To delve deeper into the topic, I looked at some examples of handmade designs that I found online. Among others I found a Logo-Design that was handcrafted as a wooden stamp and therefore has a recognizably handmade and imperfect look to it. I also found the branding for a food brand, which includes a hand drawn Logo typeface as well as an imperfect circle as a logo element and I found a typeface, where the letters are hand embroidered. This again leads to the question of when handmade gets too much and is therefore hard for the recipient to decode.
During this research I noticed that this handmade design was often part of a Corporate Design and used specifically for branding. I consider this to be one way of limiting my topic to something fitting for a thesis, but for now I want to explore this design-style in a broader sense. Especially since I know that a lot of old, analog media are currently experiencing a revival, like analog-photography and vinyl, I think there are a lot of different aspects to explore here.
I also noticed that the brands using this design-style, where mainly smaller and produce handmade products themselves, which made me think about big brands that use a handmade design style. For now, I could only think of stüssy. Even though a lot of big brands such as Disney or Ray Ban use hand lettering, the logos have been cleaned up on a computer so well, that they don’t have this feeling of real handwriting anymore. This is interesting, especially because the Disney Logo Font is inspired by the autograph of Walt Disney.
I was also still wondering since I started to deal with this topic if it really is a trend. Since trends happen quickly, I looked for articles instead of scientific proof first and found a lot of magazine-type texts online, saying that not only hand drawn illustrations are a current graphic design trend this year, but also natural-looking design as well as references to traditional media with visible imperfections. (e.g.: https://www.adobe.com/express/learn/blog/graphic-design-trends). Therefore I find it interesting how this trend will evolve further.
