Water Cooker Ballpoint Pen Sketch

Practicing my product design sketch skills during a church meeting. I've always said I listen better when I have something to keep my hands busy with, and that's why my math notebooks always had plenty of sketches along the sides in school, but at the same time I must admit it's a fine line to getting too much into the sketch when you find some interesting shapes or a nice looking sketch. After the church meeting a 70+ year old "sister" and friend saw my sketch and commented "Oh, that looks so much fun!". Sometimes age really doesn't matter very much.

Equipment: Blue Ballpoint Pen

Time: 20 min

New F1 logo design concepts

I'm a big fan of Formula 1 and my opinion is that the new F1 logo (The second logo below) is really, really bad, so I made some concepts on how to improve the design. The main problem is that the new logo says "FI" and not "F1" and I also think it lacks overall character.

Sketch Composition

I put together some sketches the other day to put in my CV. I think compositions are quite hard, but in this case I think it turned out quite nice.

Volvo Truck Sketch

I was with work on a conference recently at Falkenberg Strandbad, during which we watched some great presentations from people from the Swedish UX/Service design company InUse, which we at ÅF Design are in the process of merging together with. However, after sitting still for too long I tend to want to do something with my hands to keep focus, so I started to sketch a little while listening and here is one of my creations. I've realized that I often do my best sketches when I feel no pressure and sketch just because it's fun.

Equipment: Pencil + Photoshop for cleaning up

Thesis work Presentation Video

It's now over 2 years ago since I graduated from the BA program in Industrial Design, from Umeå Institute of Design (Designhögskolan), so I now feel it has gone enough time so I can actually watch my own presentation from the schools graduation/design conference Design Talks without suffering too much from my own nervousity on stage.

My presentation can be seen 24:25 minutes into the last video, called "Part 3" on this page:
http://www.uid.umu.se/en/uid-15/watch-the-presentations/

Quick White Board Pen Sketches

Staying over at work after I finished my hours to sketch some cars before going home. Often speed is the key to success when searching for shapes and I think I found some interesting lines to build on in these quick sketches. After wrestling with the proportions of the lower sketch for a while I scanned the sketch and kept on experimenting with the proportions in Photoshop. After some time I think I found some more balanced proportions. Hopefully I will find time to keep developing these sketches into finished renderings. My guess is that the quickest sketch will result in the best design, but I think it's hard to know for sure until I see the finished renderings in front of me.

Equipment: Green whiteboard pen + Photoshop CC (Tool: Liquify)

Time: 4/5/25 min + 1 hour

Equipment: Green whiteboard pen

Time: 4/5/25 min 

House Sketch

I got a hold of a fineliner pen and a wide format paper, which gave me some architect wibes and resulted in this sketch. As usual I messed up the perspective a bit, which I more or less corrected afterwards in Photoshop. Maybe this is a first step in finding the design of my dream house. One of my colleagues is actually building her own designed dream house right now, which is of course inspiring, even if I'm not sure I will ever be prepared to put down the effort required to build my own house. Maybe, who knows!

I've had a lot at work lately, but now I feel the energy and time to sketch just for fun is coming back more and more, so hopefully new posts will come more regularly in the near future.

Equipment: Unknown fineliner pen
Time: 10 min 

Equipment: Unknown fineliner pen + Photoshop CC (Liquify)

Time: 10+10 min 

Life Drawing Memories from UID

Candy is what gets you through a long life drawing session!

I found some pictures the other days from our life drawing classes in the 2nd year (I think) of the Bachelor Program in Industrial Design at Umeå Institute of Design (Designhögskolan i Umeå). Unfortunately I haven't done any life drawing sketching or clay modeling since, but I can recommend it as one tools to improve your sketching. Life drawing can be hard, frustrating, stressful but also very rewarding when you get it right.

First Car Sketch in a While

First time in a while that I've been staying over after work just to sketch for fun. Also the first proper car sketch in a couple of months, probably because I have been doing some professional vehicle concept design lately, which has satisfied my car sketching needs. I was looking at some videos of the new Volvo XC 60 (coming out in 2018), which I think looks truly awesome - Swedish design at it's best! ...and that inspired me to do some slightly sporty looking SUV sketching. In the end it didn't turn out to be very SUVish, which is often the case for me, I guess I need to copy some SUV designs to learn how the proportions should look...

Hobit Party Sketch

This sketch is my contribution to the guestbook in a graduation/birthday party I was attending yesterday. The party was held in a house from the mid 18th century (1750) and had an almost fantasy feeling to it, which made it the perfect place for the party, because the theme was Lord of the Rings. The graduate himself was dressed out as a hobit, hence the motif below. 

