2023

Chihiro Shigemitsu

Chihiro is a designer with a focus on the collaboration between design and craftsmanship.

“My specialities within craftsmanship are screen printing, to which I have dedicated my whole three years in university, exploring representational and abstract printing methods. I am also experienced in book making, using both skills of screen printing and graphic design to create pieces. My interests lie in documenting people’s stories, languages, and inter-cultural ideas.”

On her days off, she enjoys going to the gym, going climbing, riding her bicycle, museums with her sketchbooks, and going to speakeasy cocktail bars.

ORB Magazine ISSUE 1 Screen printing Edition

ORB Magazine (named after the booking website used to book attendance for the workshops in LCC), is a series made to document the LCC workshops. The magazine’s aim is to shed light into the significance of the workshops and to promote usage of them by the students.

This issue is the screen printing workshop edition, focusing on the documentation, separated into three chapters: space, humans, objects, of the workshop and how the space is used.

I wanted to feature interviews and works by the technicians because even after working in the screen printing workshop for all three years of my uni life, I didn’t know exactly much about my technicians and what kind of works they have printed, even though I became very close with them. This idea expanded into the idea of using a magazine format to document the workshop through the stories of the people working inside of it, and how the space and objects are used by them.

Cover with screen printed acetate sheets to make a interact-able magazine cover design, linking with the “layer” element of screen printing.

Screen printed spread.

Instructions for “Happy Accidents”

Through my experience in screen printing, I’ve found that “Happy Accidents”: colours of inks, extra layers, changing the positioning, all decisions made spontaneously, made the prints more interesting.

My aim in this project was to generate an instruction manual that would generate these “Happy Accidents” intentionally to explore new techniques for screen printing.

Combining my existing knowledge of screen printing, I used a dice to generate a set of instructions made out of nouns (objects used during printing) and verbs (inspired by the verb list by Richard Serra). The outcome is three categories of prints, each of landscape, object, and person and each print has a unique combination of colour and instruction.

50p worth view 2023 Screen print.

Lil chonk on a chair 2023 Screen print

Looking back 2023 Screen print

Animated gif showing the generated differences between each print, all made with the same screen but different instruction sets.

The “perfect” and “true” screen printing manual

As a response to the question, “What is the value of Craftsmanship to Graphic Design?” I wanted to emphasise a characteristic of screen printing which is letting the process influence the outcome.

For this, I made an instruction manual (taking inspiration from office style manuals) on how to screen print, but made two versions. The “perfect” version and the “true” version. With the set of these two, we see not just how much attention is needed to obtain the perfect print, but how the process of testing and making mistakes led to the outcome.

This, I believe we can learn as designers nowadays, where we make our outcomes on a laptop screen and watch it be printed out onto paper without any change, development, or experimentation. The beauty of screen printing is that there is the chance for the designer to make decision as the results are slowly unravelling in their hands. They can see how the ink rests on the paper, how the light inside the room changes, how the pressure of the squeegee can possibly give way to new textures. I believe that this process is something that working completely on a digital platform cannot achieve and something, as designers, we can benefit from knowing.

“perfect” manual.

“true” manual incorrect printing order of layers and swatches of test colours.

page of “true” manual ink bleeds on the side of the page, uneven pressure of the lines.

page of “perfect” manual

Chihiro Shigemitsu

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