Tom Stromberg of The Geniant Blog has put up a great post about the value of hand drawn sketches in the creative process.
I’ve always loved drawing and I used to do a lot more of it when I was younger. Recently I’ve been wanting to try and integrate more sketching into my work and rely less on software to visualize ideas. After recently seeing Mike Rohd’s stunning sketches from SXSW and reading about a particularly interesting drawing class in Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind (which I highly recommend), I decided to give it a go on my own.
I recently purchased the book referenced in Pink’s work, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, along with its companion workbook and plan to treat it like a class I’m taking all by my lonesome. I’ll be sure to post updates as I work my way through.
If you’re at all interested in the subject, make sure to check out Stromberg’s piece.
I have a copy of ‘Sketching User Experience‘ that I haven’t yet gotten around to reading at home. It seems interesting and well focused, at least as far as I can tell from reading the forward. Happy to lend it to you, since it doesn’t seem likely that I’ll soon find the time to read a ‘work’ book that is only tangentially related to my areas of responsibility.
I also tend to prefer using pen & ink over digital tools to organize my thoughts. Unfortunately, my chicken scratch is often illegible even to me, so it doesn’t work very well as a sharing/communication medium for me. There’s something about making marks on paper that I don’t think tablet computing can replicated, though admittedly I haven’t spent any real time working with a tablet.
If you want some company for your ‘class’, let me know.
I picked up the workbook today!