All Hail to My Hands -
Some observations on the act of working by hand.
Commonly, an essay, attempting to sum up the subject matter, occupies this space. The expected route is to give an overview of the field at hand and then map the dominant strands of style, working methods, etc. There is no shortage of these editorials in the design press; many have run the party line: of “Handmade type is expressive and therefore may be very fitting for some of your clients’ needs.”
So, lets skip that. What follows is a collection, developed in the last twelve years, of observations of and insights into making things with typewriters, markers, Letraset, photocopiers, glue sticks, Adobe Streamline, and the occasional chicken wire.
One
I’m betting (not a lot, mind you—like a ten-spot or something) that most of the people in this book work by hand because they want to, not because it’s the “appropriate solution to the design problem at hand.” I’ve come up with some pretty good lines to justify, for example, why the type was copied from a going-out-of-business-sale sign or a meatpacking ad. Now, at different times I’ve had different levels of conceptual anal-retentiveness, and I might have needed to do some philosophical B.S.-ing just to get myself to do the work. But one does what one must to make things happen, and I’d rather live with a flyer bearing some bizarre type I pulled from a sign that no longer exists than one I set in some typeface that I’m not even sure I liked but “fit the concept.” If you need some inspiration to go out on your own, just get a job where it’s never appropriate to use hand-drawn stuff. You’ll be poor and happy working in your living room in no time at all.
I feel a bit more alive when I’m working the type with my hands; today’s logic says I’m being totally inefficient, maybe even painfully slow, but I get to reflect on the subject in the same way a painter does. The work is happening letter by letter and taking shape, and I have to ask, “Is this really working, or am I wasting a whole bunch of time?”
It’s the difference between you and the cubicle guys, right? You want to prove that you can get something done without sitting in front of a screen. Not even prove...it’s more like I don’t want to be that guy living in front of the computer screen. Now I’ll contradict myself by saying that the computer makes it incredibly easy for designers to be totally process-driven when working by hand, knowing that they can use the computer to edit and assemble. A lot of the designers I know employ the following working method: they build a bunch of source material through drawing, photocopies, or whatever, creating page after page of the words they might need, but then hold off on judgment until it’s all scanned.
It’s a pretty great feeling when you’ve spent five hours at a light table, burning through .005 Pigma Micron pens, and you can tell your boss is like, “I am not paying this dude to trace.” But the people in charge always seem to appreciate it when the printed
piece comes through and looks nothing like the other stuff on the market.
I can’t always get to where I’m going by doing things the way they’re supposed to be done. This isn’t a rant against the computer or the “rules” or whatever; it’s simply that “if you change the process, you change the product” (thank you, Elliot Earls, for that quote). I trust that a kernel of an idea will turn into something greater than its beginning. It’s not as if this is a digital-age concern; these ways of working with the sketchbook and Letraset and photocopies and stencils and whatever else I can get my hands on were just as valid in 1965 or 1925. (Think of that Dada poster by Kurt Schwitters and Theo Van Doesburg and remember that both of those guys made at least some cash by being regular graphic designers who set type. They practically invented modern typography.) Let the baseline drift and wobble, and let the viewer know that a person made this. Try your best. Don’t fuck around. It can’t be perfect, which is so much the beauty of it.
Every time I put a mark down with my hands, I intuitively learn something: a wrong angle, bad spacing, an ugly r, or “That one’s hot, let’s not fuck it up” (and then you do anyway: restraint is for suckers). Start at zero and add; everything is a decision to be made. When working on the computer, I get a pasteboard full of stuff, and then a lot of the work can be done in one big gesture—bang, four paragraphs of copy down, punctuation is hung, and the font tells Illustrator what to do with the leading and spacing and kerning. Yes, there’s intuition as I feel my way through the layout, but the decision-making is macro—What typeface? What size? Should I adjust the leading? What are the proportions? When drawing a word with a pen, I work on a micro scale, and decisions are made on every matter: How am I going to space this? Do I care about the baseline? Is it even the same typestyle? Why can’t I draw today? All defaults are gone. It’s me versus the world; even when I lose, at least it’s an interesting place to be.
Two
The story of modernism (of painting or whatever) goes something like this: new technology (photography) comes along and frees old technology (painting) from its previous obligations to standards, perfection, representation, or what-have-you, and modern painting is created. Once upon a time, graphic designers would’ve been expected to have a decent number of lettering skills even if it were just to work up an initial layout. Then the computer completely removed the need for those skills. By rendering hand lettering obsolete, the computer strips it of its previous obligations and imbues the very act of lettering with a level of meaning that it has not had. Now I use my hands because I want mistakes, quirks, and imperfections—those qualities that give my work warmth. Keep in mind that, at different times in history, that warmth could’ve gotten you fired. Now we view these results as the elemental quality of working by hand.
Scott Makela once said that he wouldn’t sell any more of his typefaces, because he wanted to “protect his DNA.” I’ve always liked the idea that our handwriting and lettering—the shape, the spacing, the quality—is our DNA and is unique to our work.
Three
I’ve never had much luck using a photo of some great, oddly spaced hand-painted sign and attempting to replicate it with a computer. Maybe I just haven’t tried hard enough. I don’t know if mistake-induced spacing is all that interesting; it’s more the full package of aesthetics, quirks, and ideas that I am after. When I find a two-word sign with a randomly italicized I, it is going to be just that in a line of Helvetica. But when I try to draw a typeface based off that sign, then that I becomes an integral element. This more or less overlooks one of my own motivations for copying type from signs and photos anyway: to pay homage to the people whose handiwork is all around me yet rarely considered.
Four
A sense of history is embedded in this kind of work, even if it’s only at a glance. When using the same tools as those who came before me, I’m going to cop some moves. I think there’s a certain retro quality to a lot of this work, which makes sense. If I’m using the same tools as a sign painter from the 1920s, a 1970s illustrator, or the graffiti writer down the block, it makes more sense to look at their work than that of some dude who’s setting allcaps Helvetica Neue. I would go so far as to say that a lot of people working by hand are directly inspired by seeing work done by others using the same medium and believing in it.