Hand-Drawn Graphics

Hand-drawn graphics: the tool arrived as warehouse supply

A drawn line carries the speed of the hand along with the shape. Slow down and the ink has longer to settle, so the stroke darkens. Lift the tip and the line begins to break into dry streaks. Push a marker across the page too quickly, and the paper grain starts pushing back.

The tool showed up in 1952 as an industrial supply. Sidney Rosenthal, working out of Richmond Hill in Queens, fitted a wool felt wick onto a small glass bottle of permanent ink and called it the Magic Marker. It went out to sign painters and warehouses, and it needed heavy stock, because the ink soaked straight through anything thinner. By 1958, they were on every desk in America. Designers, illustrators, architects, and advertising studios discovered they liked the accidents just as much as the efficiency.

Ad studios took them over completely. Through the sixties and seventies, a layout artist drew the whole advertisement by hand, long before a word of it went into type. Thin marker lines stood in for copy nobody had written yet. That sheet was what the client saw and approved. Today the profession is mostly gone, yet the marks still tell that a real hand was here first.

Sorting hand-drawn graphics by the tool that made it

• Marker. Dye ink through a felt tip of fixed width. The ink is transparent, so any place two passes overlap comes back darker, and a tip past its best leaves pale streaks along the stroke.
• Pen and ink. A flexible nib swells and thins with pressure; a technical pen holds one weight throughout. Tone in both comes from hatching rather than from the line itself, so pen work carries detail down to very small sizes and then loses it all at once.
• Pencil and graphite. Value is built from pressure and from how much of the paper tooth the lead reaches. Graphite has a faint metallic sheen in the darks, and the darks are never black.
• Chalk, crayon and pastel. The medium sits on top of the sheet instead of soaking in, skipping across the high points of the texture and leaving the pits empty. Coverage is broken by nature.
• Brush. Width changes along a single stroke as pressure and ink load change, and the stroke tapers where the brush lifts. The one tool that puts the whole range from hairline to solid mass into a single gesture.

Working with drawn graphics

The thing to hold onto is that every set is one person’s hand. If you mix two packs in a layout, you will get two handwritings on the same envelope, which the user’s eye catches in a flash. So pick one set to carry the piece and borrow from a second only where the tool and the weight actually match.

Then there is the instinct to select everything and hit align and distribute. Fight it. A hand never lands on 0° and never leaves equal gaps, so a row of scribbles on a perfect baseline won’t read as drawn. Nudge each one a degree or two, let the spacing wander, and remember the elements were made at a real size by a real tip. Enlarging a marker stroke four hundred percent is strongly unrecommended.

Beyond that, it is mostly restraint. One mark placed with obvious intent does more than five sprinkled round the edges, because the whole value of this material is that somebody decided to put it exactly there. You can see it instantly when it is true, and just as instantly when it is not.

Where a hand-drawn look belongs

• Small-batch food and drink labels.
• Farmers’ market and craft fair promotion.
• Journals, planners and paper goods.
• Infographics that need a less corporate voice.
• Charity and community campaigns.
• Podcast and newsletter identities.
• Recipe layouts and cookbook interiors.