Smallkine Poetry Press is a small, independent publisher focused on poetry. They wanted a logo that could live comfortably at the scale of their zines—something simple enough to print on a back cover or even inside the pages, yet strong enough to remain recognizable at very small sizes.
The idea for the mark grew out of a long-standing typographic problem: how to preserve legibility as type shrinks. As letters get smaller, counters collapse, strokes blur, and the roundness of forms disappears. Designers have often solved this by squaring counters, exaggerating serifs, and relying on optical illusions to maintain the impression of curves.
I first encountered this approach through David Sudweeks, when he was developing Pearl, a miniature typeface inspired by Dwiggins’ “M-formula.” The principle was that at tiny sizes, square counters maintain clarity, avoiding weight gain at connectors and creating what I call a “phantom curve”—a shape that reads as round without truly being curved.
The idea resurfaced years later when I came across Émile Javal’s Physiologie de la lecture et de l’écriture. His studies of legibility show how forms that look broken or awkward at large scale can optically blend back into legibility when smaller (compare figures 68 and 71). This visual trick of distortion at one size becoming clarity at another stuck.
When the chance came to design the Smallkine logo, it felt like the perfect application of these ideas. The final mark leans into square counters and oversized serifs, producing a chunky letterform that holds its structure at the smallest sizes while still offering visual interest when scaled up. In this way, the logo reflects both the press’s intimate scale and the resilience of poetry itself: legible, even when pushed to the edge.
