By Blythe Langley
Designer

Year 2010.
Lately I’ve been on a kick of researching and writing about upcoming trends for 2010 in the design world. At the very least your website design and development should be staying with the game in terms of what is hot and what is not in the design world, but more importantly, why not be ahead of the game? In my latest research I stumbled upon the hand written design style. I fully support the prediction of this style becoming a widespread trend throughout website design and development and here are my top three reasons why.

1. Bringing it back to the roots.
As I’m sure you’ve seen in fashion, in print advertising and a wide plethora of other design mediums, style-based trends move both forwards and backwards throughout history. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you might have noticed that the 80’s are back in style. Trends come and go and often times resurface again. Where did design begin before the computer emerged? Paper. During my college studies for visual communications, before we were ever even allowed to use a computer for design, we were strictly hand rendering designs on paper. Bringing this basic hand rendering style of the past into the future of website design is going to do wonders in the world of internet marketing. Not only does is it give you the freedom to manipulate things exactly how you want them to be, but it gives your website the look and feel of being meticulously crafted and well thought out. It takes a lot more effort to render things by hand than with a simple filter application.

2. Multiple levels of meaning.
Some might say that the (re)introduction of hand rendering brings a child-like feel, but I would argue that it is all about the style that you render in. A thick, chunky, curvy hand rendered font with stick figure drawings will surely bring an amateur feel to your website design. But what about writing that appears on blue prints? I would say an architectural hand rendered font doesn’t suggest a child-like style, but rather, a more professional style, representing a mindful and comprehensive process used to achieve an end result. Styles such as this appear clean and well thought out, while maintaining that focused thinking was put into creating purposeful work. The style you render in will certainly affect the look and feel your website has.

3. Break the rules. Break outside the box.
Why hand-write something when you can simply type it? I say, why not? Between the move to computer-based design and the arrival of web 2.0, I think we became stuck in a world of website design that was flat. It consisted of generic shapes and basic web-safe type that all looked the same. This is because most designs were made up of preset, computer-generated pieces. We no longer live in a world where the vision you see on your screen has to be flat. Be bold. Bring shading and shadows to your website design; bring hand rendered sketches and letters straight from the paper to create the world that exists on your screen, and ultimately strive to reflect the physical world that we live in.

Will the hand rendered style become one of the big trends in 2010? I can’t say for sure, but I can say that we’re already using it. Are you?

Have your own predictions on what will be big in 2010, or simply looking to take your website design and development ahead of the game? Contact us. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

Check out some of our recent work for examples of effective use of hand renderings

Hand-written cut-outs to call out our work within our home page billboards.

Hand-drawn logo to convey ideas behind brand’s mission.

Branded apparel utilizing hand-drawn lettering