After my research on the historical context, I feel the need to define and categorize the term “hand-made design” a bit more. In the beginning I saw it as an aesthetic that is defined by small imperfections and lots of details, for example in texture, that hint towards a production technique that requires human hands. But I want to explore what exactly this entails.
One way of defining it is by focusing on analogue techniques as a requirement for hand-made design. The designer Mark Fox believes that when everyone uses the same digital tools, the results will all look similar. „Design has been homogenized by the mass adoption of the Mac. It’s a powerful and omnipotent machine, but in the end, it is a simulation of the real tools.”1 When using the real tools, the created graphics have character and show evidence of a human hand. Digital programs on the other hand always create the same clean lines, “tricking the designer into thinking that their work is ‘finished’ when it is just ‘polished,.”¹
Letterpress is one example of an analogue tool for graphic design that is experiencing a bit of a comeback. Even though it is more time consuming and labor intense than newer methods, it creates details that can’t be achieved digitally. During the process of letterpress printing there are some constraints. The composition is created by using physical objects, even for the white spaces. And features like weight, shape and color have to be chosen carefully and intentionally. “Rather than stifling creativity, the materials’ physical constraints stimulate it, encouraging problem-solving by using the tools at your disposal.”2
So the difference in using digital or analogue techniques can not only be seen in the aesthetic of the result, but impacts the whole process, and therefore the quality of the design in general, even if you ignore the imperfect aesthetic. The designer is forced to take his or her time and create everything physically.3
Another limiting aspect of digital creation is the problem around accessibility. The files that are saved now, might be outdated in ten years because of possible changes in technology. This also hints towards the fact that all these programs rely on code, which creates clear boundaries as to what a designer can create. And coders become a necessity, that designers rely on. This can narrow the range of results that can come out of a digital creation.¹
There is also the common mix of analogue and digital. For example, the designer Tjitske Oosterholt says that she likes to start out with analogue tools and later manipulate the results digitally to create her designs.4
What the categorization into analogue tools also doesn’t include is graphic tablets. Nowadays hand-drawn sketches can be created on a digital drawing tablet. The programme might clean up the lines a little bit if the designer chooses it, but this still can create hand-made, imperfect human design – even though it has been created digitally. Therefore I think it would be wrong to exclude digital techniques in general from the definition of what hand-made design is.
- https://medium.com/re-form/in-pursuit-of-digital-analog-design-education-9b24b518857 ↩︎
- https://www.pixartprinting.co.uk/blog/letterpress-printing-return/ ↩︎
- https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180427-why-analogue-design-still-endures
↩︎ - https://trendland.com/tjitske-oosterholt-digital-art/ ↩︎