Eye Magazine

Drawing together the work of designers who eschew a Mac-slick look for the wonky and the hand-made using photocopying, letterpress, handwriting, drawing or interventions, The New Handmade Graphics shows us something we probably already knew: that the improvised and the quirky is alive and kicking. That is not to say that the designers featured in the book do not use computers at some point during their process. Stephen Byram, for example, might use scratchy pen drawings and handwritten type for his rough abject aesthetic but all this gets assembled through Illustrator. Derek Birdsall, however, who makes perfectly normal layouts for Thames & Hudson, uses cut and paste for the simple reason that he has never learnt to use a computer (and he is fortunate in having a daughter, Elsa, prepared to complete his digital layouts for him) . . .