The making of a protest font

The Protest Font stems from Kiss & Bite founder Alan Qualtrough’s participatory art project the Truth Wall, which invites people to print and display their own politically-driven letterpress poster.

The project, which was a collaboration with designer and creative technologist Matt Holmes, took the letterpress poster font Alan uses for the Truth Wall: 20-line Atlantic Sans Condensed, digitised it, laser cut it using Lino, and mounted it on 3mm acrylic blocks. The project was funded through a Knowledge Exchange project with the Arts University Plymouth.

This meant the font was easier to manipulate and use on a wider range of presses so the Truth Wall could be scaled up with larger installations and more participants.

The Truth Wall itself is inspired by Alan’s interest in protest posters, especially the I AM A MAN campaign used in the American Civil Rights movement in the 1960s to make a statement about race equality, and the Atelier Populaire campaign in Paris, also in the 1960s, which was a student challenge to the French right-wing government. In both instances, traditional printing methods were hacked to give ordinary people a voice and the ability to print at home.

There were a few crunches and crashes along the way to creating the Protest Font, but it made its debut at Ocean Studio’s Print in Action weekend in October 2022, where people from across the city came to created their own protest posters and add them to the Truth Wall.