IN4MATX280 – Grey Patterson

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, I’m currently working on a master’s in design. (I’m not sorry for talking about it a lot, I’m excited!)

In the first week, we spent a lot of time sketching. Which is… not something I’ve done a whole lot of, in the past; a bit here and there, especially while I was planning out Fluidics, and I do some at work on occasion, but never as much as we did in that first class.

One of the things that our professors mentioned was that it’s something that takes practice. Which, duh, except I hadn’t really thought about it like that. I’d done the thing that so annoys me when people do it with music: "oh, I’m just not talented at that."

That’s wrong. It’s not that I’m not talented; it’s that I’ve never practiced. So I made a resolution of sorts: I’m doing a degree in design, sketching is an important skill in design, so I’m going to practice this skill. I added it to my habit tracker, and off I went.

Since then, I’ve been trying to do a sketch every day. Mostly sticking with pencils (or rather, ‘pencils’; most of these were done in Moleskine Flow – it’s a pretty good app for this, and I’m quite enjoying the Apple Pencil), a bit of pen here and there. And sketching whatever catches my eye – there’s a good deal of the random items around my house, and a small collection of light fixtures in the various Starbucks’ I’ve found myself in over the past month or so.

It’s been fun. And, looking back over my sketches to put this post together, I think I’m improving. So, hey, practice: it works!

Sketch of two light fixtures. The fixture on the left is ceiling-mounted and has three hanging can lights. On the right is a lamp.

Sketch of salt and pepper grinders, sitting in front of an arched candle holder.

Sketch of a charred stump, still smoking.

Sketch of a cabinet with glass-fronted doors. On top of the cabinet is a plant, vines spilling out of the pot to mostly cover the mounted horns of a deer(?)

Sketch of a rectangular wooden planter. A few succulents are growing in the planter.

Sketch of an electric kettle with the lid open.

Sketch of a cushioned chair with a pillow on it.

Sketch of a teapot being used as a planter. A plant is growing out of the teapot, with a vine draping behind the spout.

Sketches of four different hanging light fixtures.

Sketch of a decorative planter. The planter is a statue of a wagon, being pulled by a snail; some small plants are growing in the bed of the wagon.

Sketch of a toaster, plugged in to the wall.

I recently started a Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction and Design. While the main goal of the program is, obviously, learning, one of the side goals is to build a portfolio; as such, I’m going to be making an effort to post some of what we’re working on in class here.

One of our assignments was to start collecting images and clippings, and doing some annotations of them. The idea is to build up a library; something like Quiver, but for design instead of development. It was actually very fun; a lot of my classmates did it handmade, and I considered it, but I’ve also been meaning to try Adobe XD and figured, why not?

It’s a pretty neat tool, it made it very quick to put these all together. Much more focused than my other digital go-to, PhotoShop, where I probably could’ve accomplished the same thing, but would’ve spent more time digging around in the ‘draw a line’ settings and whatnot.

Source: Windows Task Manager (Windows 10)

A lot of what I did for mine were mobile apps – that is, after all, my main area of interest – but I also made an effort to branch out to other operating systems and even (gasp) physical devices.

Source: the office Keurig. No, I don’t know how to work it.

A big part of the assignment was giving feedback to our classmates on what they’d collected. The goal wasn’t “hey, that’s a cool interface you were looking at,” but “oh, that’s a good point about the interface.” The exercise, after all, was about the act of collecting and annotating.

It was interesting to see how everybody did theirs – most of the people I talked with had done them by hand, although somebody did a lovely blended style one by collecting screenshots and photos and then annotating them with an iPad and Apple Pencil.

I’m not sharing all of what I’ve collected here – I’m proud of my annotations of the to-do list app I use, but I don’t actually want to share the contents of my to-do list. And while I had fun marking up Dark Sky, I don’t feel the need to share my home address with the internet.

I’ve got some pieces from my sketchbook that I might post sometime soon, and I’ll hopefully continue to have interesting things to share as the program goes on!