by selina.pichler -

20*A Semester in Print – Looking Back and Looking Forward

Every research project begins with a suspicion.

Not a hypothesis in the formal academic sense, necessarily. More of a feeling. A hunch that something you have noticed repeatedly in the world around you is worth examining more carefully. For this semester’s blog series, that suspicion was relatively straightforward: that analogue political media is not simply a leftover from a pre-digital era, but an active, meaningful and ideologically loaded form of communication that continues to shape how people understand politics in public space.

Nineteen blog posts later, that suspicion has largely held up.

But the process of testing it – through design theory, cultural criticism, printing, and finally a small survey conducted on the streets of Graz – turned out to be considerably more layered than the original hunch suggested.

The semester began with questions about why physical political media still matters at all. In a media environment dominated by algorithmic feeds, disappearing content and endlessly optimised digital branding, the persistence of posters, stickers, banners and printed pamphlets seemed worth accounting for. The answer that emerged across the early posts was not simply nostalgic. Physical political media occupies space in a way digital communication cannot replicate. It confronts rather than competes. It persists. It deteriorates. It leaves traces – on walls, and in memory – in ways that a sponsored post optimised for a six-second attention window simply does not.

From there, the series moved into the mechanics of political visual language: how colour, typography and composition function as ideological shorthand, communicating political orientation before a single word is consciously processed. This was perhaps the most theoretically dense section of the semester, drawing on design theorists, political communication scholars and cultural critics to build an argument that visual literacy is not a specialist skill but a widely shared cultural competence, absorbed through years of repeated exposure to political environments.

The argument about analogue authenticity followed naturally from this. Imperfection, it turns out, is itself a form of communication. Rough textures, visible print processes and DIY aesthetics signal human involvement, collective effort and resistance to institutional polish in ways that highly produced digital branding cannot easily replicate – even when it tries to imitate them.

Then came the practical work.

Designing the survey sheets forced every theoretical argument back into lived decision-making. Choosing colours meant navigating real cultural associations. Selecting typefaces meant working within – and sometimes deliberately against – the visual conventions that Austrian political culture has built up over decades. The design process confirmed, from the inside, what the theoretical posts had argued from the outside: there is no neutral visual choice in political communication. Every decision encodes something.

Printing confirmed it further, and added a complication. The colour divergence between the digital and risograph versions of the survey was not ideal from a methodological standpoint. It was, however, honest. Real analogue political communication does not exist in controlled conditions either. It is produced under time pressure, with available materials, in imperfect environments. The imprecision of the riso output felt, in retrospect, less like a research flaw and more like an accidental confirmation of the series’ central argument about the material nature of analogue media.

The survey results themselves were, broadly, what the theoretical framework predicted. Colour associations mapped closely onto local Austrian political conventions. Typography produced consistent ideological readings along the lines that design theory would anticipate. And the risograph format was reliably perceived as more liberal or radical than its digitally printed equivalent – a finding that felt almost too clean, and yet was grounded in the very real cultural associations that riso printing carries within contemporary visual and political culture.

The results mostly matched expectations. But matching expectations is not the same as being unsurprising.

There is a difference between believing something theoretically and watching it confirmed by a stranger on a street in Graz who glances at a printed sheet and immediately, without hesitation, places it politically. That moment – repeated across participants, across design variations, across printing formats – was genuinely striking. It made the abstract arguments feel suddenly very concrete. Visual political literacy is not a theoretical construct. It is something people actually do, quickly and confidently, without being asked to think about it.

That is the detail that will stay with me from this semester.

Not a particular survey result. But the speed of recognition. The automaticity of it. The way a person looks at a slightly misregistered riso print of three generic political words and immediately, instinctively, knows what kind of politics it is supposed to feel like.

There is a great deal more to understand about how that process works. How it differs across demographics and political contexts. How it changes over time as visual conventions shift. How it interacts with the circulation of political media in specific urban environments. How it might be deliberately disrupted or subverted by designers working against established ideological codes.

These are questions for a master’s thesis.

And after a semester spent moving from theory to design to printing to streets and back again, I cannot wait to keep asking them!

See you next semester!

Sources:

  • Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities. Verso.
  • Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Blackwell.
  • McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. McGraw-Hill.
  • Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
  • Lupton, E. (2010). Thinking with Type. Princeton Architectural Press.
  • Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t Think of an Elephant! Chelsea Green Publishing.
  • Hearn, A. (2008). “Meat, Mask, Burden”: Probing the Contours of the Branded Self. Journal of Consumer Culture.
by selina.pichler -

19*The Medium Responded Too – What the Risograph Results Revealed

There was one finding from the survey that felt, in retrospect, almost too neat.

The risograph-printed versions of the survey sheets were consistently perceived as more liberal, or more radical, than their digitally printed counterparts showing the same designs. This held even when the underlying colour and typographic combination was one that had been rated as relatively conservative in the digital format. The medium was not merely a neutral carrier of the design. It was doing its own ideological work.

This is, of course, exactly what the previous posts in this series have been arguing. That the form of political communication shapes how its content is interpreted. That analogue aesthetics carry historical and cultural associations that precede any conscious reading of text or image. That imperfection signals something.

But arguing it theoretically and watching it happen in a survey conducted in Graz are two different experiences.

The risograph’s characteristic visual qualities – soft ink textures, slight colour shifts, the gentle misregistration between printed layers – appear to activate a set of cultural associations that respondents connected with grassroots politics, protest culture and anti-establishment communication. No one used those words directly, necessarily. But the feeling they described when encountering the riso-printed sheets consistently placed those designs further left, further from institutional authority, further toward the register of collective and community-produced political media.

