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A Beautiful Trend, Still Going Strong
Overland Park, Kan. – February 28, 2018 – The heart of the JNA office is our bar. It’s where we have our morning meetings, toast to new client wins and celebrate our co-workers’ marriages and birthdays. In the middle of our bar is a square chalkboard. As the resident hand-letterer of our agency, I am often called upon to decorate this board with signage to match said festivities. Sometimes I’ll chalk up riddles for co-workers to solve or special messages to welcome clients. I appreciate having a different creative outlet from my usual daily work as an art director, and it got me thinking, how did hand lettering make such a huge comeback?
Hand lettering is the perfect balance between the hard, crisp and clean lines of typography and the free-flowing marks of illustration. It has managed to capture the eyes of the everyday consumer and it doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon.
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when hand-lettering began to really take over. The rise in popularity of Pinterest and Etsy is sure to be large contributor to the growth of the hand lettering trend. Etsy effectively paved the way for home craftsmen to spread their work and Pinterest further promoted this idea of do-it-yourself. Artists, illustrators, and letterers used these platforms along with social media outlets to promote their work and hand lettering continued to spread to more and more people. As time passed, businesses saw that handmade products had a place of value with the consumer and adapted hand lettering into their marketing and advertising, creating the ultimate comeback.
So why has hand lettering survived this long when most trends seem to come and go with the snap of a finger? I’ll give you three big reasons:
Authenticity
With technology constantly changing and evolving our world to be more automatic, more seamless, and more perfect, the consumer wants imperfection. Social media too often creates this illusion of perfection, which results in the consumer craving a semblance of something “real.” Hand lettering has personality and character, it is rough around the edges, and provides the consumer with the personal touch needed.
Adaptability
Hand lettering is allowed to break the rules of traditional typography. Letterforms can stretch, bend, and warp to fit any format, 2D or 3D. They can be made from any type of media – food, cardboard, ink, watercolor – in any kind of style – like whimsical, elegant, extravagant or rustic. This amount of versatility is limitless and a large factor of why the hand lettering trend continues today.
It’s Fun
To put it simply, hand lettering is just plain fun. It has inspired bright and playful murals to discover when exploring a city, created beautiful and intricate book covers for you to sit with and read, given you funky artwork to brighten your home. Lettering provides a fun and unique contrast to the typical black-and-white machine-made type we see on a regular basis. Besides, who doesn’t want more fun in life?
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Written by Christine Wigginton, Junior Art Director
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