April — Il-Verse workshop

Heikki Lotvonen | written on 16.6.2026

On hosting a one-day Il–Verse + riso workshop at If By Magic.

Visual poetry & experimental typography workshop at If By Magic

In April I hosted a one-day Il–Verse workshop with Robin Ellis at If By Magic¹ micro-printhouse in Helsinki.

I made these as a promo material:

New feature: arbitrary rotations

In anticipation for the worksohp, I added a new feature to Il–Verse: proper support for arbitrary rotations. Previously characters could be rotated in 90˚ increments, but there was a little secret: you could type any rotation amount to the box that displayed the current rotation amount. The problem was though, my collision logic was dependant on AABB (Axis-Aligned Bounding Box) logic, which is super simple and fast to compute, but doesn't support non-axis-aligned rotations. So, I added a new collision logic for arbitrarily rotated rectangles, using OBB (Oriented Bounding Box) and SAT (Separating Axis Theorem)². So now, using the mouse scroll wheel, the characters can be rotated in 1˚–5˚ increments. This feature turned out to be super fun to use, with lots of potential!

Collective spatial-temporal poster

I was a bit nervous because the plan was to teach a new program (Il–Verse), use it to create a collective zine, print the results with a risograph then fold and staple it into a zine, all in one day (10–16). I didn't know if we'd have enough time, but in the end, it was perfect timing: when the clock hit 16:00, the last zine was stapled and done. The workshop had 5 participants, which was a good size group for this schedule. Robin and Janya were in charge of instructing the printing, me with the Il-Verse.

The warm-up assignment I gave them was the following:

We will make a collective poster (A3).
Think of the poster as a stage where text and letters exist in space. The stage is this room, so the poster is the blueprint of this room.
Create A4 size page in Il-Verse
Write your name where you sit in the room (your position in the room is your position on the page).
Record your personal experience of this moment spatially as text (sound, sight, thought, smell, etc.), with your name as the center point.
Everybody's A4 page will be placed on the A3 poster according to where you sit in the room.

We only had about 30 minutes to design it, but when everyone's image was overlaid, the result was amazing:

In the afternoon, I gave the participants the main assignment:

Each person makes 2 spreads (A4), which will be put together at the end as a collective risoprinted zine.
Page size is 297mm × 210mm. Add 5mm margins.
Content of pages is open to you.
But, don't (over)think about what to make, just start placing letters. Focus on the process, not the outcome. Experiment. Try things. Follow your curiosity.
Content is whatever visual matter comes out of the experiments you do. Repeat: don't try to force an image to happen, let the tool guide you.
Add your own name to each page (so its clear who made what).
At 14:45, export each page as PNG 300DPI, and upload the images to Google drive. Name the files (page order + your name)!

Again, the results were amazing!

I did the cover: