My Favorite Design Tool

Besides String and Tape

My sense of design has changed over the years, as you would hope, but my process hasn’t…but for one tool. Everything starts with a napkin sketch. It can be as simple as a shape or curve, perhaps an idea for a seat or a crest design. Here is a small drawing of the Helix chair in it’s infancy.

These seeds are precious. Then I play with a small model. Below is one from a design class. We made a small photo backdrop to make it easy to photograph and then remove the blue color. Then I download photo into the latest addition to my design tools, Procreate (not sponsored…as if).

Procreate is an app on my Ipad that I’ve been using for about 5 years. It’s a drawing program that let’s me make rapid iterations of my ideas. You can work on it like a sheet of paper, by drawing and erasing with the apple pencil, but there is so much more that I find helpful. You can import photos or images to draw over in layers, just as though you were using tracing paper. You can also move and adjust single components and stretch and pull the shapes to refine ideas and proportions. I often get ideas while pushing and pulling the drawing like silly putty. It’s not a 3-d rendering that you can spin around it space. I wouldn’t want to invest that kind of time at this point in the process. When beginning a design, it’s difficult to keep the ideas from calcifying. I can’t stress enough how critical this is to the early stages of design. The instinct to “nail it down” is tough to resist. Keeping open to new ideas, or jettisoning bad ones is tough. I can’t remember who said it, but the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. The cost of change is expensive, even on a piece of paper where each change costs time with an eraser, but in Procreate, you can undo a thought by tapping your fingers on the screen.

After the Procreate sketch, I make a full scale rough version from plywood and aforementioned string and tape. Here is full scale mock up of a piece I built a few years ago with Aspen Golann from a sketch in Procreate.