For some reason that never ceases to baffle me I don’t have a ‘No Junk Mail’ sign on my letterbox, and there’s a white-trash family that lives round the corner who go delivering flyers and catalogues pretty much every evening. My house is constantly awash with useless, unsolicited bits of paper. Which is not all bad, there are occasional Video Ezy coupons, and ones for pizza that I always think I’ll use but I never do.

With that said, I can’t remember where these came from. They might have been Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes envelopes, or they might have been hospital correspondence, or something else entirely. It was a while ago, I can’t remember. Whoever sent them, one day the first one turned up in the mail, and regardless of what was in it I was immediately struck by the envelope.

I like brown paper. Always have, always will (I assume). Brown envelopes are therefore cool, and this one was all the more cool for having important block letters and danger-red printing. Awesome. The magpie-designer in me jumped at it, and promptly ripped the corner off the envelope and stuck it on my wall. It looked good up there and I soon forgot about it. Then a while later (months, let’s say), another envelope turns up, from the same people. At first glance it’s brown, has the neat red warning-corner, address window, all that. Cool.

But when I take it inside to look further I find that no, this isn’t a brown envelope, this is a white envelope that’s been printed brown. The red corner is still printed the same, but hasn’t been overprinted onto the brown, the brown comes up to the edge and stops with a nasty overlap. Bleaugh.
To those without printing-knowledge this will seem utterly irrelevant, and fair enough too. But someone out there has gone to the trouble of designing and producing something to look like something else, making a white envelope look like a brown one, when it would in fact be quicker, easier, more ecologically sound and more effective to produce the something for real.

The point I’m trying to make (accent on the fourth word), is that there’s no substitute for the real thing. Whether this is brown paper, or hand-drawn type, or obscure outdated block-printing, faking it will usually look worse. The computer, for all its ease, cannot manufacture glitches, or credibility. The same thing is repeated all over – The drumming on Shapeshifter’s Soulstice album is so good because it’s actually drumming. Any protools geek could programme those beats in, but that guy’s actually playing them. And that’s always worth more.