Hand Job: A Catalog of Type

These days, graphic design is digital design. It's just the reality of the industry, with good reason, too: the breadth of tools, the cleanliness, the ease, the rapid-fire capacity for fleshing out concepts. A room of specialized designers became one; a room of designers today in turn are a force unrivaled in time. But as the hours of looking upon a screen lengthen, many designers (ourselves included) dream of a time when people believed in working by hand. Not only as it was necessitated, but because it works. Computer graphics often feel insufficient, lacklustre and worst of all, confined; just perhaps this owes to our soft spot for hand-made items. But regardless of why, hand-drawn type and illustration simply inspires us much more consistently. Hand Job: A Catalog of Type features works of 50 of today's most talented typographers including Mario Hugo, Adam Hayes, Jim the Illustrator and Human Empire. Hand typographer Michael Perry curated the volume, focusing on diversity in means and style. From sketchbooks to moleskins, posters to books, album art to movie credits, the hand-drawn lettering aesthetic of which this great book is comprised quickly drives one away from the computer desk and into the arms, so to speak, of a pen and a piece of paper. Intimate shots of the creative process as it progresses in the artists' studios rounds out the work nicely, giving understanding to how this beauty comes to be.