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.