Marshall McLuhan’s argument that the medium is the message has perhaps never felt more directly confirmed in small-scale empirical form (McLuhan, 1964).

It is worth being honest about the methodological complication here, which was acknowledged during the printing process itself. The risograph versions were not colour-accurate reproductions of the digital versions. Riso ink colours diverge from screen-designed palettes in ways that cannot be fully controlled. This meant that respondents in the riso condition were not responding to identical visual objects with only the texture and medium changed – they were also responding to slightly different colours. The cleaner methodological isolation that the research design originally intended was not fully achieved.

And yet the consistency of the riso-as-liberal response across design variations that differed in colour, typography and overall composition suggests that medium was doing significant independent work. Even when riso colour shifts pushed a design toward tones that might conventionally read as more conservative, the tactile and textural qualities of the print appeared to override or substantially complicate that reading.

This points toward something interesting about the hierarchy of cues in political visual communication. Colour dominated the responses to the digital prints. For the riso prints, medium appeared to compete with colour for primacy – and in many cases won.

Part of this may relate to the specific cultural positioning of risograph printing within contemporary visual culture. Riso has become closely associated with independent publishing, zine culture, small-circulation political pamphlets and artist-run spaces. In Graz as elsewhere, people who have encountered riso-printed material have most often encountered it in contexts coded as alternative, independent or politically left-leaning. The print method carries those contextual associations with it into whatever it reproduces.

Walter Benjamin wrote about the aura of an object – the quality of presence and uniqueness that mechanical reproduction alters (Benjamin, 1935). Risograph printing, paradoxically, reintroduces something aura-adjacent into reproduced political communication. Its slight imprecision makes each printed sheet feel slightly individual. Its texture makes the process of production visible. Its colour behaviour makes it impossible to fully standardise.

Respondents appeared to respond to all of this, even without consciously analysing it.

Which is, in the end, precisely how political visual communication is supposed to work.

Not through conscious argument.

Not through careful decoding.

But through accumulated feeling – the slow, largely invisible process by which aesthetic experience becomes ideological orientation.

The survey was small. Its methodology was imperfect. Its sample was local and specific. None of these results can be generalised into universal claims about how all audiences read all political print.

But they confirm, in a situated and material way, what this series of blog posts has been trying to articulate from the beginning.

Politics is visual. Aesthetics are ideological. And the medium – even a slightly misregistered, colour-shifted, imperfectly reproduced medium – is still very much the message.

Sources:

  • McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. McGraw-Hill.
  • Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
  • Hearn, A. (2008). “Meat, Mask, Burden”: Probing the Contours of the Branded Self. Journal of Consumer Culture.
  • McQuiston, L. (1993). Graphic Agitation: Social and Political Graphics Since the Sixties. Phaidon.
by selina.pichler -

15*Two Versions of the Same Thing – Printing the Survey Digitally and with Risograph

At some point, the design had to leave the screen.

Printing is where political communication becomes physical. It is also where things get complicated in ways that no design software fully prepares you for. The survey sheets were printed in two different ways: through standard digital printing, which produces clean, colour-accurate, consistent output, and through risograph printing, which does not.

This difference was the entire point.

Risograph printing is a stencil-based duplicating process originally developed for high-volume office reproduction in the 1980s. It uses soy-based inks, prints one colour layer at a time and produces results that are characteristically soft, slightly textured and never entirely precise. Colours bleed at edges. Registration between layers shifts. Ink density varies across a page. The output is immediately, visibly imperfect in the specific ways that analogue printing processes tend to be imperfect.

As discussed in the previous post on analogue authenticity, these imperfections are not simply technical failures. They are communicative. The texture of a risograph print signals something about production, about process, about human and material involvement. It looks like someone made it rather than a machine optimising for uniformity.

The decision to produce both a digitally printed and a risograph-printed version of the same survey sheets was therefore not only practical. It was itself a test of the series’ central argument: that the medium shapes how political content is received, independent of the message itself. If participants respond differently to identical designs printed through different methods, that would confirm what McLuhan argued sixty years ago and what contemporary protest aesthetics continue to demonstrate.

The printing process, however, immediately revealed a limitation that needed to be acknowledged honestly.

Risograph printing works with a fixed set of available ink colours. These ink colours do not correspond directly to the full RGB or CMYK colour ranges used in digital design. A blue designed on screen will not print as that exact blue through risograph. A warm red may shift toward coral. Certain combinations of ink layers produce secondary colours that were not anticipated in the original design. The survey sheets printed through risograph would therefore not be colour-accurate reproductions of their digitally printed equivalents.

This was noticed during production and taken seriously as a methodological complication.

In an ideal research scenario, both printing methods would produce visually identical outputs, isolating medium and texture as the only variable. That is not what happened, and pretending otherwise would have undermined the integrity of the survey. Instead, the colour divergence became an acknowledged condition of the research process. Participants viewing the risograph versions would be responding to designs that were not only texturally different but also chromatically shifted from their digital counterparts.

This creates noise in the data. It makes clean comparisons more difficult. It means that participant responses to the risograph versions could reflect both the change in medium and the change in colour, and separating these two effects would be genuinely challenging.

But there is also something honest about this limitation.

Real analogue political communication does not exist in colour-controlled environments either. Protest posters are printed under time pressure with whatever ink is available. Wheat-paste adhesives yellow over time. Street light changes how colours read at night versus noon. The conditions of physical political communication are always imprecise, always subject to material unpredictability.

In that sense, the colour inconsistency between the two versions of the survey is not only a methodological problem.

It is also a reminder of what makes analogue political media different in the first place, and something to have an eye out for.

Sources:

  • McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. McGraw-Hill.
  • Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
  • Heller, S. (2003). Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century. Phaidon.