Hi there, I'm Karl Ulrich and I'm going to teach you to better represent your designs on a whiteboard, a computer screen, or a sheet of paper. In other words, I'm going to teach you to draw. Now, my goal with this module is to teach you relatively quick sketching and visualization techniques. There are really two main purposes. The first is for you to be able to better communicate your design to others, and the second is to help you better visualize your design in the course of the design process itself. What I'm not going to be able to do is teach you photorealistic rendering techniques. There is a role for such renderings in the design process, but in general, it requires expertise beyond the scope of a quick video tutorial. And so, you're going to engage with an expert to help you out with that. Now some people think of sketching and drawing as art and as requiring artistic talent, but I don't really believe that's the case. There are a few very simple techniques that, once mastered, will allow you to develop the skill with just some practice. Indeed, there's no one right way to sketch or draw in the context of product design. So beyond a few simple rules that arise out of geometry, you'll be able to develop your own style with some additional practice. Okay, here we go. Now let me also say and explain this rig, which is that most of the time in this module, what you're going to see is my hands with a pen on the sheet of paper. And so what I've done is I've set up a little structure that lets me support my tablet so that I can capture video of what I'm doing on the page. Let's start with the most basic idea in drawing, which is that we typically represent objects by drawing lines that correspond to the edges of the object. Those lines aren't usually actually on the object, so it's a little bit of a fiction. But our brains are really quite adaptive in interpreting lines as edges and making sense of the objects. And what tools do we need to create those lines that represent edges? Well, pretty much anything can suggest an edge, even light. Many of you will remember that Pablo Picasso did a whole series of drawings using just light, but the best tools are the ones you have with you. You can draw with a crayon on the back of an envelope if you really have to, but we can usually do a bit better than that. Let's start with the paper. Any letter size copy paper or printer paper will work just fine. And some of you might even want to use graph paper, which provides some guidance for lines that are orthogonal to each other. I print my own graph paper on scrap paper using a five millimeter grid. But for the purposes of this module, I'm going to use some pretty nice drawing paper like this paper here from Copic. And this paper is nice in that the markers don't bleed through and it has quite a bit of strength. So I like this paper, but pretty much any paper will do. In terms of writing implements, you're going to need a few different things. Let's start with a mechanical pencil. Typically, you're going to want a 0.5-millimeter mechanical pencil, that is, a mechanical pencil with 0.5-millimeter lead. Although a 0.7-millimeter, some people like that, it creates a fatter line. You're also going to need a fine pen, and I would look for one that gives you about the finest line that is possible. This one here is by the Japanese company Muji, and I like it quite a bit. You'll also need a thin marker, which is a felt tip marker usually quite a bit wider than the fine pen. This is a very standard marker available in the US called a Sharpie, the fine tip Sharpie. And then you'll also need a thicker marker. This is also a Sharpie, very commonly available in the US, but pretty much any thin and thick marker that you can put your hands on will be just fine. Now there are much nicer markers, fancy markers that you don't really have to buy, but if you are into drawing, you might like these markers. This marker is from Copic, C-O-P-I-C, which is a nice brand and it has the advantage that it comes in a set that allows you to get widths of the nib on the marker anywhere from, I think, 0.1 millimeters all the way up to over 1 millimeter in width. Another marker that you might find quite useful is a shading marker, and these markers come in different shades of grey, from very light to very dark. These happen to also be made by Copic. And the nice thing about standardizing on the Copic markers is that the shading markers don't bleed, the ink doesn't bleed when you shade over the Copic marker. And you can see over here that if I shade over the Sharpie ink, I get just a little bit of bleeding. It's not a huge problem. You can, of course, shade with a pencil as well, but these shading markers are really quite nice. You'll also want a ruler, and you might want a triangle, which just lets you make lines, just establish lines that are perpendicular to some other feature or a line. And lastly, of course, you're going to want an eraser to clean up a drawing or to remove the reference lines that you might do in pencil. [INAUDIBLE] traditional, paper-based tools, there are now pretty good digital tablets available as well including the iPad by Apple. And in terms of sketching technique, there really is no major difference between using a digital tablet and using paper and pencil. I don't really care which one you use, you can use either. I, in fact, use both. The only real difference for sketching is that, with paper, you'll probably use pencil, then ink over it and then erase the pencil. And with a tablet, you use layers. So you have a reference layer that establishes where you want your lines to be, you then put your lines in a second layer and then you hide the reference layer in order to reveal just the information you want for your drawing. But fundamentally, whether you use a digital tablet or paper and pen doesn't really matter and the techniques are going to be the same. Mostly in this set of videos, I'm going to use pencil and paper because I think it's more likely that that's what you're going to be using. I want to point out a dangerous tendency that many people have when they first learn to draw, and that is that they draw the sketchy little figures in the corner of the sheet. I call them chicken scratches. They're usually too small, they're all scratchy, they're hard to read and they're off in the corner of the page. Let's take inspiration from Thomas Edison. This is a page from his lab book while he was developing the light bulb. And you can see that what Edison did here is he used nice dark lines, he centered the work on the page and he also signed his name. You can see TAE, Thomas Alva Edison, and the date, taking credit for the work and establishing when the work was done and by whom. Now if you're going to do a more careful sketch, then one really standard technique that works quite well is you use pencil first to sketch out the object or the lines that you want to eventually converge on, and then you ink over in the desired location, and then you erase the pencil marks in order to leave just the inked lines, and that's a pretty standard technique shown here. And then lastly, when you're doing your work, you've used nice dark lines, you centered it on the page, you also want to take credit for your work. This establishes who did it and when it was done, and it's just a nice habit to get into to put your name and the date somewhere on the sheet. I like to put it in the lower right corner. So let me make just a few summary comments for this introduction. And the first thing I want to say is that, in this instructional module, we're going to focus on quick visualization, but there's really two flavors of quick. There's really quick by which I mean, typically, 30 seconds or under a minute to represent an object. And there's slightly less quick, and the slightly less quick is usually where you use a pencil and then ink over it to get the final lines. The second point I want to make is that in design, we're usually trying to visualize something before there is an object, which is not quite the same as describing visually something that already exists and that you can look at, that you can hold in your hand. Now, in these videos, I'm going to mostly show you objects and then draw them because I think it makes it easier to see what I'm doing. But I do understand that in design, the object usually doesn't exist yet. So you have to make an additional leap from a concept in your head to the visual representation of that concept on the page. In the next segment, I'm going to discuss several distinct approaches to representing your design with a sketch.
