Representing Brands with Handmade Art
Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 by Mary FlorCruzWhile the advent of Photoshop enabled advertisers to create flawless images to represent their brands, many have reverted to using handmade art to do the same job in a more authentic manner. At the PSFK Trends, Ideas and Inspiration Conference, trend spotter Wendy Dumbo interviewed commercial artists Laurie Rosenwald and Scott Campbell on the subject.
Rosenwald is a New York City artist, who creates whimsical collage and ink drawings embraced by clients, such as Ikea and The New Yorker. Out of her many personalized techniques, she touted the value of a truly original font, created by hand with all its flaws and ink spots. She asserted that the hand drawn font is infinitely more unique than one found in a font library and inevitably used over and over again by hundreds of other graphic designers, who so often rely upon the resources and approaches dictated by their Macs and Adobe programs.
Similarly, tattoo artist Campbell has also found a commercial niche in creating handcrafted artwork. He talked about his training at a tattoo parlor and time spent taking direction from those whose bodies he was decorating, the ultimate art directors. The beauty and cool factor of his designs lead to a request from Camel to design an entire campaign. Nike has also recently commissioned him to hand draw the design for the 2007 Olympic uniforms. And Campbell now has his own line of tattooed furniture at Barney’s, after all as Dumbo pointed out the ultimate luxury is a handmade object.
During the interviews both artists conveyed a passion for their individual artistic approach, which results in a truly unique and authentic end product. Authenticity is a quality that our society now so often craves and rarely finds, which is why demand for these artists by big brands is so high. In such a computer reliant world, I wonder how we can bring authenticity and a unique hand crafted touch to our clients.
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