Start Sketching

Explanation

You don’t need to be a great artist to be a great designer — but basic sketching is a very important skill, because it allows us to explore ideas quickly and communicate them effectively to other people.

In this assignment, you’ll practise making “thumbnail” sketches. These are small, low-detail drawings of objects and layouts. We’ll use this technique throughout the course.

Instructions

Sketch these objects

 Set your timer: 25 minutes

For each of the objects listed below, create a small, icon-sized drawing in your notebook (about 2 cm by 2 cm). Aim to spend a maximum of one minute on each sketch, and get through as many as you can in the 25 minutes available.

In design, sketching isn’t about creating something beautiful — your only task is to sketch a representation of the object or layout.

Here’s an example of the level of detail to aim for. (Hopefully you can tell that this is a chair.)

When you’re ready, get started!

1. Flower
2. Tree
3. House
4. Box
5. Laptop
6. Face
7. Rubik’s Cube
8. Cat
9. Bottle
10. Chair
11. Car
12. Telephone
13. Clock
14. Hills
15. Desk lamp
16. Boots
17. Bicycle
18. Aeroplane
19. Postage stamp
20. Fruit bowl

Sketch these posters

 Set your timer: 25 minutes

Thumbnail sketching is especially useful for quickly exploring different layout options. For this next exercise, we’re going to do the process backwards — take some finished posters, and then create low-detail sketches of them.

The purpose of this activity is to help you understand the level of detail required in a thumbnail sketch, as compared to the finished design.

As an example of what to aim for, here’s a sketch of the poster for the film “Jaws” (1975):

Once you’re ready, set your timer to 25 minutes, and create similar sketches for each of the posters pictured below. Aim to spend a maximum of five minutes on each one, and get through as many as you can in the time available.

Poster 1: Eye Bee M (1981)

Image credit: IBM/Paul Rand

Poster 2: Grand Prix (1966)

Image credit: Saul Bass/John Frankenheimer

Poster 3: See America (1936)

Image credit: United States Travel Bureau/Martin Weitzman

Poster 4: Titanic (1997)

Image credit: Paramount Pictures/21st Century Fox

Poster 5: Parasite (2019)

Image credit: Kim Sang-man

Review our example solution

In the last ten minutes available for this assignment, take a look at our example below. To maximise your learning in this course, make sure to finish your work on each assignment before looking at the solution.

Example solution

In conclusion...

Congratulations on completing your first hands-on assignment! Next, let’s talk about how you can succeed with the rest of this course.

Assignment version 1.0
Last updated 7 June 2021