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Lately I've developed an unhealthy obsession with making things that can survive a dead battery.
Paper. Ink. Staples. Fold marks. Bent corners. Objects that occupy space and slowly age with the people who own them.
For years I've made things that only ever existed as pixels. Motion graphics disappear the moment the timeline closes. Renders become compressed videos. PSDs become forgotten folders. Even the internet itself feels increasingly temporary—posts vanish into feeds, links rot, platforms collapse, algorithms decide what deserves to exist today and what quietly disappears tomorrow.
I don't think it's nostalgia.
I just miss weight.
Maybe that's why my old zine has started crawling back into existence. It's why I've been spending weeks designing a set of custom cards instead of doing something sensible. It's why I'm slowly assembling a printable tabletop RPG that I genuinely hope people won't just download. I hope they'll print it. Fold it. Spill coffee on it. Lose half the character sheet. Scribble rules in the margins until it barely resembles the original.
A PDF shouldn't be the destination.
It should be the blueprint.
Maybe I'm imagining it, but I don't think I'm the only one moving in this direction. Lately I've noticed more artists making zines, tapes, CDs, stickers, books, patches, cards and strange little editions that exist outside a screen. It feels less like a trend and more like a collective instinct. As if enough years of frictionless digital everything have made us crave friction again.
The internet has a strange relationship with physical things.
Everyone romanticises handmade work until there's a price attached to it.
After weeks of drawing, revising, colour correcting, adjusting bleed margins, nudging text by fractions of a millimetre and arguing with print proofs, I realised something wonderfully stupid: eighteen pieces of printed cardboard cost almost twenty pounds to manufacture before they've travelled a single mile.
That's the contradiction I can't stop thinking about.
The price tag is part of what gives these objects their value. Not because expensive automatically means better, but because physical things refuse to pretend they're free. They have weight. They occupy shelves. They require paper, ink, time, shipping, storage, mistakes and second attempts. Every copy is proof that somebody had to make a decision.
At the same time, that price is what makes physical work so difficult to keep alive. We compare handmade objects to products manufactured by factories running around the clock. We expect independent artists to compete with industrial economies of scale while also somehow making everything affordable.
It's a strange expectation.
We celebrate DIY culture, but we've become accustomed to factory prices.
Even so...
Holding a prototype feels absurdly satisfying.
Not because it's perfect. It isn't. The latest version only exists because I found a handful of alignment issues that nobody but me would probably notice.
It feels satisfying because it escaped.
It stopped being a file.
It became something that can gather dust on a shelf, get left inside a backpack, passed to a friend, forgotten in a drawer and rediscovered years later.
Digital work spreads faster.
Physical work stays longer.
I don't think one is replacing the other. I'll still spend most of my days staring at timelines, layers and node graphs.
But lately, whenever I finish something, I keep asking myself the same question.
Could this exist in someone's hands instead?
More often than not, I hope the answer is yes.