Screw Driver Sketching Exercise

Over one year as an employee now! Wohoo!!

And finally I start to feel like I'm getting up to speed to a level which I think is professional. To be productive in a creative profession 8 hours a day is not the easiest task and I'll probably never get there (can anyone?), but I'm slowly but surely starting to learn what I need to at least do the best I can. As long as I'm doing my best I don't really feel so much pressure, because how could I do more? But if I'm tired a week, have a hard time concentrating or for some reason have low motivation I can really feel performance anxiety and that only makes me less creative and can easily lead into a negative spiral where it in the end starts affecting my self confidence, which makes it even worse. So I'm really trying to prioritize sleep and to make sure I have everything I need to be focused and have energy at work. That makes working as a designer a 1000 times more enjoyable!

My title at ÅF is industrial designer, or product designer, and I'm part of a team of around 20 product and interaction designers and surfacers from all over the world including Sweden, Italy, Turkey, India, Rumania, USA, Canada and Iran. ÅF also has a satellite design studio towards Volvo AB where around 50 partners and some employees work under ÅF's name. 

The international environment is great to work in and I get to do exciting Projects, which make me feel like I'm learning a lot and developing as a designer, which is the most important thing in this period of my professional career. A good salary really comes secondary even if I cannot complain on that either, considering that I started working directly after my bachelor and so far have little experience from working professionally as a designer. The autumn was quite tough for me because my hole situation drained my energy and I had a hard time delivering at work, but now I'm on my way up again and I feel that the passion and the energy is coming back more and more every week. Probably the nice spring weather is helping my progress as well.

Below are some sketches of mini-screwdrivers. I didn't try to brand it to some specific brand, but just played around with different ideas. Again I was lucky enough to get the possibility to do this on work time, in between projects, because my boss said she needed some sketches that we can use when presenting what we do outside of ÅF.

Work in progress...

Equipment: Black Biq ballpoint pen, Photoshop CC, Wacom Cintiq

Time: 2-20 min/handmade sketch + quite a lot of time in Photoshop colouring, touching up some sketches and arranging the sketches in a nice way.

Backpack Sketching Exercise

Doing some product sketching to practice my skills and to give ÅF some more sketch material that is not under secrecy so we can show it in presentations or to new customers. The idea was to try to design two different sorts of backpacks, which would belong to the same product family and have the same form language. For this project I did everything in the computer, actually only in Photoshop, because I think it is interesting to have some variations between each project. In one I might be working a lot with markers and/or ballpoint pen and in the next I'll work almost entirely in the computer. For me, this brings more variety to my work, which makes it more fun and ultimately makes me more creative. I strongly believe that you get different ideas when sketching in different mediums.

Equipment: Photoshop CC, Wacom Cintiq

Time: Hard to say since I spent much time experimenting and redoing to find the final design, but the quicker sketches was made within 10-20 min

ÅF Future Concept - Container Handler Teaser

At the moment I'm very lucky with exiting conceptual projects at work. One example is the vehicle on the sketch below, which is a future concept of an autonomous container handler, designed to lift containers (and other heavy stuff) in for example harbours. It might look small and almost reminding of an autonomous indoor vacuum cleaner, but with it's 4,5 meters in diameter it's slightly bigger, to say the least, and has some cool transformer inspired features and some other conceptual ideas that that hopefully will make the concept really interesting. I won't go into details now because the concept is very much work in progress, but I will post a more detailed presentation of the concept once it's finished. It might take some months since I'm only working on this when I don't have any other projects, which happens once in a while when working as a design consultant, but as long as I get to do fun things like this in between the projects I dont complain!

Equipment: Biq ballpoint pen, Photoshop CC (Liquify)

Time: 2-3 Hours (including a couple tries until I was happy with the sketch)

Retro F1 Car Sketch

A retro F1 car sketch that I found in my computer from probably the 2nd year in Umeå, when I used to do a lot of sketching in the evenings after school. One thing that is both good and bad with sketching on a checked paper is that it really limits what you can do afterwards in Photoshop because it will be very obvious if I would use for example Liquify to correct perspective errors. The good thing is that it makes the sketch more credible, that the picture is actually what the sketch really looked like on the paper, even though this also could be faked in Photoshop if someone really would like to do it...

I don't consider enhancing the sketch afterwards in Photoshop with tools like Liquify, or painting over some lines and dots with a white brush, cheating since it's just another tool that designers can use when designing. It's more effective to fix some small perspective error in a sketch than to do a whole new sketch, but of course the goal is always to make the sketch as good as possible already on the paper.

Equipment: Ballpoint pen

Time: 1 Hour