7 The whole human race is foolish and has no knowledge!
The craftsmen are disgraced by the idols they make,
for their carefully shaped works are a fraud.
These idols have no breath or power.
18 Idols are worthless; they are ridiculous lies!
On the day of reckoning they will all be destroyed.
19 But the God of Israel^[f] is no idol!
He is the Creator of everything that exists,
including his people, his own special possession.

(from Jeremiah 51)

How much of what we do is genuinely helpful to the world? We might design well crafted products, but how does it matter if our products become objects of desire without genuinely helping the people who use them? How much of what we do will make it to the other side? Will it be destroyed. How do my designs strengthen the human net?

I can appreciate an interesting sketch. I believe that I evolved my personal technique as a mish mash from the designers I work with, the work I see online, ArtCenter techniques and from the techniques of Ryan Church and Scott Robertson. However I ferreted out all these sources not to become an individual looking sketch artist, but somene who can quickly pump out as many directions as possible.

The crux of a sketch is that it is merely a means to an end. I am not
really worried if my sketch looks like everybody elses. If the design
is generic however thats the problem. I am still working on that. It is
only recently that I have grown comfortable with my sketch technique
and its abitility to represent shapes. I still have a lot to go as far
as clearly representing mechanical concepts and manually drawing
exploded view during meetings.

The frustrating part of designing products, is partially my own lack
of knowledge of all the manufacturing processes possible in China (it
is a pity that you can have really cool processes available
domestically that the marketing team doesnt consider because of
location), working with skittish marketing teams, as well as
time-frame. I suscribe to many different publications to get me more
information about materials and processes, but time-frame of
development usually means that the development team is not particularly
interested in rocking the boat. My own fear is that I am slowly
becoming too much of a trouble-shooter not exploring ideas, but
evaluating those created by others. So any empirical comments regarding
generating genuinely new ideas are much appreciated.

Addendum: I have worked with many creative engineers and marketers in the past, and I try not to be the slow one in the chain, but sometimes I am the one thats not creative enough. I just dont want to give the impression that the designer is always the creative genius (thats more the exception than the rule really :) )

Thinking of an entry to the Peugeot competition
 

Another sketch. I tried recording the render, but didnt succeed.
I will have to try again.
 

Sketch session at productdesignforums.com
 

  

Here is how I use the warp command in Photoshop to design multiple iterations quickly.
Commands used here:
Ctrl+L for levels
Edit>Transform>Warp
M: Rectangular Marquee
Select>Transform Selection

This was the result of a surfacing demo designed for VARS to demonstrate Solidworks 2007 capabilities. The renders could not be touched up in any way because they were intended to showcase Photoworks. That said I did do some color correction on the second render.



 

I was thinking a while back of making a Solidworks DVD for Industrial Designers. These are some sample files that I doodled with. What do you think of the DVD (or book) idea?
 

Sweet! These renders won the September Photoworks Render Contest.

 

Sketch workflow using Solidworks 2007:
Whats the point you ask. Why dont you just finish it up in CAD? Why take a screen grab and jump to another program? Well- for one detail geometry in a model takes exponentially longer to create. Overlay sketches get the ideas across quick and easy

Also , there is a psychological reason for doing so. You cannot imagine how quickly a CAD model can stifle discussion. As soon as you put some sketch lines onto a screen grab, you give your team tacit hints that you are looking for input. Conversely the closer to a photo your render looks, the more likely that you can convince a development team of a direction you feel strongly about.

This side view view is an overlay (blue and grey screen) done in Corel Painter, over simple geometry (white surfaces) in Solidworks 2007.
The screen can then be applied as a decal to the Solidworks model and tumbled around.

Here are some screen grabs of recent work that I did for Solidworks Corp.
The brief was to design a software demonstration that was exciting yet plausible. Plastic parts designers form a large bulk of ID users so we looked at simple demonstrations of core functionality with sexy models and concepts

The background in Solidworks can actually be set to any jpg you want. This makes for some really great overlay possibilities with transparent parts and their screen-shots

The spray bottle design itself has an ergonomic handle angle, and a streamlined profile. This demo showed off some of the draft capabilities and the freeform features in Solidworks

I was really happy with how this project turned out even though it was not picked for the VARs to demonstrate with.