If that Road gets rough
and rocky

And the hills get steep and high

We will sing as we go marching

And we’ll win the one big union by-and-by

If I had a Hammer…

I cannot sing a song, since I am only the author of this colophon. But I have them all in mind, of the I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World) Red Little Songbook, they accompany me as I flip through this collection of union logos. This book does not describe things in words, nor does it call for organised labor action. And yet it manages to tell us a story, of the never-ending struggle of workers all over the world, through sparing silence, letting the images convey the message.

This object is – as any human-made good – a product of labor. But, as is often the case in (post)industrial production environments, this work is not the result of a single individual’s efforts but of collective action.

And so this book is a collection of work:

On the one hand, it brings together the logos of 200 trade unions that fighting for workers in a wide variety of sectors internationally and over the decades and centuries.

This labor therefore includes the more than 150 designers of the various emblems who, often unknown, have made the struggle possible in the first place.

But even more humanpower was required to make this print product available to readers: This book wasn’t built by me, the writer of this colophon, but by my friend, Jan Vincent Dufke, graphic designer and member of the United Services Union ver.di, who put together the collection and designed this book.

My solidarity therefore goes to Adam Hyde, julientaq, Fred Chasen, and Gijs de Heij, who, with the development of paged.js, created an open-code tool that enabled the author of this book to defy the obscene capitalist exploitation of Adobe Incorporated and to resist the privatization of design tools with the means of the free web.

The work that went into this book also includes the production of the paper, the printing, and the manufacture of the necessary machines and resources. Union logos from all of these trades can be found in this collection.

… I’d hammer in the morning.

I alone have neither a hammer nor the skills required to accomplish the production of such a publication.
Yet this book showed me, that I am, in fact, not alone, and that my contribution to this project is just enough. Or, as the American Miners’ Association (which verged into the United Mine Workers of America [page 380/381]) states in their constitution:


Step by Step, the longest march
Can be won, can be won ;
Single stones will form an arch,
One by one, one by one,
And by union, what we will
Can be all accomplished still.
Drops of water turn a mill
Singly none, singly none.

In solidarity,
a friend

This publication is a website avalaible under
https://if-that-road.codeberg.page

Jan Vincent Dufke
jan_aklar@typo.social

HFBK University of Fine Arts Hamburg, 2026.