Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese aeasthetic which embraces objects of art with imperfections, roughness and asymmetry. It’s a kind of art I liked without even knowing there was a name for it, until now… More than once the Design Reviews blog has discussed eroded, aged, worn, haltoned and other ‘lo-fi’ effects in illustrator and vector graphics in general.

distressed, worn and reliced vs brand spanking new

Guitar enthusiasts have been buying into hand-made and artificially aged or ‘reliced’ guitars for quite a while now, look at the picture above. A relic will have quite a premium on the price tag! Just think of how many years you would have to own and play a guitar to make it look that used. Quote: “Fender’s Relic line accounts for more than 12% of its $5 million annual sales.” Another very popular market for aged and worn appearance is clothing; think of faded stonewashed jeans and distressed leather jackets. Of course don’t forget antiques either.

As I noted earlier the Wabi-Sabi idea can be put into your illustration and logo work quite easily now with the modern versions of illustrator which are less about pure lines and shapes than before. There’s a lot of vector tools that can cross over into areas that were once Photoshop only avenues.

I have a couple of other articles planned about Wabi-Sabi style graphics, beauty and design coming up which I think will be very interesting. And I hope to put up some polls for feedback too. Come back next week!

What to do? Illustrator has a couple of likely tools – roughen and scribble. They don’t really provide any kind of corrosion. In the old days this is what we would have done to age some text; print it on the laser and blow it up on the photocopier a few times at max magnification. Between copies you could rough up the sheets of paper a bit, crinkle it a bit, depends what you wanted.

3000 Recordings

Anyway that was a long time ago. Now it’s easier to use Photoshop and some spatter brushing, the photocopy and stamp and threshold controls, a bit of the dodge tool perhaps. Then you can bring that into Illustrator and vectorise it if you wish to use it in a logo. That’s what I did and I’m pleased with the subtle and realistic results. What do you think?