That handmade touch

A handwritten note. A doodle on paper. It shows a certain freedom. A certain warmth. A certain authenticity. A certain physicality. A certain humanity. I could go on.

And what's more, with hand-drawn text, with a hand-drawn illustration done with care, somehow the mind seems to absorb it better, compared to if it were done by machine, I claim.

Something machine-made might cause a feeling of distance, might cause your subconscious to say: "This doesn't apply to me quite so much. This doesn't feel like my kind of stuff. Perhaps I can tune out".

With something handmade, on the other hand, your subconscious might say: "Now, this feels like my kind of stuff. Handy stuff, creature stuff, human being stuff. This feels like home." Perhaps the handmade can more easily pull you close, more easily get to your heart.

Yet, machines are so much fun, and so practical, and so irresistible. This website is a machine thing, you know? But I want to mix in the human touch, and for that matter, a bit of the physical world we humans inhabit. So, I contemplate the mixing.

And it was in contemplating the mixing, that I got so excited when I discovered Potrace not long ago, which is turning out to be a mighty handy way of mixing the two.