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What Industrial Design Students Had to Carry, Part 2: Drawing and Drafting Supplies
It's hip to T-square
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.
Enter a caption (optional)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.
Enter a caption (optional)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.
Enter a caption (optional)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.
Enter a caption (optional)
Enter a caption (optional)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.
Enter a caption (optional)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.
Enter a caption (optional)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.
Enter a caption (optional)Drafting Lamp
Your typical cheapie 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.
Enter a caption (optional)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.
Enter a caption (optional)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.
Enter a caption (optional)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.
Enter a caption (optional)
Enter a caption (optional)
Enter a caption (optional)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.
Enter a caption (optional)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.
Enter a caption (optional)Electric Pencil Sharpener
Went into this one in detail here.
Enter a caption (optional)_________________________________________________________________
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!
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Comments
Current ID students do know what all those items are and had to use them for most of their college years. So the authors statement above is without a doubt incorrect. Speaking from experience as a graduate of 2014.
I still use an old draughting table that a friend gave me, who was using it to make set design drawings for movies. The table is still very useful, because I can work full size on products while drawing, which can't always be achieved with 3d drawing software, when the object is larger than the screen - it is good to see the whole product full size.
Yes!!!! Smelly circle templates. Still smelling bad after all these years!
Dude what was in those things? It was almost like they were created by Predators who always wanted to be able to scent and track ID students to kill them for sport.
It's funny, becase once you become professional, you just used paper and pen and a few markets.
I know and have all of these :) class of 2022
Leroy lettering and zipatone or chartpak came in handy.
A small desk or personal fan... those drafting table lights get hot.
Plastic Triangle? I thought they were call "Set Squares"? and there are 2 of them. One Isometric (30/60/90?) and one with 60/60/60 angles (the name leaves me).
Oh and a flexible curve thingy you could bend trace a curve. We used these a lot back in the early days designing footwear with our French curves and circle templates
Dry erase powder, came in a little sock like bag...apparently it helped the tools slide around over a drafting without smudging.
Dry erase powder .... Came in a little cotton sock and helped your tools roll around the drawing board.
As we has study classic academic drawing, using of human ball joint figures are rare, but it looks like the student with big pvc paper holder who late for study running over street is same picture everywhere =)
Koh-I-Noor Electric Eraser ... provided the quickest way to back out of some dead end rabbit hole detail design.
Mail tube to carry rolled up drawings on a bkie and a sizable pvc portfolio for stuff you didn't want to roll up. Mulit-angle set square, letter guide. Line guide. Clutch pencil and mini sharpener.
So yes... so, so much yes.
I had the manual sharpeners that the top always came off and spilled lead all over my art box. I also carried Q-tips and loose x-acto blades for the pastels.
I wouldn't say what we felt toward the architecture students was "resentment". That implies jealousy.
You're right, "resentment" isn't the right word...I meant "outright hatred." Ahahaha. Okay I'm not actually going to post this comment. Where's the delete button--
letraset.
Dammit, how could I forget this one?!? Remember the agony of having to buy a whole 'nother sheet because you ran out of one damn letter? Or did you ever try the "Well, I can make an F by not rubbing all of this E" thing?
I know this is aimed at industrial designers here, but I'm in the same boat Robyn. I'm a just graduated Theatre Design/Production student and I had to learn how to use all of these. I had to learn how to draft by hand before being able to be taught how to use CAD.
Not just ID! I spent a year at SUNY:Purchase doing Theatre Design/Tech and had all these things too.
How funny, I was also at Purchase around '90, prior to going to Pratt for ID. I remember the campus looking like some kind of futuristic prison. Did you meet Wesley Snipes?
I did not. Was he there?
One year of drafting was enough to put me off it! Though the theory was useful when we moved onto doing engineering drawings in CAD.
When I started CAD'ing I appreciated the hell out of it, because so much busywork was eliminated. Just being able to automatically center something or automatically find the midpoint was freaking amazing to me, not to mention being able to mirror things.