Michael Roller

The Best (and Easiest) Advice on Sketching

I’m preparing to give my Design Communication students their first sketching assignment. With that, I’ve been trying to give them the best advice possible for how to improve their skills. I asked my friends on Twitter, and got a ton of responses (thanks!). It occurred to me that there are a lot of small pointers and advice that people have to share, so the most actionable advice will be memorable and easily digestible. Here it is:

1. Always Warm Up.

2. Always Pin Up.
   

3. Always Cheat.

Always warm up. Have you ever played a sport or a musical instrument? If so, this advice instantly makes sense. Whether you’re running a 5K or playing the clarinet, you’ve got to loosen up to perform your best. When you warm up and “stretch,” you prepare both your muscles and your mind. I prefer a warm up I learned from Scott Robertson, which has me drawing at least a page each of straight lines, ellipses, and circles before I dive into something (yes, I still do this at work). Warm ups succeed because they completely separate designing from drawing. The repetition is therapeutic and allows the mind to begin thinking about ideas before having to commit them to paper.

Always pin up. Technology has allowed some people to work almost exclusively on the computer. While this affords many benefits (control-z, less paper), it challenges designers to consciously hang up and share their work. There’s something magical about hanging your work up on a wall. Unlike viewing it on your desk, perspective errors become clear, the use of contrast makes sense, and your best designs often jump out at you. When the entire studio hangs work on the walls, they share their successes and failures, improving together.

Always cheat. Cheating can mean emulating someone else’s style, tracing an underlay to understand perspective, or copying a product detail to better sketch it from memory. Don’t confuse copying a sketch with copying a design; learning through replication is different from plagiarism. Many designers avoid these things in favor of developing unique habits, but in reality they’re slowing their pace of improvement and missing out on opportunities. “Don’t think tracing is cheating; it’s a skill, says designer Sam Amis. “I was always afraid to, until I realized I was being stupid not to.”

These are my three easy rules for improving your sketching skills, but there are many more. A few others are: stay positive, sketch everyday, and choose one: ideate, communicate, impress. What is your best piece of advice?

Tags: demos, process, sketching, student work

The Devil is in the Details

Why does a MacBook feel so sensual while other laptops lack the same emotion? They’re basically the same rounded box, right? The devil is in the details.

This post continues my recent interest in how form communicates meaning. First, Gray Holland wrote about how surfaces can communicate meaning, now Joshua Maruska gets into the details of how to actually do it. Joshua does a nice demo for Alias on how to make a simple, rounded square into a high quality set of surfaces: something that looks geometric, but feels organic.

This approach isn’t always necessary, but we designers need to be aware of when these details matter and when they don’t. For a piece of consumer electronics (where aesthetics are critical), it definitely does.

Check out the rest of the article, Devil in the Details, highly recommended for anyone who knows Alias well but wants to step up their craft.

Tags: consumer electronics, demos, design making