What is a Grawlix?

While designing a new poster, I experimented with various approaches to sophisticated swearing.

When designing the tennis poster, my first idea was to use a simple curse word that hides the actual curse behind asterisk symbols. But of course, it’s obvious what’s being said. Boring.

My second idea was the good old table-flip emoji. It consists of Unicode characters depicting an annoyed something or other that flips the desk in frustration.

I hung up a test print in my Studio, and people who came to my store on Saturday did react positively to the poster itself. But nobody knows this old-school emoji anymore—from before the era of graphic emojis, back when IRC and ICQ were still around. So come on, let’s get rid of it.

As a comic book enthusiast, the next thing that naturally came to mind was Captain Haddock’s cursing or Automatix.

This type of swear word representation is called a "grawlix." It’s a sequence of typographic symbols used to hide swear words while gracefully paraphrasing them—all under the guise of beautiful typography. Typically, these are characters that are unpronounceable.

So I decided to go with this kind of swearing. May everyone decide for themselves how they want to swear from now on.

How #$@!% became shorthand for cursing

Sign up for my newsletter, and you'll be the first to know when I publish the poster.

Other than that, "Das Sommerfest" just arrived at my studio, hot off the press. The tennis poster will have a similarly minimalist design. I'm going through a phase like that right now, you could say.