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What Industrial Design Students Had to Carry, Part 3: Paper

That's a lot of dead trees

By Rain Noe - July 18, 2015

in Hand Tools | design.edu

In Part 1 and Part 2 we went over drawing implements and tools. Now for the crucial stuff: The paper.

Sketching, rendering and drafting are such huge parts of industrial design, and all three used to be done on paper. As ID students at Pratt we had to stock a lot of the stuff, and you'd see us riding the subway carrying those huge white plastic Pearl Paint bags filled with different kinds of paper; you had to be careful not to bang the corners into anything on the train or it'd scrunch the edge of the paper.

Editor's Note: The images used here are for illustrative purposes. As such, some are not ID-related and some aren't even on actual paper. But you'll get the idea.

Part 3: Paper

Tracing Paper Rolls

Rolls of trace were pretty useful for two reasons. The first was the analog version of scrolling: When you were working out an idea, you could just keep unspooling the paper.

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Drawing by Thibaut Sally

You could add some quick marker work to trace too (though it didn't hold it as well as Bienfang 360, see below). If you passed one of the better students' desks in the studio, you'd see something like this on a roll of trace:

Drawing from Car Body Design

In addition to white they sold it in some yellowish colors, but I tried one once and hated it.

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The second benefit of trace was that it was useful for doing quick overlays, an easy way to gradually refine a concept by tracing the bulk of the drawing beneath the current layer, but altering some of the parts on the new layer.

Drawing via ID Sketching

Tracing Paper Pads

We also had to have trace in pads, which was far more useful than rolls when you were working on something of a fixed size.

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Drawing by Bob Borson

Newsprint

Trace was considered pretty disposable, as was newsprint, which you were meant to crank through. We used newsprint almost exclusively in pad form. It was pretty diverse and could take everything from ballpoint pens to charcoal to pastels to Prismacolors.

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Drawing by Arne Dassen

Marker Paper

Newsprint made for bloody marker work; for a proper marker rendering you'd step up to something like Bienfang's Graphics 360, which held the ink much better.

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Canson Colored Paper

You would typically buy this stuff in shades that matched the marker colors you already owned. Using Canson was a quick way to set the tone (literally) of a rendering, and after you knocked out the marker work you could go over it with fine ink, a white Prismacolor and/or gouache to get convincing breaklines, reveals and highlights.

Drawing by Bryon Fitzpatrick

Vellum

When it came time to do draftings, you switched over to vellum in its familiar orange condom. You could buy this stuff in pads, but it was always easier to transport if you bought the rolls and just cut your sheets to length. With a 24" roll you could cut 18 x 24 sheets or 24 x 36 sheets, making this my go-to. The kind in the photo here has a grid on it, but we always used the blank stuff.

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Mylar/Acetate

Mylar (a brand name for acetate film) was sturdier than vellum and more translucent. It also took balls to use because it had a plasticky surface, so you had to break out the Rapidographs and draft in ink. (There were ink erasers, but I never liked using them.) Using the stuff was a good way to get a crisp-looking overlay that you could swap underlays beneath (for different colors, for instance).

This is the kind of look ink on Mylar would give you:

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Sketchbooks

Of course, we were all required to carry sketchbooks. I liked how the spiral-bound ones opened flat, so I could get right to the edge of the page, but the binding often got mangled in my bag. I ended up switching over to the book-bound style, but those didn't wear very well either.

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Drawing by Spencer Nugent

Also consider that a lot of times, we had to stock all of these types of papers in different sizes. That's a lot of buffalo wings, man.

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Up Next: Tools

Ex-ID students of a certain age: What'd I miss?

Current ID students: How much of this stuff do they make you go through?

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Ming An

7 years ago

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Double A provides the best paper you can get for sketching

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Denis Garmash

9 years ago

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Long life for paper. I prefer "derwent black book" and "100% recycled zap book" in different size.

Also there is a hint on Waco tablets where you can put a paper on it, to make drawing feel more natural, I use it a lot.

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Hector Torres

9 years ago

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Long life to paper!!!, i really like traditional sketches.

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Jim Morgan

9 years ago

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Just layout pad and marker pad back in 2010-2014, and plastic stuff for engineering drawings. I guess most of the stuff you guys were doing on the nice papers, we'd just scan into the computer and photoshop/sketchbook it.

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Allison Whitehead

9 years ago

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The Graphics 360 had a good side and a bad side. ...and the good side you were supposed to use was never face up in the pad.

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Allison Whitehead

9 years ago

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Then we mounted the good ones on foam core with super 77!

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Reid Price

9 years ago

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I just remember going through an entire ream of 11x17 my sophomore year. and never, ever, ever filling up an entire sketchbook before I got bored of it and wanted a new one.

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Robyn Fraser

9 years ago

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I remember most of these too from Design/Tech but what I mostly remember is annoying blue print paper and hunting down a Design/Tech teacher who had the key to the blue print room.

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Matthew Selnick

9 years ago

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After a year of ID school, I've gone through many pads of tracing paper and canson/strathmore paper. A few people used rolls, but for simple ideation the trace pads were used more often. Haven't officially taken a rendering course yet, so I can't say I've experienced any of the more specialized types of paper just yet.

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