack of boxes. The angle is the only thing giving it force.
×
Do not mix angles One element at its own rotation reads as a mistake, and it makes every correctly set element look like one too.
×
Do not use both inks Red and blue on one sheet is a third pass. It doubles the price of the run and the studio stops using the system.
×
Do not set copy on the angle Structure can lean. Sentences cannot. Anything longer than four words stays level.