An Interview with Erin Cochanco (@neue.sans.press)
Erin May Cochanco (@neue.sans.press) is a creative based in Brooklyn. We first met in Fall 2023, when we both took the inaugural iteration of the Risograph & Self-Publishing.
Today, Erin works at Secret Riso Club, helping organise and run their membership and volunteer programs as well as their communications (newsletter, social media captions) and more.
Here's our interview below!
Xinyi: Can you introduce yourself?
Erin: Hi, my name is Erin Cochanco. I am a graphic designer for my personal practice. Professionally, I work as a communications coordinator at Secret Riso Club and a studio manager for an artist named Zoe Pulley Studio.
Xinyi: Can you tell me about your first experience or first exposure (to) Risograph?
Erin: My first exposure to Risograph was through a class in my senior year of school. I graduated from Parsons in 2024, [so] I started class in the fall of 2023. It was a semester-long class, but my interest in it extended afterwards. I kept printing until I graduated. Once I lost access to the studio at school, I felt like I needed to look for an alternative place to print at. The studio that seemed to make sense to me was SVA RISOLAB because at the time, they were running a boot camp class that gave you access to their studio space over there for, I think, a really minimal fee compared to what it is now, because I think a lot of classes now at SVA are like $700-$800.
Xinyi: So the risograph class was like your first time using the Risograph.
Erin: Yeah. I actually didn't know what a risograph was. I just randomly picked it because I was on the site for the add-drop period, on the last day of add-drop. I hated the class I was in, and riso was the top thing, [and] anything will be better than the class. So I just clicked it...the waitlist was more than 99 people. Yeah.
Xinyi: How did you get your start at Secret Riso Club?
Erin: I was interning as an in-house designer at this place called Pyper Blue Collective, and then Secret [Riso] Club was a ten-minute walk away. So it made sense to start printing there. With my work schedule, I applied under a work exchange program, which meant that I would work one day for them, and then for one whole day, I would have full access to their studio and also them as people, getting their insight on my project and other support that they could offer me. Three weeks in, they started talking to me about hiring me part-time. By December, we had a proper verbal agreement. I went home to the Philippines for a month for holiday break. By the time I came back in January, I started working with them as a communications coordinator.
My role was very flexible. I was doing a lot of Inbox, handling some coordination with collaborations. I would also do client work sometimes, and that would involve helping fix documentation for client pitches. Sometimes it was presenting design directions for people. I would help with any activations that they have – in-person events, printing. So it was really a range of things. I stayed on with them throughout 2025. I'm still with them now. The team has shaped up a bit more. So my role there has definitely been more concentrated on what skill set they think is relevant for them, which in this case, it's my organizational skills.
I started with them as a work exchange person; the work I would do for them was setting up their membership program and volunteer program. And my previous experience within that type of field was when I was at Parsons. I was a part of AIGA at the New School as a board member. I was a programming director. I think programming and community work are very relevant to their practice as a risograph press, not just because of actual printing, but because that's kind of the ethos they see with Risograph or independent publishing. It's all about community and having events, and organising ways for people to connect.
Xinyi: What about the risograph has made you want to keep using it? What specifically about the risograph process or the printing, or what have you gotten out of it?
Erin: I think that when I met Riso Printing as a medium, I was really depressed. So, the Risograph as a medium – There's so many ways you can really rabbit hole in their different characteristics. You can get really deep into file prepping or like just colour is like understanding how the inks work. You can choose how technical you want to be about it. It was like such a good avenue to occupy my attention and keep my mind off of things.
As I started printing more and more – like when you're in school, you're kind of doing this in isolation. When I started being led to different spaces that had risograph as part of their mission or really relevant to what they do as an organization, for example, places like Secret Riso Club, SVA RISOLAB or Lucky Risograph press or txt.books, I found a lot of people who were just very kind. I started to see the community aspect of independent publishing as in large. It led me to know more about art book fairs. And that's a whole different dynamic of your prints or your practice existing and interacting with other people.
My first foray into that was when Lucky Risograph had their fair at Usagi, because our professor was from Lucky Risograph. And then it was like, sounds about Riso. I think it was the first time my brain was like, oh, I can like actually kind of earn money from this. It's not like just a silly thing. There are people out there where this is their livelihood, making prints or [a] printing studio. I got into East Village Art Book fair, which I think is organized by 8ball. I was selling my prints there. I just met so many people and it was just so nice interacting with them. I think you have to be a certain type of person to be interested in independent publishing. Um, I think it like filters out people who care too much about money or like AI, like you get people who value the humanness in making and find value in process.
I've just been doing more fairs as myself. It got a little bit more difficult when I joined an actual studio, which is odd because I joined a studio because I wanted it to contribute to my own practice, but I found myself using my skills to support them more.
