“A testament to a printed, physical thing”: Anthony Burrill’s Work Hard and Be Nice to People turns 21

21 years ago, the designer and graphic artist Anthony Burrill stumbled upon a letterpress print workshop in the back of a local shop in Rye, East Sussex, the town he calls home. Following a paper trail from posters pinned up in the area, all with a common imprint: Adams of Rye, the artist found himself walking through a door marked ‘Print Works. Do Not Enter’ and into a room that would come change to change his creative career, forever.

Burrill’s most significant work to date (and by significant we mean one that would grace hundreds of walls, produce quite a fair few rip offs, and be redistributed at varying scales for all kinds of causes) would be his first to come out of the press at Adams of Rye. You could say it all snowballed after Work Hard and Be Nice to People. A longstanding collaboration with this traditional letterpress print workshop led Burrill to produce countless typographic works: Think of Your Own Ideas, I Like It. What is it?, You Know More Than You Think You Do, and Ask More Questions (to name just a few) that have established his unmistakably positive and powerful graphic language.

For the very first time, this very special archive of the artists’ work has been uncovered for an exhibition at They Made This in Mare Street Market, Coal Drops Yard in London. Open from today (1 May), until 24 May 2025, the exhibit will display works made from 2004 all the way to 2019, with 25 letterpress prints that chart 15 years of this analogue printmaking.

While Anthony celebrates his manifesto officially becoming ‘an adult’ and looks back at the longevity of this creative partnership with Adams of Rye, we caught up with the designer to discuss his printmaking career to date.

It’s Nice That (INT): Let’s start with the show – it opens this week at They Made This in Mare Street Market, Coal Drops Yard in London, and this is the first time that your archive of letterpress prints you’ve made over the years at Adams of Rye will be on show.

Adams of Rye is a traditional letterpress print workshop local to you in Rye in East Sussex. It’s kind of set your creative career onto a new path ever since you stepped in it. I was wondering if you could tell us the story of how you initially came across it and how it’s made such an impact on you as an artist?

Anthony Burrill (AB): Me and my wife decided to move down to rye in the early 2000s when our children were little – we both grew up in the countryside and we’d spent 15 years in London, so we felt like it was time to move down. Rye is just a really beautiful little town, it’s got its own identity and it feels quite self contained. It’s a place of creative history, of painters and writers especially, it’s got lots of literary links. So moving to Rye has definitely been a different stage in my life. I’d finished being a student, I’d worked professionally for a while, and then had children. In those days, it was just about possible that you could kind of work remotely, but it was still a big leap to move out of London.

I first found Adams, from various posters around the town, always with a little credit line at the bottom ‘printed by Adams of Rye’. It was like a bit of detective story, finding where these things had been printed, and then finally going into the shop, finding the print workshop behind it, and meeting Ian and Derek, the people that run it.

I had done letter press during my time at the Royal College when Alan Kitching was my tutor. But once I’d left, it wasn’t something I ever thought I’d pursue, even though I’d really loved it. But then when I found Adams, it was like: Oh, I can print big, and it’s relatively cheap to do so – that was another big draw to it.

INT: You’ve certainly achieved something that is timeless with Work Hard. There are 25 prints on display in the show in total – what other gems can people expect to see on display? What’s been uncovered from this process of looking back over 15 years of printing?

AB:I’ve still got three copies of the very first edition of Work Hard from the very first time we printed it, one of the copies is going to be for sale in the exhibition. The very first print had my website address on, and, you know, it looked very much of its time. It’s slightly dog-eared and creased a now, so it’s quite fun to see that one, as well as all the different iterations that have been in the past.

In the rest of the exhibition, it’s everything that that came after that really, works like: Think of Your Own Ideas, I Like It. What is it?, You Know, More Than You Think You Do, and Ask More Questions. It’s almost like, Work Hard, kind of opened the door, literally and metaphorically. I went into this space and started to play with words and meaning, and because I had had this fairly limited range of typefaces to work with at Adams of Rye, everything had a unity to it, and a connection. I think I was always influenced by Work Hard, and was always trying to create something that kind of sat alongside it. There’s 25 prints in the exhibition and I think they all basically say the same thing. All of my print work has been about curiosity, learning and understanding, and finding truths within yourself – all of the things that are common to everything that I do, really.

INT: It’s interesting what you were saying about using a limited range of type faces allowing all these works to connect. One of my next questions was going to be around the restrictions you might have given yourself whilst printing all these years and why they were important?

AB:All my work is concerned with materials and working within restrictions, and how those restrictions can make you more creative, especially in an age where working from a computer can give you millions of images simultaneously and you can take as many different sources as you want. I think it proves that by using less, you can say more. You can reduce things to their core elements, and through that, say things that are meaningful, that connect with people. So I think having restrictions is really good for creativity, and it makes you think in different ways – recognise how you can use the same elements, but in lots of new ways.

INT:How do you think the use of such a traditional craft has influenced your creative process and ideas over the years? And why do you think it’s important to keep these age-old techniques in print alive today?

AB: Because I was at college in the pre-digital era, I was taught to use analogue means. Alongside Alan Kitching, I was taught by tutors such as Margaret Calvert, who were from a rich tradition of graphic design. You could feel the sense of history, you know. So, using letterpress for me, feels like I’m connected with that history of design and history of production. It’s really tangible thing, I love the physicality of print. You start off with a blank piece of paper and it goes through the press, and then it means something. It’s transformative, and it’s magical.

Language itself is magical and typefaces are magical – we can encode ideas through these abstract shapes that mean something. For me, the way that the type is set gives it warmth and humanity. It all refers to the history of visual communication, and it’s part of this line of heritage.

INT:I also wanted to speak to you about writing – the actual content of your messages. I think speaking up about things that we want to change feels increasingly important and a lot of your work over the years has been about just that. Working with charities, organisations and causes like Extinction Rebellion, War Child, Teenage Cancer Trust and so many more organisations for change.

AB: Yes, it always comes back to really good copywriting, or to kind of get across those messages without them being too filled with doom. I like to spread things with joy, optimism and hopefulness. I think that’s something that’s always been in my work. I’m kind of hardwired to be optimistic.

Everyone’s looking for clues about how to live in a better way, to make things better – that’s just something I’m always concerned about too. I also think a lot about how to make the work open to people, so that everyone can understand what it is I’m trying to say. My use of language all links back to historic references like the suffragettes, the civil rights era, people like Corita Kent and the modern day language of protest. The people that get out onto the streets with placards always have engaging and interesting messages.

There’s so many things happening in the world at the moment that need to be talked about and be part of our lives. I want to make work that is part of my life, and part of how I see the world and how I’ve lived.