About quick sketching

Here's about quick sketching.

Here is a dump of his live tweets during this excellent workshop at UX London. If you like it, you should buy their book when it comes out later this year.

• wondering about the easiest way to export my tweets from yesterday and get them into chronological order
• sketching workshop kicking off, hooray! ‘and we’re going to get kind of sweaty’
• ‘how many of you guys are IxDs? And how many are UX Designers?’ Cue chaos
• showing people your sucky drawings is part of the growing process
• squeak squeak squeak, explain explain, squeak squeak (how many of you use a whiteboard?)
• why are we here (in this sketching workshop)? to become better communicators
• design drawing is useful in the planning process, can help to see the world differently, heightened awareness of how things work
• drawing can help you tell your story to others, its honesty can be v compelling
• why draw by hand when we have computers? Mice suck.
• why draw by hand - direct with the pencil is more direct, more expressive than via mouse
• thinking is a fast paced activity, the pencil is simple & immediate, a good, fast tool for capturing thought
• ‘Pencils Before Pixels’ - Mark Baskinger
• we’re going to start off with really simple things like straight lines …
• ‘i’d love to sit down and draw cubes with you after the workshop’
• we’re grabbing pencils and paper…
• starting with pencil holding technique. @ashdonaldson & @cennydd are getting some remedial tips
• if you can’t see the tip of your pencil you can’t draw. You need a v loose grip to avoid fatigue
• your bellybutton is very important for vertical lines. It’s like a visual landmark. Pull the lines toward it #uxlondon (seriously!)
• (feels like sketch pilates)
• @keeran of course I’m participating! my vertical lines are much better than my horizontal!
• correct each others squares. what do you see? either ‘my squares suck’ or ‘the person next to me is blind’
• you have to warm up before you can sketch properly.
• techniques for better hand drawn wireframes: use non-repro blue for underlay drawing (it disappears when copied)
• carry a sketchbook all the time. practice sketching all the time. practice straight lines, squares, using hatching for tone
• ‘it’s all about pulling some lines’
• use lines in various intervals, not scribble, for adding tone.
• being purposefully rough, like overlapping corners, makes sketching look more sketchy
• sketchiness = this is not a finished idea, I’m still thinking about this. Sketching holds the conversation back to the big picture
• avoid crosshatching in wireframes, starts to ‘pop’ too much. Use various weight of diagonal or vertical lines instead
• build your sketches up sequentially, add weight and tone onto the skeleton
• uh oh. perspective! (moving shapes in space)
• perspective - make sure your back vertical is a little shorter than your front vertical
• try to finish your line with the same weight as you start it
• if you can do curved planes, you can do arrows. (v pretty arrows, that is)
• @alexjamesmorris you might think all UX people draw, but unfortunately not true, and many of us would love to draw better!
• move the point of your arrow back just a tiny bit off centre and it will look better
• i can recommend Trio Scribli pens #uxlondon (via @solle)
• ‘these are all ‘ungood’ ways of drawing a circle’
• the only useful thing your pinky does is stablise your hand when you want to ‘drop in’ a pencil
• the trick to drawing a good circle is to do a few practice circles before you ‘drop in’ your circle (it works!)
• @freecloud agree that blog posts are like word sketches, but there’s nothing like drawn sketches to communicate some ideas
• @alexjamesmorris i agree. you can’t copy and paste sketched wireframes. I think that’s incredibly important.
• I’m realising that my biggest problem with sketching before is not visualising what I am trying to sketch before starting to draw
• realising sketching is a lot more deliberate than I thought. Resolving to *really* do the sketchbook thing from now on
• ’sketching becomes a magic trick. I can draw this and you can’t. That’s a powerful thing’
• @alexjamesmorris absolutely - pencil before pixels as Mark said at the beginning
• ok. drawing people. If I can leave this workshop with people drawing skills I will be stoked.
• if you have an element in your sketch that is weak or less deliberate, it attracts attention & detracts from your entire sketch.
• notational sketching = the act of recording things that you see in the world. Mostly for your sketchbook, less so for sharing
• analysing visual input (what you see) and deciding what to record is a particular kind of drawing skill