Lena Slepushkina’s letters look like they are still wet. Her cohort-25 poster at the Bankov Poster School, made for an imagined concert that promised to “step into a world of dreams and music”, was already built from dense, expressive brush lettering layered over halftone texture and digital noise — drawn as much as designed.

That same hand gets put to real bookings. Her poster for Morning Jazz, a live open-air saxophone session, ran through the same rough-edged calligraphy, a design as unpolished and alive as the event it announced. Between school studies and real commissions, she keeps circling the same territory: hand lettering pushed to the edge of legibility, softened by scanner grain and pattern.

It is a fitting pairing of instincts. Jazz favours the note played slightly off the beat, and her lettering favours the line that refuses to sit still, smudged and looping rather than set.

Why we like it: Slepushkina draws her type instead of setting it, and it shows — her posters look handled, like something that could still smudge if you touched them.

Find Lena online: Instagram