Proof of Life: The Case for Texture in Branding

Words: Amy & Jennifer Hood
October 2026

Amy and Jennifer Hood, cofounders of brand identity and type design studio Hoodzpah, make the case for texture and handmade aesthetics as proof of life in the age of AI, joined by a few of the best logo scuffers in the business.

There’s a visual shorthand between humans and brands. An aesthetic telepathy where brands tell us who they are through visual cues that we instantly understand. We know the tells instinctually, if not consciously. Generous, unfussy primary colors signal value, ease, and approachability for brands like McDonalds and Walmart. Neutral colors and refined typography signal exclusivity and premium price tags for brands like Aesop or Tom Ford. This is visual identity 101. A lesser-mentioned trick in this bag of branding is texture.

Texture as shorthand for authenticity

Texture has become shorthand for “authenticity” and “human craft”. Authenticity is probably mentioned in 75% of brand guidelines under the “traits” section, almost to the point of being cliché. But the thing about clichés is they become ubiquitous because they’re broadly true. Consumers do want an authentic sense of personality from their brands. Not as a pandering checkbox, but a genuine sentiment along a whole spectrum. For example, Dynamite Valley’s ink-roller textures, off-kilter label placement, and literal brown-bag packaging cue a celebration of real people brewing real-good craft beer; whereas brands like Deus ex Machina exude a devil-may-care tone with their hand-drawn, textured graphics and gritty image treatments. One brand uses texture as shorthand for human craft while the other signals subculture flowing against the mainstream.

Top: Kingdom & Sparrow's beautifully raw branding for Dynamite Valley. Bottom: Just one of the hundreds (if not thousands) of handcrafted logo lockups for countercultural Moto/Surf/Record label Deus Ex Machina (this one by True Grit collaborator, Adam Nickel).

Effort, friction, and grounding

Remember going to Starbucks and the barista writing your name in Sharpie on the cup? It was always spelled 50% wrong, then said 75% wrong by the end of the latte line. But it was wrong and real! (Maybe we can trace the blandification of Starbucks back to when they ditched the Sharpies for printed labels.) Texture signals a reality and tactility we crave. An evidence of the human touch, or at least the perspective of the individual. Designer and illustrator Lauren Griffin says using texture can make a work “feel lived-in” and “keeps the human hand visible” in the same way that we love seeing the brush strokes in a painting, or a film burn on a photo print. It’s proof of life, and inference of lore. In this social media age where someone decides whether to stay or scroll in less than 3 seconds, texture can be a quick way to communicate that humanity and effort, even in a digital space.

Lauren Griffin understands the value of keeping the human hand visible in her clients' work. Case in point: The Westerly, an art gallery and specialty goods store out of Steamboat Springs, CO.

“I find that when new clients reference the projects that brought them to my doorstep, whether it be a one-off illustration or a branding suite with hand-drawn elements, that human element is what people are often most drawn to.”

Lauren Griffin

With so much of our lives lived on a screen, and every app trying to squeeze more optimization out of our lives, we yearn for tactility and effort. We’re reaching for hobbies that actually add friction to our lives (hello woodworking, pottery, gardening, and knitting). We’re looking to be more present (hello phone Bricking and in-person brand activations taking over). Brand designers are reflecting that sentiment in their work too. Creative Director Daniel Sheridan , who has created vintage-tinged graphics for brands like Seager, Coors, and Huckberry, says he uses texture to achieve a “real world feel” in his work. The Metaverse is dead, and many brand designers are making digital experiences that mirror real life. We’re reaching for photo grain, texture packs, painterly effects, soft neutrals instead of whites, hand-drawn typefaces purposefully skewed in ways our typography instructors would scold us for.

Daniel Sheridan says his use of texture in branding adds "a level of dimension and real-world feel that is often lost in flat graphics that live solely on a screen."

