Sketching, Creativity and the Design Process

I'm a big fan of the design process. Almost more than the result itself.

I remember when I first got my hands on the wonderful book Driving Ambition, and I found myself quickly drawn not to the high quality photography, but to Gordon Murray's initial sketches and the drawings involved in developing various ideas. It's something that has always fascinated me - how people create the things we see and enjoy. If you're at all into car design I can't recommend it enough.

Recently, David Airey had a great post on logo design where he made the point that sketching was a vital ingredient in the design process. He also posted many design options for a project he was involved in.

While reading that post, I was in the midst of posting logo submissions for the Xmms2 graphic contest. And I was, in fact, doodling ideas in a hardcover notebook I keep for jotting down ideas and sketches. So after reading it, I decided that after I was done submitting logos, I'd post up the various doodles and sketches.

Now, I'm far from an accomplished artist, but I had fun generating ideas and transforming them into digital form with Inkscape. Hopefully this will encourage others to post things that illustrate their design process (whatever process that might be). It's something that I don't see enough of on the web (if you know where it is, then point me to it). There's a lot of inspiration in seeing how people create things, even if they're just pencil sketches on a knapkin.

Here are the various ideas I played around with. You can see a fair number of my xmms2 logo submissions that come directly from these sketches. Others never quite went anywhere....

[click on the image(s) to see larger versions]