Hasta La Ideas

Industrial design used to be a mess. I don’t mean the field, I mean the work. ID’ers of a certain age will remember flushing spray guns in the model shop, the pain of cleaning and refilling a Rapidograph, the horror of knocking a box of mechanical pencil leads onto the floor and watching the leads shatter. Gummy erasers were admittedly fun to absentmindedly knead, but made your sandwiches taste funny come lunchtime.

Then there was the absurd amount of supplies you had to stock: Markers in every color and gradation, aforementioned pencil leads and Rapidograph ink, drafting tape, X-Acto blades, templates, triangles, T-squares, French curves, ship’s curves, and rolls and freaking rolls of vellum, trace, mylar, newsprint, etc. It’s hard to miss that aspect of the job.

The man fronting this video below is a graphic designer and not an ID’er, but as he demonstrates how people used to do the work before computers, the industrial designers among you will recognize plenty of overlap: