Erik and his son Dylan started printing the well-known quote from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe “God is in the details”. They left the workshop for lunch, and only on their return noticed the mistake: The “l” and “i” were reversed. They then corrected the mistake and printed a “proper” version. When people started ordering the poster, everybody wanted the “wrong” one. As this “mistake” fits perfectly with the quote’s message, subsequent reprints all feature the bad spelling.

When you’re bent over the press, handling large wooden letters, they become objects of their own and stop merely being parts of a word. With a manual process like letterpress, you learn to accept such accidents** and instead begin to celebrate them.

This poster became so popular that this is already the third edition, albeit slightly changed from previous ones, else it wouldn’t be a run of only 50 prints. You can buy it here.

Here are also some copies left of the edition showing the original quote with its proper spelling.

*Happened before with “Better done than prfect”, where we simply didn’t have enough lower case e in the case and decided to just leave one out of the word “perfect”. Our most successful mistake ever.

**It’s purely coincidental that the two posters with mistakes are set in Akzidenz Grotesk. We just happen to have that typeface in large sizes that print really well.

You can buy it here.