Novelty vs Nostalgia

From one decade to the next we have been on a pendulum swinging back and forth between the celebration of modernity and industry on the one side (i.e. the industrial revolution, the space age, the dot-com era, the tech boom, the AI boom), and the celebration of humanity, individuality and craft on the other (i.e. the arts and crafts movement of the late 19th century, the hippy/counterculture movement, the alternative anti-establishment whirlwind of the 90s, the indie craft hey-dey of the 2000s with hand drawn logos à la Contino, hand-lettering by Mary-Kate McDevitt, handmade everything on Etsy, and craft beer and coffee shops on every corner). With AI doom in every headline, and consumer trust tanking worse than the 2025 New Orleans Pelicans, it seems clear the pendulum is currently swinging towards nostalgia, humanity, and the natural for many consumers. Brand designers are cleverly using texture to reflect that sentiment, even if it is through digital tools. “The use of textures and handmade finishes in my work are always meant to bring raw humanity and reflections of the natural and physical world we, as human beings, tend to crave in an age of frequently sterile, pixelated, tasteless modernity,” says brand designer, Jonathan Schubert.

Wayward Coffee co by Jonathan Schubert, says his work "has only ever benefited from the addition of texture, grit, and an authentic printed, stamped, or hand-executed finish".

The new status symbol: proof of human craft

Hermès has recently begun collaborating with talented artists to create beautiful illustrations for their brand’s social media accounts. The illustrations feel like one-off, handmade pieces of artwork with visible brush strokes and texture galore. In an almost earth-shattering act of brand defiance, sometimes the works don’t even feature a Hermès product! But the intention is clear, and the effect is real. It tells us Hermès is a brand that values craft and human artistry. It tells us something about their own passion and artistry for making products. It’s setting a vibe, and the vibes are impeccable. And they’re not the only ones. Brands like Loewe and Lacoste are similarly using hand-drawn illustrations, be they new commissions or pulled from their archives (imagine getting to pull from Burberry’s illustrious archives with gems like this one or this one from their history, clothing an Arctic expedition).

"There's obviously craft and human skill behind clean and flat design, but it's not immediately felt or present in the same way as something textured.”

Andreas Pedersen

With sleek, picture-perfect graphics being so easy to generate without intention, skill, or even taste, people are finding more joy in the imperfect and the evidence of effort. A recent Philadelphia Flyers illustration of Gritty grilling hot dogs sparked immediate backlash among fans who thought the graphic was AI-generated. The comments section had over 100 comments like, “Really? AI? I’m disappointed." The team quickly clapped back with receipts, showing a time-lapse of the artist creating the intricate illustration. The post went absolutely viral. The fans rejoiced, and the Flyers brand reputation was at an all-time high.

As it becomes harder and harder to tell what is and isn’t AI, texture is becoming a signifier of the human-made. “I still love [being able to see] the process of creation in finished work; that's still what inspires me most,” says founder of Neighborhood Studio, Curtis Jinkins.

Curtis Jinkin's brand design for Megaphone Artist Management. "Texture can just add a subtle level of craft and detail that helps amplify meaning that's (hopefully) already apparent in the graphic. "

Perfect is Boring

Flawless perfection is boring. Symmetry may be pleasing, but peculiarity and irregularity make you study the thing. You know what’s cool and interesting? A crooked smile. A tooth gap (RIP to Andy Samberg’s tooth gap and Ben Affleck’s Chicklet teeth). A scar. It’s character. It’s proof of life and mischief and a great story from “that one night.” It’s lore. That’s the inference we get when we see brand design that has paper tooth, inkbleed, or a screen-printed effect: “This has history”.

“So much of my work is inspired by styles and techniques from the past, where texture was built in due to technical limitations.”

Daniel Sheridan

“I think there's cool meaning behind that, especially now with all the robot art out there… to actually make something with your hands and embrace the imperfections as more than just some sort of trend but rather an element of humanity behind it.” Andreas Pedersen, who’s worked with boutique and global brands alike, adds,”...I think it adds a layer of attitude. When I studied graphic design at university, there was a phrase…it goes, "Perfect is boring". That has resonated with me ever since.”

