An Analog Brand in a Digital World

Every time I drive into San Francisco, I see billboard after billboard lining the freeway. They all promise a brighter, faster, smarter future...powered by AI, of course.

Slick fonts. Clean renders. A curated future. It’s everywhere. From the moment you exit the bridge, the entire roadway feels like a declaration of "join us, or be left behind".

But when I pull off and sink into the rhythm of the city, what I love most has nothing to do with AI at all.

Small venues with thrifted furniture and hand-painted signs. Burlesque performers who spend hours hand-placing rhinestones on their corsets. Eateries with pizza by the slice and walls covered in posters advertising upcoming live shows.

These are the places that feed me creatively.

And they’re part of the reason I'm feeling a call to create more analog brands.

What Is Analog Branding?

To me, an analog brand means creating something that feels rooted in reality. Not manufactured through AI, not reliant on stock textures or filters. But made with my hands.

I want to scan the faded velvet cover of my old Victorian photo album and turn it into a texture for my client’s brand. I then want to take the 1800s photos from inside of it and build custom digital assets of the cardstock frames so that they feel like objects with weight and memory.

I want to photograph alleys and peeling paint and wrinkled concert flyers. I want to bring in dirt and lace and ink and thread.

I want you to see the fingerprint in the brand. The heart beat. The soul.

This isn’t just nostalgia for a simpler time...it’s rebellion.

Analog branding feels so punk to me. It’s resistance to simple, glossy designs. A refusal to flatten everything into perfection. A middle finger to the algorithms trying to tell us that creativity can be automated.

More than that? It’s urban fantasy in design form. Where gritty reality and dreamy magic collide.

Adding In A Little Analog

It's no secret that I love using textures in the brands I create. But, I also design many of my brand illustrations by hand. Every sword, crown, moth, and gothic emblem begins as a pencil sketch or ink drawing.

It’s my way of giving a brand some life, one line at a time. But I want to go deeper. I want to start gathering textures from the world around me.

The grain of tree bark in the local park. The wet ring left behind by a coffee mug. The upholstery on an old chair in a dive bar. The crumbling wallpaper in the bathroom of the antique store.

I want my camera roll to look like a scrapbook of forgotten places and unnoticed details. Then I want to bring those textures into the brands I create. Not as background noise, but as meaningful elements.

Something that says: “This was found. This was chosen. This was made.”

Even if the final deliverable is digital, I want it to carry evidence of the analog world.

Because branding, to me, is about worldbuilding. And I don’t want to build a world that only exists on a screen.

I want it to feel tangible, like something you can reach out and feel.

In Conclusion

In a world racing toward artificial, I want to create something really...real.

The handwritten. The scanned. The stitched. The photographed.

If you're the kind of person who still tears pages from magazines, still feels something in your chest when you hold an old photo, still believes in the power of texture and loves time-worn buildings...

Then maybe you're craving an analog brand, too.

Want me to add some analog vibes to your brand?

I'm currently booking.

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