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Why Did I Make Risoprint Studio?

The first time I encountered Riso as a creative tool was at my first design job, at a small agency in Portland, Maine. One of the owners brought in a Gocco printer. I remember being fascinated by it immediately.

The idea behind it sounded simple: expose a screen, burn your design into emulsion using a flash bulb, roll ink through it, make a print. But, the aesthetic it produced had — and still has — a cult following. We were each allowed one print. I can’t even remember what I made. What I remember is the ritual.

There were single-use lightbulbs. You closed the lid. There was a bright flash. Something invisible became permanent.

The owner kept emphasizing how important those bulbs were. They weren’t cheap. They weren’t reusable. Every flash was a decision.

He also reminded us that they didn’t make them anymore. Replacement film and parts were already becoming hard to find. This wasn’t a tool you could casually waste — it was disappearing even as we used it.

When another junior designer and I burned a screen for something he considered “stupid art,” he got irritated. We were wasting bulbs.

At the time, I didn’t understand why that mattered. I was young. I was playing. The machine felt like a toy.

The tension stayed with me. I don’t know whether it was the aesthetic that lingered for twenty years; or the feeling of being scolded for not respecting the cost of a decision — probably both.

It would take me two decades to understand what he meant.

That part didn’t land for me until much later.

Riso — short for Risograph — is technically an office duplicator. It was designed for churches, schools, community newsletters. Cheap. Fast. Functional.

Artists adopted it anyway.

A Risograph prints one color at a time using soy-based inks and a master stencil wrapped around a rotating drum. Each color requires its own pass through the machine. You don’t mix inks the way you do digitally. You layer them.

Because of that, nothing is perfectly aligned. Colors drift slightly. Overlaps create unexpected tones. What should be flat becomes dimensional. What should be precise becomes human.

That unpredictability is part of its cult following.

In the intervening years, I worked in digital tools where everything is infinitely editable. Layers are abstractions. Color is frictionless. Undo is limitless. It’s powerful — but it’s also weightless.

Riso isn’t weightless.

Each layer is a commitment. Each color is intentional. Each misalignment becomes character.

Risoprint Studio started as a curiosity: could I recreate that layered, slightly imperfect aesthetic in a browser? Not as a filter, but as a process.

I didn’t want a “make it look vintage” button. I wanted something closer to how Riso actually behaves:

The constraint is the point.

When you isolate light, midtone, dark, and accent into separate layers, you start thinking differently. You begin to see an image as stacked interpretations rather than a single flat thing.

Digital tools usually collapse everything into one unified surface. Riso pulls it apart again.

Gocco prints have a human, natural imperfection that the polish of modern tools has largely erased. They feel touched. They feel handled. They carry the memory of the process inside the image.

That feels important to me.

Because I’ve started to realize that most meaningful making happens in layers over time. We revisit ideas. We print over old assumptions. We allow small misalignments. We discover that imperfection creates warmth.

I built Risoprint Studio because I wanted to feel that again — not nostalgia for a machine, but respect for process.

It’s not a replacement for ink. It’s a meditation on it.

And maybe that’s the real thread running through all the tools I make:

I’m not trying to optimize creativity.

I’m trying to slow it down just enough that it has texture.

And that’s kind of what makes Riso beautiful — it rewards mistakes. The slight drift. The overlap you didn’t predict. The ink that shifts tone when it meets another color. It reminds you that not everything has to be pristine to be meaningful.

We can’t take everything so seriously all the time.

So when you try Risoprint Studio, don’t sleep on the nudge seed button. A little misregistration goes a long way.