Brand design for Bold Bean by Andreas Pedersen. "When the texture has meaning it has to be rooted in a strategic insight, a reason for being there beyond 'It looks beautiful '."

It’s even gotten to the point where graphics that are too slick have to come with artistic receipts. Take the Apple TV bumper animation. They created a multicolored, accordion-style animation of their logomark that looked so crisp it seemed like CGI. Then they dropped the behind-the-scenes content of how it was made. Dozens of crewmembers operating cameras and booms, rigs holding the logo rendered in glass, intricate lighting setups. What was “cool” was now “amazing” and flooding everyone’s feed as people jumped to share it. It feels like it’s never mattered more “how” something was made. We want to know humans are creating the design that we consume.

Texture as a grounding device in an increasingly digital world

At one time, texture in branding was mostly seen in certain industries: heritage brands, food and beverage brands, punk or counterculture brands. Now pharma, insurance, and even AI companies (facepalm) are reaching for texture and handcrafted aesthetics as a way to signal warmth and humanity. Some to better effect than others.

Design studio, Geist, created the brand identity for Claude, focusing on the company’s stated goals to be “helpful, harmless, and honest always.” How the tech has turned out is a whole other question. But the stated goal makes it clear why they chose a hand-drawn style of illustration for the brand. To feel genuine and less like an ethicless robot. Mind you, they designed this brand back when AI companies were promising to cure cancer, before the Hugging Face and Australian Medicare hacks and...[waves hand] everything else. There was more restrained optimism back then.

It's easy to be cynical about AI giants using texture and handmade illustration to soften their image, but sometimes, even in tech, it's the exact right approach. Take Light, for example, a relatively new phone brand with no app support (GASP!) adopting handwritten typography and tactile hand-drawn animation to communicate their “radically different” approach to phones. Light is focused on making dumber (i.e., simpler) phones that are better for our attention, our wallet, our privacy, our earth, and our well-being. The toothy, illustrative effect is used sparingly, but it’s effective. In conjunction with grainy, real-life-looking photography and video, the tone is very “get out there and talk to a real person.”

Brand video for Light Phone from the wonderfully humanist hand of Brooklyn-based animation director Daniel Zvereff.

Texture as stolen valor

Despite best intentions, if the brand aesthetic does not match the reality of the product experience or brand culture, it can come off as trickery, or worse, a kind of Big Brother doublespeak that pretends to be one thing when it is very much another.

“Texture can just add a subtle level of craft and detail that helps amplify meaning that's (hopefully) already apparent in the graphic,” says Curtis Jinkins of Neighborhood Studio, who’s made a name building textured, gritty, and nostalgic designs for Deus ex Machina, Kiehls, Filson, and more.

Brand design for Let 'Em Run by Curtis Jinkins / Neighborhood Studio.

Texture is more a finish than a hack. Like choosing a matte instead of a gloss finish on your packaging. At Hoodzpah, we often try to peel back the gloss and the glitz of a design to judge “would this still be interesting without the texture… without the motion… without the mockups?” The idea and the execution have to be solid before texture, motion, and mockups are brought into the mix. “If something doesn't work — bad layout or dumb concept—texture won't save it.” says Schubert, who is known for his illustrative brand work.

“The finished work I deliver to clients should always be successful when presented in clean, untextured format before it is successful with the addition of textures.”

Jonathan Schubert

The Cheat Code

We’d agree that concept is king. But in the modern content landscape of quick consumption and ever-shrinking attention spans, we can’t ignore immediate vibes. When I asked Lauren Griffin, whose work has attracted clients like Pabst and Weezer, if texture was a cheat-code, she responded “Absofuckinglutely. I may not describe it as a 'cheat code' per se, as much as a familiar process that I know can bring that final touch… Sometimes when I'm drawing a particularly detailed illustration with clean lines and lots of details, I'm comfortable with the illustration not looking quiiiite right, as I know I'm going to drag it through layers and layers of texturing to scuff it up and remove some of the clean edges.” Vegas-based illustrator, Blaze Ben Brooks equates it to more of a magic trick “I think most people looking to get a job done don't understand the possibilities of graphic styles and textured finishes until you put it on display.

