Lars Kim

Lars Kim is a designer and letterpress printer living in Portland, Oregon. After completing studies at Bryn Mawr College and the University of Copenhagen, she worked in architecture and new media before stumbling upon a Heidelberg Windmill in 2006. Over the next 14 years, she managed the print and paper studio at Logos Graphics in San Francisco, where she discovered the tactile beauty of letterpress and dove into the technical aspects of print (offset, letterpress, screen print, and intaglio), along with both Eastern and Western styles of hand papermaking and fine bookbinding. Lars also teaches design at the San Francisco Center for the Book, where she produced an artist’s book on Korean symbols of longevity (Shipjangsaeng) for the Small Plates Imprint program in 2017.

As an independent scholar, Lars investigates East Asian typography and the transmission of early printing technologies along the Silk Road. She is an advisory council member of the Holes in the Wall Collective and a member of From Jikji to Gutenberg, a UNESCO-supported transnational project which seeks to promote cultural democracy within historical printing narratives for a global audience. Her current research involves analysis of the Korean movable type collections at the Newberry Library and the Library of Congress. She also works on a range of commercial and private graphic/web design projects through her freelance practice, Solsken Design. You can find her work on Instagram.