Gotten your hands dirty with design lately? Likely not.

With the shift of most professional creative endeavors to the digital realm, particularly in fields such as graphic design, photography, illustration, video, and music, it is easy to lose touch with the hands-on experience. As a designer and production artist working in advertising, I often feel bound to the computer as a creative tool. Sometimes, however, it’s a good idea to step out of your comfort zone and look elsewhere for inspiration.

Case in point: despite my love of digital design and its capabilities, one of the more rewarding type experiences I’ve had recently was with a child’s lettering kit. I was looking for an appropriate typeface for an invitation. The prospect of trolling through endless digital font samples to find the right type just seemed too much like work. Sure, there are some great digital typefaces out there, maybe too many.

This time, however, I found my type in a simple stamp set belonging to my daughter. This unassuming little kit includes individual stamps for each letter of the alphabet, as well as the numbers 0-9, some key punctuation, and an ink pad.

It was a revelation to work with. And a heck of a lot of fun, too! The whole process was immediate and rewarding. No two stamped letters were exactly alike, and the results well-suited the intent. Of course, I couldn’t resist the temptation to scan in the lettering and manipulate it further on the computer, imposing “order” on the random results. But the real fun was in the tactile, hands-on approach to creating the type.

I’m sure that many graphic designers began their careers, as I did, working with traditional media, and then adapted their skills to computer-based applications. Certainly, hand-drawn type, Letraset, paste-up, halftone screens, and such production methods can seem like quaint memories from decades gone by. Contemporary design and image software have rendered traditional approaches all but obsolete.

It can be difficult to break away from reliable production methods, certainly in advertising, where so much of what we do is deadline-driven and constrained by brand standards. And while this idea of returning to “the source” for inspiration is an old standby, it’s worth a second thought.

While we become more comfortable with our high-tech tools, we can lose touch with some of the simpler creative outlets that drew many of us into the world of design in the first place. But there is definitely room for outdated technology in the digital world. The union of the two can create interesting – and liberating – results.

As the saying goes, “everything old is new.”