“Sometimes I'll show before-and-afters of the clean graphic vs. the textured final, and the response makes me feel like a magician turning a red ball into a rabbit.” Dustland branding by Blaze Ben Brooks

Pastiche vs. Authenticity

Three out of the six designers we interviewed for this piece got their start by making t-shirts, either for local print shops or for their own bands. All of them mentioned the ephemera and research they’d collected on different printing and artistic techniques through the ages. I’d wager to guess that 99% of people reading this article have a similar collection of matchbooks, coasters, posters, and book references. When we use texture packs or vector brushes, we’re not spoofing, we’re signaling. We’re choosing the finish. There are so many ways to achieve that perfect textured, weathered feel, from brushes to Photoshop actions. The key to making it look authentic is context. Otherwise, things can easily veer into pastiche territory. “The biggest complaint I hear from viewers or clients is ‘I hate when you can tell it's fake vintage,” says Brooks.

“Really understanding vintage printing techniques (lithography, flexography, silkscreen, etching, trapping and color overlays) can make things look so much more authentic.”

Curtis Jinkins, Neighborhood Studio

People outside of the creative departments may not know what you mean when you say “texture”, but they have an innate gut sense of when it’s used wrong. “Sometimes the fake texture can look a little too... fake.” agrees Sheridan. We’ve all gone to a local restaurant where the menu was printed on flimsy printer paper with a giant, pixelated paper texture laid on top of the design. The sizing is wrong, the quality isn’t there. If you didn’t love their Penne alla Vodka so much, you’d actually hold it against them.

Daniel Sheriden employing True Grit's Infinite Pulp paper textures to add a little warmth to the digital manifestation of his branding for Sweet Justice Creamery.

Blaze Ben Brooks, known for his gritty, retro-tinged design style, approaches texture in his work like an exercise in “backwards engineering”. “Context is key when applying texture,” he says. “Knowing what aesthetic or process you're trying to achieve is crucial. If I want my finished design to look like a movie poster from the 1960s, I need to know what kind of paper they would use, what kind of print process they'd use… You can't just take a paper texture, set it to multiply, place it over your design and call it a day.”

Analog and Digital Executions

Curtis Jinkins feels the push and pull between digital and analog. “I think getting away from a computer and going back to hand drawing and scanning is the best way to break out of that.” Jonathan Shubert has his own method of marrying approaches: “Sometimes I will print my work in black and white at various scales and scan it in to get that authentic printed look and feel... always hits the target.”

“Nothing beats the real thing, honestly,” says Pedersen. “ A real photocopied flyer…a letterpressed business card…a real artifact or printed item that will exist in the real world.”

Andreas Pedersen's Zing wordmark has just the right amount of texture and evidence of craft to bring authenticity to his contemporary brand design for the homestyle pickle makers.

I (Amy Hood here) used to dabble in sign painting, and my veteran sign painter friends (shoutout to Harpoon, holding it down in Orange, CA) often lamented having to paint logos with big, gaping grit-effect holes. While the grit effect looked great in digital instances like a website, the faux aging looked phony in real-life application. They always recommended painting the logo using a thinner application of One Shot paint and a light hand. This lets the brush stroke shine through naturally instead of faking brush strokes and weathering. It’s the authentic method that the grit effect was created to mimic in digital spaces.