It's been nice to travel to and find local Risograph studios because everyone has their own relationship with their local community and how Risograph shows up. Some studios will only do workshops, some studios will have education as a really big part of their platform. Some studios make a lot of money by distributing consumables - studio art. In LA. They distribute machines, and they sell inks to a lot of places on the West Coast, and then they have contract work with the colleges there. So it's interesting to see how different people have their own setups. Even travelling to Europe and seeing how risograph Studios there, how some of them are really connected or they really try to collaborate. I was in Southeast Asia recently, and I did my own Risograph workshop there under my personal practice. It's interesting to see how in Southeast Asia, there's usually only like one or two different studios, and then they more or less come from the same schools, or they just follow the same pipeline. It's not that diverse because I think in the US there are a lot of small like arts or liberal colleges, um, that have a risograph. People are exposed to it that way. But that's not at least in the Philippines.
Xinyi: Besides like the people, beyond making money. What has been the most rewarding thing you've gotten out of your personal practice?
Erin: I think it's just practising like your personal autonomy. Being an organiser really feels empowering because especially as an international student, there are so many obstacles to what you can do in terms of visa restrictions and things like that. But when you're an organiser, it feels good to see that if you just have enough initiative to make something you want happen, it's possible that you can change things for yourself and people around you.
Xinyi: What does neue.Sans press mean? What does that name mean?
Erin: It means nuisance because I was going to table at Multiple Formats in Boston last year. So that's like April 2025. I don't want to keep being just Erin or like Erin May, you know, I don't want to keep applying to art fairs that way. I wanted to have a proper name. So I was asking my friend Vanessa, "can you help me figure something out? Just be my sounding board."
She gave me like really stupid suggestions. She was like Erika or like things like that. And I said, " You're so annoying. You're being such a nuisance to me right now. " . After, I thought maybe that should just be my name, like nuisance. And then I just changed the spelling. So it sounds more like graphic design, like news– sounds like a typeface, right? That's where it came from. There's no deep meaning. It was just because I was annoyed at someone. And I needed that name that day.
Xinyi: I think Risograph is a very interesting space right now. I think it's interesting how you can translate like digital into like physical very easily using the risograph. But also, I think it's taken up like a very interesting specific cultural space and like the design community. Um, what would you say that experience has been like for you? When you conduct workshops with Secret Riso [Club], for example, what are the kinds of people who come to these workshops? Do they come back from multiple workshops? Do they become members?
Erin: So when I started out, I think that there was only one or two modes of workshops we would offer, which is Riso 101, the digital file prepping and then Riso poster making and Riso postcard making. Those are analogue workshops where you send the file using the scanner bed. So I feel like a lot of people we ended up attracting were kind of like hobbyists, like people who were just interested in learning a new creative format.
But now that we've developed and added 102, or a space for people to actually grow, I've witnessed way more people doing 102 and are more interested in accessing studio time or really investing their time and money into learning how to operate the machine. I had one class last year. There was this one person named Woody Pollard? I think that's how you pronounce his last name, like Woody. He does a lot of things with Touchdesigner, so I think I don't know how he categorises himself, but I would call him like a creative technologist. He got so into like risograph printing, he just came back to the space again and again, that now next week, he's teaching his own risograph workshop, but using touchdesigner to create the prints.
I appreciate risograph as a kind of reclaimed format of making because it was a utilitarian machine, l it was never meant to be a form of art making. You can really decide how you want to utilize its characteristics. I think my position as an educator, as well, is that I just want to help people understand the foundational concepts of risograph so that they can utilise the machine to do their own different things. So I find it interesting that there are also a lot of software engineers or product designers who come into the class, and then I can point them towards a P5, JS library catered to risograph.
So things like that, like people have their own way of intervention with what the machine was actually meant to be and what they can do with it. Um. Yeah, I think the best part is just seeing how you can really cross-pollinate with different people and see that people make interesting things that I don't have any knowledge on touchdesigner or blender or things like that. But when people who have that previous skill set apply it to Risograph, I think really interesting things come out of it.
Xinyi: You've mentioned everyone has like their own intervention with the Risograph. How would you position your own practice in terms of that framing?
Erin: Me? I think I realised I actually don't enjoy print making that much, but I like risograph printing, but it's not like production is not my favourite part of the process. I like, um, that it helps me reach out to a lot of people. Um, I think my- I don't know if it's even an intervention, but just using it as a node for community. I think that's how I mainly use risograph printing. I think that's the most valuable asset of it to me.
Xinyi: Where would you see yourself in five years?
Erin: In five years? I feel like it depends on my visa. Like that's the honest question because I can't plan, I can't plan out my life. I can only live in two or three-year increments because that's how long your visa is. Um, I think – I don't know what the timeline is, but I know that at one point in my life, I want to have my own risograph studio in Manila, my hometown.
I've done, I've done a risograph workshop back home, too, with Bad Student. We did a Pokémon printing workshop. We did an iteration of it in Brooklyn before at Secret Club. It was really interesting and really fulfilling to do Riso and contribute to the creative community back with Filipinos, my people, you know?
