Sketching

Prospective employers and clients often ask "Show us your work" ... and I can sometimes show them the end product if it's a public website but if it's a CD-ROM, touchscreen kiosk application, intranet or software I really can't except maybe screen captures ... which really just showcases the graphic designer's capabilities rather than mine - it can be hard to look past the colours and pretty images to see the underlying skeleton, structure and deliberate, consistent approach to interaction design.

My work is more in the process, in facilitating and guiding business, developers and designers through the requirements gathering process, through meshing ideas together, identifying risks - particularly in terms of user experience, usability and accessibility - and then coming up with the specification so someone else can build it ... although I still find myself doing a lot of front-end HTML, CSS and JavaScript development which I'm trying to move on from.

So I'm trying to start collecting artefacts I create during the design process such as this sketch above of an interface for a touchscreen application - you would never see something this messy in a UI spec or report but it's an important part of the iterative design and prototyping process in order to come up with a better solution.

My "toolkit" consists of an A5 Quill spiral-bound cartridge paper pad and the following pens:

* Copic Multiliner, Brush, small, black
* Copic Multiliner, 1.0, black
* Rotring Tikky Graphic, 0.2, black
* Zig Millenium, 0.05, black
* Copic Multiliner, 0.05, black
* Stabilo Sensor, 0.3, blue
* Artline Drawing System, 0.3, black
* Uni-ball eye micro, red
* Copic Marker, Toner Gray, No. 1
* Sharpie, fine, black

For more of my photography and stories about my travels please visit my photo blog.

Comments and faves

  1. ★

    redbarren, owlposse, serdar, lilit, and 41 other people added this photo to their favorites.

  2. redbarren (40 months ago | reply)

    awesome, the best UI's still come from an initial sketch from a nice pen onto great bound paper.. but im guessing this is a final and there was a draft set of scrap papers;) ?! so does touchscreen equal steve newton jobs or more asus netbook ?

  3. NathanaelB (40 months ago | reply)

    Thanks Ben - yes I admit I took some care to create something more presentable for my portfolio - not to mention sanitised for public consumption; here is an example of some of my crazier design work :)

  4. CannedTuna (40 months ago | reply)

    very good idea... I started doing something similar a few years back when I ran smack bang into the same issue. I find collecting the a portfolio of sketches showing your process is worth a lot to people that understand what you do.

    Otherwise it's show me the pretty screens! ;)

  5. lilit (40 months ago | reply)

    Hi, I'm an admin for a group called I ♥ wireframes, and we'd love to have this added to the group!

  6. StephenMitchell (40 months ago | reply)

    I have many spiral-note pads filled with designs that may nor may not ever happen. But I love drawing up ideas to see where or if they could work. So glad I am not the only person!
    --
    Seen on purecaffeine.com ( ?² )

  7. NathanaelB (35 months ago | reply)

    Can't believe this photo has over 3,000 views and made Explore - it's just my notepad!

  8. amcunningham72 (35 months ago | reply)

    Hi, I'm an admin for a group called Educators on Flickr, and we'd love to have this added to the group!

  9. This photo was invited and added to the Educators on Flickr group.

  10. Kent Peifeng Ke (33 months ago | reply)

    nice work~
    sketching is always attractive.

  11. Arctic128 (29 months ago | reply)

    Nathanael - The sketches are inspiring, that's why it's getting 3k views!

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