How important is a napkin sketch?
Napkin sketch of NEMA17 mount
Remember the days of the napkin sketch? Those were the days when an idea could really only be initially expressed with a pen and piece of paper. Yeah, those days are gone. If you’ve got a modicum of design skill and an idea, you can now just hand your idea to someone else.
The napkin sketch above was drawn over dinner some 11 hours after the physical object it describes popped into existence.
| Tagged with | ideas, napkin, napkin sketch, sketch | 7 comments |
7 Comments so far
hairmare
As a rule of thumb, projects that started as a napkin sketch have a way higher chance of success.
At least in my book that’s the way it is
Jeff Keegan
Yeah I gotta disagree.. Napkin or postit note sketches are the beginning of most great ideas, and will continue to be. I always save those too, knowing that someday I’ll go through old papers and find that historical first sketch.
tmophoto
whats even more incredible was that i had one of these mounts less than 3 hours after it was uploaded to the internet!! whoohoo thingiverse!!
thanks for uploading it Zach!
t
TonyS
I’m gonna have to go with Jeff here… as soon as designing the thing in Sketchup and printing a few iterations of prototypes on a makerbot becomes less time and money expensive than working out most of the kinks on a napkin first, then napkins will be dead.
Twotimes
I disagree, I think the napkin or rough sketch is extremely important. They help clarify the mind in relation to what you want to create and they allow you to think about the details without getting sucked up in the dimensions and other things that are extremely important but don’t matter until after you know what you want to do. Something that would be extremely interesting would be if people uploaded their sketches with their things on thingiverse. In industrial design it’s called showing process and most times it is more important than seeing the finished product. It might be a really cool looking thing but why is it the way it is? That’s what the process sketches show.
If anyone wants me to upload my process sketches for the lowrider or Z-rider just shout.
tre3
Sketches first… Napkins are fine, notebooks are better.
We think in multidimensional/temporal space – we do not think in 3D space. We don’t even see in 3D – yes, we have 2 eyes – but if you cover one eye, can you not recognize an object as what we label as 3D? We see the world and interpret patterns that we have described as 3D.
Good designers will translate the crazy things that go on in the human mind into 2D or 2D+ space before things move into 3D. It’s faster, cheaper and documents intent.
makeme
So, the thing already existed. And yet someone still felt the need to draw a napkin sketch to explain it. I think that beautifully proves that napkin sketches aren’t going anywhere.