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What Industrial Design Students Had to Carry, Part 1: Drawing Implements
Tuition was one thing. Keeping yourself in design $upplies was another
In the entry about the Manual Labor of Design, we see the on-camera designer wielding the former tools of the trade. This gave me a flashback to the sheer amount of items I had to purchase, carry and keep stocked as an Industrial Design major back at design school. Because I came up in the pre-CAD era, the implements we used were similar to what you'd find in an ID program from the 1940s.
I thought I'd list all the crap we had to use here in this series, and ask you current ID students what items your modern-day curriculum requires, so that I can do a contrasting follow-up post.
For perspective's sake, remember that I was in design school in the early '90s and was taught to draft by hand. This was before schools provided students with email addresses, and few people even had computers of their own. So here we go with....
Part 1: Drawing Implements
How many different ways are there to make a mark on paper? Plenty—starting sophomore year, all of these items required owning:
Charcoal
Sure these things always broke, but there was no quicker way to get a fast black-and-white gradation on a drawing. Indispensable.
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Enter a caption (optional)Pastels
For when you needed colored gradations. Faster than using Prismacolors and provided blur you couldn't get with markers.
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Enter a caption (optional)Berol Prismacolor pencils
Sophomore year I felt you needed at least the 36, but I remember walking past some kids and envying them because they had the 72 and one or two a-holes even had the 120.
By Senior year I'd wised up and was buying them piecemeal, sticking to just a few go-to colors.
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Enter a caption (optional)Mechanical pencils and leads
At a minimum you needed the 0.3mm, 0.5mm and 0.7mm for drafting, and of course you had to stock up on those leads.
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Enter a caption (optional)Kneaded erasers
Not technically a drawing implement, but gummy erasers were the indispensable Command-Z of drafting by hand. These would eventually go dark and bad, or you'd drop them on the dusty floor once too often, and it was always a pleasure to use a new one and smush it apart and back together; I miss that faintly petrochemical smell.
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Enter a caption (optional)They also provided a handy way to procrastinate:
Image by Craig the Prophet Rapidographs and ink supply
Disassembling, cleaning and refilling these was a holy pain in the ass, and you quickly learned to do it FAR AWAY FROM YOUR PRESENTATION DRAWING. You also needed them in multiple sizes, for drafting on mylar and such and getting the line weight you needed. I think I had the 0.1, 0.25, 0.5, 0.7, 1.0 and a 2.0mm, the latter one being the only one I never actually used.
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Enter a caption (optional)Markers
These were more troubling than the Prismacolor pencils for two reasons: One, you couldn't just look at one and know it was going to go dry tomorrow, and two, you needed to purchase them in gradations. For example if you needed blue in your rendering, guess what, you're buying at least five blues in every shade from light to dark.
Image by Justin Houston Need grey? Bad news: You've got to buy both Warm Grey and Cool Grey, in every shade from 10% up to 90%. Keep eating ramen for dinner.
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Enter a caption (optional)It really bothers me that I can't remember the brand name I used. They were double-sided, with a pointy end and a blunt end, but I don't think they were Prismacolor markers.
Sharpies
A Sharpie on newsprint gives you horrible bleed, making them unsuitable for precise work. But after your buddy had too many beers and passed out at the party, you found that his facial skin was the perfect canvas for accepting the ink.
Enter a caption (optional)I started to upload a photo of us ID hooligans drawing on a passed-out Illustration major inside one of Pratt's dorms, but the imagery is too disturbing. Look man, we were barely out of our teen years.
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Up next: Drawing & drafting tools and accessories.
Ex-ID students of a certain age: Did I miss anything?
Current ID students: How does this list compare to what's in your bag and on your desk?
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Comments
This is precisely what students have to buy, attending a certain "college in Pasadena city", except for refillable ink pens. Art Center is the same. And the brand of markers is Copic and they're unbelievable expensive. It's horrifying that students are being taught like it's 80 years ago. Only the graphic department uses computers. The product design department only uses physical media. And of course students end up paying extreme amounts of money because of it. Everyone's walking around with cellphones and might be carrying tablets or laptops, and then they come to class and take out extraordinarily expensive color pencils and markers. It's a really bad joke.
Still study, 1 year before 6-year graduation in Moscow.
Currently studying ID and we are still using all of this and all the digital gadgets as well!!
Prismacolor definitely made a two ended marker that a lot of design/architecture people had back in the late 90s. I still have some with small points on one side and then a sloped larger pen surface on the other end that goes down to a point. You can almost use the large end for calligraphy.
Copic markers and their delightful solvent thinner.... like perfume, still.
Graduated 2014 from the UK, in my drawing kit was;
Did you ever use an eraser shield with that putty rubber? How about an ink eraser?
Don forget the endless tabs of various paper.
Halfway through my Product Design degree and this is my general loadout:
Out of school since 3-4 years. Compared to this I had
a few pairs of surgical gloves to cut down on smudges from skin…
Bic Pens, PaperMate Flairs, No-Photo Blue Pencils, Carpenter Pencil... All of which I still used today.
We used Letraset markers that had a big, rectangular nib on one end and then a sharper, round nib on the other with a third, very fine, round nib hidden inside the cap. We used to just call them Pantone markers but I think the actual name was ProMarkers. Either way, I spent a lot of time with Cool Grey No. 2 stains on my hands!
ID major at UIC. They encourage us to use what we're comfortable with.
Perhaps they were Berol markers or Design markers?
Kurecolor marker is the one double sided?
Graduated ID in '85.
I'm an ID student in the Netherlands. All we needed in the first year was
- fineliners (0.1-0.7mm)
- markers (mostly Copic), two gray shades and two shades of a colour of our choice, I ended up buying 10 of them to have a wider range of colours
- marker paper
- coloured paper+white pencil to practice material expression
Plus we were encouraged to carry a "designer's kit" with unspecified contents, but most of us had scissors/paper knives, glue and post-its in it.
The Chartpak AD markers have the best smell and blend quite nicely.
I've probably made more sculptures with soft erasers than any other medium. On second thought, definitely.
Haha! Those guys...
Studied Design, not ID so I didn't quite have all these tools but many. I had a set of German rapidographs my Dad had used in Engineering school in the 60s, maybe Rotring? I tried to be gentle but they ended up getting trashed and had to buy a lesser set, Staedler. Putting back the really thin ones, 0.1 and 0.2 was a thrill.
How about the Staedtler propelling pencils, with the sharpener in the cap. The caps were different colours for the hardness of the lead. You could also use a barrel shaped sharpener with a cigarette filter insert for cleaning the point after sharpening.