Mirror, Mirror On The Wall, What's The Most Handmade Of Them All?
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You’ve probably noticed the race to the most obviously human-made. Every ink mark has become an opportunity to demonstrate that somebody was there, making an effort (see that? A mistake! And I left it in!). There’s something increasingly competitive about all this visible imperfection; the work must look as though we’ve been through something to produce it.
Somehow, having a solid idea and some form of taste has acquired an additional requirement: proof of human provenance. The lettering needs to wobble enough for us to believe in the person behind it. A perfectly drawn curve, meanwhile, has become a little harder to account for.
See, I can understand the appeal of seeing how something was made. A thumbprint in clay gives you an immediate sense of the actual hand that pressed it; a drawing with the corrections still visible lets you follow somebody changing their mind. There is pleasure in that proximity to another person’s thinking. It becomes a peculiar business when we begin reproducing the evidence because we’re worried about what its absence might suggest.
AI has made the question of human involvement particularly charged, of course. But even if we take it out of the conversation entirely, I’m uncomfortable with the idea that good work should make a show of being painstaking. Plenty of thought can go into something whose surface gives very little away. Some people simply enjoy vector perfection.
The doodle is innocent, Your Honour.
There is nothing wrong with wanting your project or brand to look a little more spontaneous and tactile. I’m particularly fond of a drawing that appears to have got slightly out of hand. What worries me is the point at which that choice becomes an obligation; when you find yourself adding a scribble because the work somehow seems insufficiently human without one.
This is how we end up sanitising our work in the opposite direction. We become so careful to avoid anything excessively polished that even the imperfections arrive looking familiar. The supposedly spontaneous mark appears in exactly the place you’d expect it. Everything has been roughed up sufficiently to pass inspection, and very little of the person’s own judgement survives the treatment.
Human slop, anyone?
I think this is where the conversation about taste gets interesting. You might have a predilection for an awkward colour combination that someone else would correct immediately. Perhaps the enormous flower taking up most of your layout makes perfect sense within the world you’re building, even if it looks faintly ridiculous in isolation. Those decisions give us something to respond to. We can disagree with them; occasionally, so can you, about twenty minutes after making them.
The most human thing here is the human decision itself, with all the possibility of getting it a little wrong. There ought to be room for a choice that takes a moment to understand, or that refuses to become quite as agreeable as everyone would like. Correcting every oddity until the work resembles the accepted version of “human” seems a particularly strange way of preserving it.
So before you give the whole thing another layer of grain, decide where your design belongs. Which world does it serve? What makes sense within that universe may have very little to do with the treatment currently earning approval elsewhere. Give your idea enough attention to recognise what belongs to it; you might find that the clean edges were doing a perfectly good job.
And there should still be room to enjoy it. Perhaps we do need to Marie Kondo the occasional design decision and ask if it gives us joy. Having a reason for a choice doesn’t mean producing an elaborate defence of it; sometimes your instinct gets there before you’ve found the words.
Trusting that instinct involves accepting that someone else might have chosen differently. You can make the decision anyway. The work doesn’t need to showcase extra suffering - just to earn its place.
Side note: & if decision fatigue is getting in the way of making anything at all, AIF has 140+ design products to help you get started. Borrow a beginning and see where your own decisions take it.