Sketching, rendering and drafting are such huge parts of industrial design, and all three used to be done on paper. As ID students at Pratt we had to stock a lot of the stuff, and you’d see us riding the subway carrying those huge white plastic Pearl Paint bags filled with different kinds of paper; you had to be careful not to bang the corners into anything on the train or it’d scrunch the edge of the paper.

In Part 1 and Part 2 we went over drawing implements and tools. Now for the crucial stuff: The paper.

Editor’s Note: The images used here are for illustrative purposes. As such, some are not ID-related and some aren’t even on actual paper. But you’ll get the idea.

Part 3: Paper

Tracing Paper Rolls

Rolls of trace were pretty useful for two reasons. The first was the analog version of scrolling: When you were working out an idea, you could just keep unspooling the paper.

Drawing by Thibaut Sally

You could add some quick marker work to trace too (though it didn’t hold it as well as Bienfang 360, see below). If you passed one of the better students’ desks in the studio, you’d see something like this on a roll of trace:

Drawing from Car Body Design

In addition to white they sold it in some yellowish colors, but I tried one once and hated it.

The second benefit of trace was that it was useful for doing quick overlays, an easy way to gradually refine a concept by tracing the bulk of the drawing beneath the current layer, but altering some of the parts on the new layer.

Drawing via ID Sketching

Tracing Paper Pads

We also had to have trace in pads, which was far more useful than rolls when you were working on something of a fixed size.

Drawing by Bob Borson

Newsprint

Trace was considered pretty disposable, as was newsprint, which you were meant to crank through. We used newsprint almost exclusively in pad form. It was pretty diverse and could take everything from ballpoint pens to charcoal to pastels to Prismacolors.

Drawing by Arne Dassen

Marker Paper

Newsprint made for bloody marker work; for a proper marker rendering you’d step up to something like Bienfang’s Graphics 360, which held the ink much better.

Canson Colored Paper

You would typically buy this stuff in shades that matched the marker colors you already owned. Using Canson was a quick way to set the tone (literally) of a rendering, and after you knocked out the marker work you could go over it with fine ink, a white Prismacolor and/or gouache to get convincing breaklines, reveals and highlights.

Drawing by Bryon Fitzpatrick

Drawing by Bryon Fitzpatrick

Drawing by Bryon Fitzpatrick

Drawing by Bryon Fitzpatrick

Vellum

When it came time to do draftings, you switched over to vellum in its familiar orange condom. You could buy this stuff in pads, but it was always easier to transport if you bought the rolls and just cut your sheets to length. With a 24″ roll you could cut 18 x 24 sheets or 24 x 36 sheets, making this my go-to. The kind in the photo here has a grid on it, but we always used the blank stuff.

Mylar/Acetate

Mylar (a brand name for acetate film) was sturdier than vellum and more translucent. It also took balls to use because it had a plasticky surface, so you had to break out the Rapidographs and draft in ink. (There were ink erasers, but I never liked using them.) Using the stuff was a good way to get a crisp-looking overlay that you could swap underlays beneath (for different colors, for instance).

This is the kind of look ink on Mylar would give you:

Sketchbooks

Of course, we were all required to carry sketchbooks. I liked how the spiral-bound ones opened flat, so I could get right to the edge of the page, but the binding often got mangled in my bag. I ended up switching over to the book-bound style, but those didn’t wear very well either.

Drawing by Spencer Nugent

Also consider that a lot of times, we had to stock all of these types of papers in different sizes. That’s a lot of buffalo wings, man.

__________________________________________________________________

Up Next: Tools

Ex-ID students of a certain age: What’d I miss?

Current ID students: How much of this stuff do they make you go through?

Many years ago, I worked as the IT director for a school here in Massachusetts. It was a multi-faceted job that included maintaining a file server, a backup server, well over 100 machines and, finally, a help desk for about 125 people. I have some amusing stories from those years, as well as an important lesson: never have a single point of failure.

Redundancy was the name of the game in my previous job. For example, our file server was connected to something called an “uninterruptible power source,” or UPS. A UPS provides electricity in the event of a power outage. That way, if a storm knocks power out, I still had time to get to our computers and shut them down properly.

I also ran a backup server that saved its daily and monthly backups to several locations. If one of those backups failed for whatever reason, I could rely on one of the alternates to provide what I needed. What does this have to do with daily life? Plenty.

As Leo Babauta once said on Zen Habits: “I’ve seen people pay $1,000 to hear speakers at a conference and only have one pen to take notes.” If that pen breaks or runs out of ink within the first five minutes, you’re out of luck. The simple act of bringing two or even three pens can eliminate a potential problem.

Consider where there might be a single point of failure in your life right now. I did some brainstorming of my own, and came up with this list:

1. More than one flashlight. Here in semi-rural Cape Cod, we lose power at the drop of a hat. Keeping three inexpensive flashlights in the closet eliminates some stress.
2. Car keys. Most new cars are sold with a pair of keys. But that’s not always the case with used cars. If you’ve only got one key, spend the money to get a second.
3. Charger cables. These things aren’t really built to last longer than a couple of years it seems, yet we don’t replace them until they become a frayed fire hazard. Keep a fresh one in a drawer so you can swap it out with the original before plugging it into the wall becomes an act of pure optimism. Additionally, having multiple charging cables in different locations (such as one at your home, one at your office, one in your briefcase) means that you don’t ever have to worry about forgetting a cable when you need it most.
4. Important documents, like birth certificates, marriage certificates, social security cards, etc. My practice is to put the originals in a safe deposit box and keep photo copies on hand. If I lose/damage the copy it’s no big deal, and I can always retrieve the original if I need it.

Finally, and you probably saw this coming, I’ll say please make multiple backups of your important digital files. A solution as simple as Dropbox makes it very easy to have files both on your computer and safely on their servers. Additionally, Carbonite and Crashplan will back up your computer in its entirety. (Erin wants you to know she’s a fan of Backblaze.)

Make a list of the single points of failure in your life right now, and see if you can fix them. Someday you might be very glad you did.

Post written by David Caolo

Let Unclutterer help you get your home or office organized. Subscribe to our helpful product shipments from Quarterly today.

The post Eliminating single points of failure appeared first on Unclutterer.