In Part 1 we looked at all of the things industrial design students had to carry, just to make marks on paper. Chances are a lot of that list overlaps with modern-day ID students’ EDC. However, this list is bound to differ, and aren’t all exactly things to “carry,” but also include things we used to have parked in our dorm rooms/apartments/studio spaces.

Part 2: Drawing and Drafting Supplies

Circle and Ellipse Templates

You could freehand these shapes on sketches, but the templates were a must-have for draftings. As with the markers, the pain in the ass was that you needed to have every ellipse template from thin to fat.

First round draft pick

When you had the ellipse blend into a straight line, you really had to nail the tangency or everything looked off. The rookie move was where your line didn’t quite flow into the curve dead-on, and you could either fatten the line weight to try to hide it, or get your money’s worth out of the gummy eraser.

These templates also stank to high heaven, by the way. I don’t think they ever stop off-gassing.

French Curves

I hated these. They never had the precise curve I needed, and they broke easily when you sat on them. I owned three or four and didn’t find them particularly useful.

Compass

For when you had a draft a circle bigger than what the templates had. You’d have to build up several layers of tape at the centerpoint, so that the point on the compass wouldn’t put a hole through your drafting.

T-Square and Plastic Triangle

Because how else are you going to get dead-horizontal and dead-vertical lines, besides running a piece of plastic along the edge-banding on your melamine-laminated MDF drafting table? And you wanted to get the T-square with the 1/4″ of transparent plastic for the edge, so that you could line it up with existing lines a lot more precisely than with the opaque metal kind.

Protractor

I always disliked using these, because if you were off just a little with your angle mark and projected it far across the page, it was off a lot by the end of the line. If you were lazy like me, that means you mostly worked on things that were rectilinear.

Eraser Shield

This little silver sliver was super-useful, allowing you to quickly mask off parts of the drawing you didn’t want to erase. It also let you do dotted lines by allowing the eraser to only come in contact with the evenly-space circles of negative space.

Drafting Table

Mine was similar to the one pictured here, but I didn’t have the cool little tray. You had to set the worksurface’s angle perfectly so that you could reach the top of the drawing as easily as the bottom. Mine was a pain to adjust because it had four legs that all changed height independently, and the floor of my Brooklyn apartment wasn’t level. You had to get under the table, loosen each leg screw, and support the heavy top with your head while adjusting the legs. That was the first time I really understood what “bad design” meant.

Drafting Lamp

Your typical cheapier swing-arm, positioned in a clamp that was placed to provide maximum reach over the table. The springs on these pieces-o’-crap always wore out, and you had to shore them up with rubber bands between the metal bosses or your lamp would start to sag.

Drafting Chair

I always dreamed about buying one of the expensive height-adjustable ones with the gas spring and the footrest, but I didn’t have the money and I used a stool I stole from the studio.

Portable Drafting Table

This was for your studio desk at school. Here’s the exact model they made us get, which had a built-in horizontal that ran on wires and obviated the need for a T-square. I was surprised that the cheap-looking mechanism actually maintained its parallel-ness pretty well.

Drafting Tape / Drafting Dots

To hold the paper at the table at the four corners. And drafting tape had a weaker adhesion, so it wouldn’t tear the corner of your drawing off when you removed it. But every once in a while you’d run out of it after the store had already closed, and you’d use masking tape by doing that thing where you stick and unstick it to your jeans to lower the adhesion.

It was also fun to stick drafting dots to the backs of people’s shirts. And then you had no one but yourself to blame when you ran out.

Architect’s Scale

If you dropped this and the freaking knife-like edge contacted a table edge on the way down, guess what, you just irreversibly dented it and now you’re buying a new one.

On top of that, these objects fomented, in aspiring industrial designers, an early resentment of architects. Because these weren’t called Industrial Designer’s Scales.

Drawing Figure

The most talented design students didn’t need one of these, because they could already picture in their heads what a figure ought to look like for any given pose. So yeah, I needed one of these.

Electric Pencil Sharpener

Went into this one in detail here.

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Up Next: Paper

Ex-ID students of a certain age: I miss anything in this category?

Current ID students: Admit it—you don’t know what any of these items are! No, you don’t! Look me in the eye, damn you!