(want of a comprehensive definition of the value of handmade design)
Michael Perry: Hand type may not always be the right answer or the most time-effective solution, but it is definitely the most fun. It’s the answer I go to most often. It shapes my work and the work of so many around me. It is the answer that keeps the artist from taking himself or herself too seriously and infuses some fun into an industry that sometimes takes itself too seriously. It reveals the hand of the maker, and its viewer finds comfort in that: the artist illustrated lines made crooked from too many cups of coffee.
Jacob Covey: Meanwhile there is a mind-boggling craft involved in all traditional print-making that makes any hand-crafted print far more valuable than any digital print…Aside from the fact that giclée prints are far more expensive per-unit than most any other process, I simply find it consumerist and soulless to actively convince people that a digital print has any value beyond decoration or as reference material. It is, as a kind of Platonic thing, not capable of being Art. For example, screenprinting is perhaps the most common and well-known non-printing-press, print-making technique [entertaining Aesthetic Apparatus instructional video here]. It’s potentially cheap and easy if also messy. It can be as simple as one-color screened on paper or something complex and nuanced like [a] 24-layer Gary Baseman print from Decoder Ring. But it has SOUL that resonates back through generations of our ancestors who developed hands-on methods for spreading information and art.
And you can FEEL the ink when you run your hand over the surface of a screenprint. You can see flaws, shifts in registration, places where the screen flow became dried up, etc. The ink has characteristics that interact from one color to the next. You can stare at the art as a built-up object and every print is crafted — either with such imprecision that every print is distinctly unique or with such precision as to baffle the viewer who understands the process. But the point is that every one of these prints becomes a new piece of art. The original art is its own entity and every single reproduction is another.
Paul Rand: When to use computers is certainly as important as how to use them. In the school environment, they should be part of the curriculum but not the curriculum: nothing can replace the hand in the early stages of design education.
