What is all the hand-written type in branding trying to tell us? We take a deep dive to find out

Lately, at TBI, we’ve been noticing an uptick in brands leaning towards the unpolished and the lo-fi, felt in the many scrawly, hand-written typefaces we’ve spotted in identities. For a while, they seemed to crop up on the fringes of the industry, before they slowly began appearing on mastheads, movie posters, and identities that were both loved and killed. Far from a workshopped, manicured look, these typefaces – and the identities and visual worlds they appear in – sing of a ‘come as you are’ energy, letting brands take up space as their authentic selves, without the veneer of perfection. But what is their humble, scribbled-on-a-napkin aesthetic trying to tell us? And more importantly, why are designers choosing to whip out their pencils rather than toiling over perfectly constructed digital typefaces?

Perhaps it is because these typefaces have a way of letting brands speak their truth, as in the case of skincare brand Radford. When LA-based agency Day Job began working on the identity, the concept became the king. The brand wanted to cut through the noise in the skincare industry and focus only on the goodness that’s inside each of its bottles. “Victoria Radford’s products aren’t cheap, so she didn’t want to charge more just to have fancy packaging,” Creative Director Rion Harmon tells us. “If all that matters is the product, well, then the brand should look scribbled, fast and loose, with only one colour; it should be easy to reproduce, and cheap to print. It emphasises that you aren’t paying for the brand or the packaging – you’re paying for the product.” So the team asked the founder to write her name over and over again, picked their favourite letterforms from it, and assembled the logo. And so, the handwrought letterforms became a way for the brand to speak in a language that resonated with them, while not just elevating their story, but adding to it. “The charm of a system like this is that it’s actually flawed. This is not a font. There’s something approachable about that,” says Harmon.

The ability of letterforms to evoke feelings was also something the team at Barcelona-based design studio GGT was thinking about when building the brand for Pussy Juice, a natural cider. The drink was made by a Stockholm-based FLINTA collective called LLIPS – run by a friend of GGT’s founder Gina Guasch – to serve at their events, and they wanted an identity that reflected the “self-managed, punk, bold and fun” character of the brand. The process of hand-drawing the letters and the illustrations allowed the studio to “find the magic by escaping the preconceived rules about design,” Guasch tells us. The resulting identity, with colours spilling out of lines, doesn’t take itself too seriously, all while perfectly capturing the “party juice’s” rebellious persona.

Embracing analogue techniques also allows a respite from screens and softwares, letting designers return to more traditional forms of mark-making – an aspect that seems to have a lot to do with why creatives are choosing to make work with their hands. It also makes space for designers to respond to briefs in exciting new ways. When Kyiv-based illustrator and graphic designer Andrew Getmanchuk began crafting an identity for a London-based bar called more than, he was drawn to the concept of the place. “It’s meant to be a place that encompasses a bar, a gallery, and a co-working space for creative professionals. So I wanted to make something that conveyed a sense of informality and freedom that would reflect the establishment’s format.” After testing a few typefaces – none of which felt quite right – Getmanchuk decided to hand-draw the letters with charcoal. “I drew with my left hand because I wanted to achieve the effect of childlike crooked lines,” he shares. Cleverly, he retained the smattering of charcoal dust around the letters (as if he’d forgotten to blow it off the page after writing the name), and drew an equally charming suite of illustrations. “This approach shortened the distance between the brand and its audience by making the brand seem more familiar,” he adds.

It is over the top, but also fun and silly, which perfectly fits with the dive bar format.

The symbolic connotations of anything that’s hand-drawn with mediums of the yore are quite strong – as Getmanchuk suggests, it speaks to our yearning for things reminiscent of childhood, felt in the swell of all things kidcore; it reflects our exhaustion with the ever-present, always-switched-on digital world (dumbphones, anyone?), and at the same time, hints at our collective appetite for craft. And in a brand world swimming in perfectly-kerned, geometric sans serifs (so many of which look like first cousins of each other), hand-written type also helps create a point of differentiation, as seen in the identity for Dead Poets.

Much like more than, Dead Poets offers many experiences in one place as a dive bar-café-barbershop, inspired by music and art. “We were looking to create an identity that would convey an atmosphere of an unconventional and open-minded place where everything can happen,” says Alice Mourou, Founder & Creative director of Hong Kong-based design agency Oddity, who came through with an equal parts eerie yet captivating brand for the bar. As a nod to the ‘dead poets,’ the bar is made in stainless metal, with “quite a few morgue-like details,” shares Mourou, “so with the logo, we wanted to accentuate the poetic side of it.” Soon, she was struck by “the spiritual idea of the haunted hand” and began drawing as if she was not in charge of the logo, “but the souls of dead poets who controlled my hand were,” she adds. “It is over the top, but also fun and silly, which perfectly fits with the dive bar format.”

To push the character of the logo even further, Mourou began sketching while limiting the control of her hand. “I tried to hold the marker weirdly – hard grip, loose grip – moved my whole body instead of just the wrist, changed the speed of writing, closed my eyes, held the marker with my left hand, attached it to a 2-meter long stick, used my feet instead of my hand… Obviously, each resulted in completely different shapes of glyphs. Almost like one was written by the soul of John Lennon, and another by MF Doom – an additional line of storytelling.” The experimentation led to so many iterations that the identity now is an ever-evolving icon – while the team’s selected a more legible version for the “official” logo, menu and signage, the other versions live across the space, the tableware and the merch, while Mourou keeps adding new editions to the collection.

Creating good design does not require you to comply with trends.

By retaining the mistakes, the crooked lines, and the eccentricity, Oddity makes a case for the innate beauty of flawed craftsmanship, and the surprises it can hold. “Creating good design does not require you to comply with trends, create complex kinetic motion, use AI for ultra-detailed generations, or employ any other technology,” Mourou adds. “All you need for good design is a pencil and your brain.”