In a digital age, handcrafted design finds enduring value
Graphic designer Jim Parkinson was a lettering artist and type specialist who created the now iconic logos for magazines such as Rolling Stone, Newsweek and Esquire. He died earlier this summer at the age of 83. In 1963 he graduated from California College of the Arts with a degree in advertising design and painting. His career took off during the analogue heyday of graphic design, when lettering for logos and logotypes was done by hand – an approach that many fear is being lost.
Today’s desire to use digital tools is understandable. Advances in technology mean that you can now sketch with an ever-improving array of pencils on your tablet – but even these tools need to be turned into zeros and ones in the digital world. In contrast to the warm, hand-drawn feel of Parkinson’s work, graphic identities are now slick, sleek and sit perfectly on a page, in shop windows or on the fenders of cars. The kerning is precise but everything looks the same – the result of computer-led design. This is compounded by the desire for brands and companies to have visual identities that can be presented across different mediums at a variety of scales. There is, as such, a lack of certainty, serendipity and human touch – a loss of “happy accidents” as my Harvard Graduate School of Design professor Holly Getch Clarke called them.
Despite this, there is reason to be optimistic. US restaurant chain Cracker Barrel has long had a logo that only a human could have envisioned: a man in overalls sits on a cane chair and leans on a large wooden barrel next to a large yellow blob emblazoned with the company name in unbalanced, un-kerned lettering. In a bid to correct this, the company carried out part of a $600m (€510m) rebrand in August, removing the overall-clad man from its logo and digitally homogenising the typeface. The following day, Cracker Barrel experienced a $100m (€85m) drop in value. It seems that you can put a price on the use of technology in branding after all.
Thankfully, some of today’s creatives are making the case for doing things by hand. Swiss firm Pank, founded by Paula Troxler and Kleon Medugorac, recently exhibited a multimedia installation with digital and analogue elements at Zürich’s Museum für Gestaltung called I Don’t Need Graphic Design, I Need a Little of That Human Touch (pictured). The showcase was an unabashedly human and messy collage that put a finger on what much of contemporary graphic design misses: the human hand. In just the title, they were able to articulate the approach of designers like Parkinson.
Jessica Bridger is a contributing editor at Monocle.