We find that texture is best used in digital spaces and sparingly in printed materials. In print situations, we encourage our brand clients to use toothy, textured papers and tactile print methods. Why print a paper texture on a bright white sheet of paper when you can print your design on a nice, toothy, ivory paper stock? It’s like getting a spray tan over a real tan. Digital tools for texture create an amazing and consistent way for brand teams to achieve a grounded, printed look in digital spaces. Those tools, paired with an understanding of tactile details and the execution of the physical brand elements, make you a double threat. It’s why we often provide our clients with both clean and textured versions of their logos. Like our visual identity for L.A. Material. The clean files were used on embroidered hats and signage, while the gritty versions lived in digital spaces. Lauren Griffin often delivers the same, like on her visual identity for Irregardless.

Hoodzpah's L.A. Material brand design is a perfect example of using digital tools to add texture and wobble to wordmarks and assets that live online, whilst retaining the flexibility to supply clean, crisp vectors for physical and printed brand elements.

Lauren Griffin's clean and inky wordmarks for Irregardless.

Vector brush packs can deliver the right texture while also maintaining the ease of editable strokes. “I still pencil sketch 99.99 percent of my projects on tracing paper,” says Lauren Griffin. But when it comes to final artwork, she loves the control of clean beziers and vectors. “I am partial to Bézier Buddy brushes when I want to bring a shaky, hand-drawn quality to my brush strokes. It's so satisfying to plot out dirty, rough marks with clean beziers, knowing that the line texture is totally editable every step of the way.” Is it amazing seeing Michael Doret’s rounds and rounds of carefully plotted hand drawn logo revisions on tracing paper? 100,000%. What a legend. Is it also amazing to be able to adjust clean vectors for quick revisions because you’re using digital brushes? Also yes.

“There's a wonderful irony to the explosion of social media creating more opportunities for designers to use texture in branding, not less”

Andrew Fairclough,
True Grit Texture Supply

Brand Consistency and File Handoff

With any visual identity project, it’s important to prepare your brand assets for easy client handoff and adoption. Brand guidelines should outline how to achieve the look so the effect is actually usable and repeatable by their team long term. Branding is repeating, repeating, consistency, consistency. What good is a complex visual identity system with intricate textures and tons of layers if no one else can achieve the look except the designer who conceived it in the first place? Brands are living breathing things. Their existence depends on many caretakers along the way. Consider who will be maintaining the brand you’re working on, and record documentation.

Use brush and texture packs—like these very ones on True Grit Texture Supply—that allow for brand consistency and easy application across various apps. Prepare ready-made assets that empower your clients to carry on the torch. Call out brush packs, grit textures and tools they’ll need to purchase within the brand guidelines; Or better yet, budget that into your quote so you can purchase the right items for them and just include them in final deliverables. We’ve seen many well-intentioned and expertly executed rebrands with hand-drawn elements that quickly get dropped or go unused after launch. Probably because the internal brand team was unable to recreate the style with their skills or timelines. There is a balance to strike when making a distinctive yet functional brand identity that can last and weather trends.

Handing off those files to an external design team? Specifying easy-to-use and flexible digital tools such as textured brushes helps your vision live on. Above: a snippet from Hoodzpah's brand style guide for Fanhood featuring our Bézier Buddy vector inking brushes.

The goal of branding is to make a memorable connection with a target audience, in simple terms. But the more enviable goal is for a brand to become a shorthand for a way of thinking or living. Great visual identity can embody a brand and a subculture without having to say a word. Texture is a part of that toolbox. One that can signal individuality, tone, friction and effort in the best possible sense. Especially in a modern world where many of us are tired of seamless tools and sleek interfaces promising to think and optimize everything for us.

Here's a few of the ways our interviewees integrate True Grit tools into their brand-design workflow to create authentic texture effects that cut through the noise.

Jonathan Schubert

"I frequently find myself using TGTS textures and brushes! I do ALL my drawing in Procreate with the TGTS Rusty Nib / Round Felt Pen brush... and I frequently employ pattern textures from TGTS Lithotone, Beat Tones, and Halftone Zine Machine."

The Rusty Nib | Lithotone | Beat Tones | Halftone Zine Machine