Handmade

There's been a big trend around for a while towards all things arts & crafty: knitting, scrapbooking, deconstructed textiles, and sites like etsy.com where you can buy and sell anything handmade.  But over the last little while it also seems to have crossed over into world of professional design, film, video, and advertising. 

After years of reliance on Photoshop and CGI animation, all of a sudden there seems to be a counter-trend going on recently towards the rough instead of the slick.

The nice folks over at Influx posted on a similar thought a few days ago.

For example the cover of Esquire magazine this month features this hand-written cover.

Michel Gondry started playing with cool handmade stop-motion techniques a while ago (including my favourite video ever), but it's gone more mainstream of late.  Like this video by the Pocket Dwellers from earlier this year with lots of interesting design using ink and paper.

And for the promotional campaign to his upcoming film Bee Movie, Jerry Seinfeld deconstructs the whole animation process with live actors in bad costumes (what's funny is apparently the movie itself actually will be full CGI animation, this film was only made as a trailer).

As they note at Influx (where they have some other great examples), the idea seems to stem from a desire "to demonstrate that human beings were involved in the creative process. It is interesting that this happening at the same time as creativity is becoming more democratic." 

So it seems like all the "unprofessional" creativity expressed by people on MySpace and flickr and YouTube - all the webcam films and picture-a-day videos - has seeped into the collective design consciousness, and is starting to change our expectation of what professional creativity can look like.  Which seems to me to be a good thing.

Comments

[Kate]

It also reminded me of the recent GAP commercial where doodling (like kids do on high school notebooks) featured prominently.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VofVcDjYP8M

[n0wak]

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/07/071406.html

[Jason]

Kate - another great example, thanks.
n0wak - thanks, hadn't seen that one before. Brilliant, in typical Ze style.

[Brett]

Look at any skateboarding, surfing, skiing or snowboarding magazine from the past couple years. This is a trend long in the SoCal and X-TREME (caps for ironic emphasis) undercurrent that is now reaching mainstream.

[eLiZaBeTh]

Toronto is an awesome city.. I visit as often as possible.. ( I live outside buffalo NY ) cool blog.... I will have to check it our regularily