The Beauty of the Hand

Why does it take design trends so long to catch up to the great designers? What I mean is recently I have been noticing that more and more people are embracing the “hand written type” for anything from ad campaigns to movies. This hand written type looks suspiciously like the design technique coined by one of my favorite graphic designers: Stefan Sagmeister.

If you don’t know who I am talking about, he is worth looking up. His eccentric, original, stirring design still hits a deep cord in my graphic design heart. When he returned to the states after a short design bout in Hong Kong, Sagmeister created his own unique “type face” where he would use his own handwriting instead of regurgitating the same type face in the same bland ways. Sagmeister even went as far as etching the words into his own skin (with some help).

Now, 10 years after this poster was designed do I start to see people utilizing Sagmeister’s techniques. The first time that I saw it was in the movie “Napoleon Dynamite” which used the concept of Napoleon’s doodles that is a running joke throughout the movie and added the spice of the handwritten type.

Most recently I have seen this style featured in an ad campaign for Noodles and Company pushing for the concept of “balance”. What I found most interesting about this is the fact that this concept of balance and symmetry is conveyed with an asymmetrical unbalanced typeface. I think that the reason this design technique is so exciting for designers is the fact that it reintroduces the human element back into a design style that it dominated by the computer. So maybe next time you are stumped about your design, try putting down the mouse and picking up a pen and paper.