Hasta La Ideas

Editorial Addendum: Congratulations to OMGPOP, recently purchased by Zynga!

Until they come out with a gaming app specifically for industrial designers, OMGPOP’s Draw Something (both free and paid versions available, cross-platform) is as close as you’re going to get. It focuses on an area every ID’er should be up on—sketching—and it’s intensely addictive, as well as good practice.

For those of you who somehow haven’t heard of it, the game is basically discrete bouts of one-on-one Pictionary on your cell phone or iDevice, with your opponents being anyone you choose to link to. Unsurprisingly, I’m having the most fun playing with friends who graduated from art school: An industrial designer in New Jersey, a graphic designer in Singapore, an illustrator in San Francisco, and an art director in Brooklyn, among others.

Sketching takes many forms and this game can accommodate them all, depending on how you want to play it. At it’s most base level, sketching is trying to quickly communicate a concept with the bare minimum amount of lines:

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