Confession: I Use Paper

I use paper to design with.

I find that people have a healthy reaction to proposal drawings that are sketched on paper. By healthy I mean they have a tacit understanding that we are looking at a proposal and not a final product. A hand-drawn sketch conveys the idea that things are still in flux and easily changed when compared to “digital sketches”.

Rough Sketch

This is an early, very rough sketch of the portfolio portion of this site. It was not intended for a presentation – I show it here as an example of my creative process, which consists of rapid, iterative sketching. Pushing pixels around is too goal-oriented to promote further exploration of basic concepts. It’s not just clients that leap to final solutions prematurely.

Game Scene Sketch

Game Scene Final Illustration

I moved from Industrial Design into media development when I worked on a computer game. I started out doing illustrations for the backgrounds, vehicles and architecture. In some cases I did final illustrations and animations. It was fun, and it led to a lot of more meaningful work in multimedia. Ironically, I am not all that into computer games myself.

UI Concept Sketch

UI Final Delivery

In this example the look and feel had already been designed by an outside firm. I was asked to design and develop a navigation system for it. Not ideal. I presented a tight concept sketch overlayed on an existing screen. Tight means I had everything pretty well figured out: concept, layout, dimensions, type, color. There wasn’t time to iterate or show multiple designs, so this was “it”. I hope it doesn’t look like the afterthought it was.