With over two decades of experience teaching how to design, draw, and render at the highest college level, concept designer Scott Robertson knows a thing or two about what it takes to make concepts ‘stick’ for his students. And as one of the most widely-recognized design sketching masters, he’s proven these concepts in his own practice through and through. In How to Draw: Drawing and Sketching Objects and Environments from Your Imagination, the Art Center educator consolidates years of design sketching knowledge—from thumbnail sketches and perspective grids to shaded renderings—into a digestible self-study program that can take anybody’s sketching ability to the next level. Frankly, if you’re even remotely serious…

WhLike a true creative, when he’s not working on a project for a client, industrial designer Eric Strebel likes to create improvements to his own toolset. In the past, he’s made sketchbooks, dust masks, resin casting boxes. This time around, he’s working on a tablet stand for his 16-inch Wacom Cintiq Pro to position it upright for more ergonomic viewing and sketching alongside his existing workstation: He plans to have hinges on the stand to allow it to make use of the tablet’s various mounting points. He even created a cardboard mock-up to test this theory, complete with a slit in the middle for the charger cable to fit through.…

These days, it’s nearly impossible to avoid having to use the cloud for at least some sort of file storage—even if it’s just a few photos off of your phone. And for more serious users, juggling huge amounts of important data can be cumbersome without a serious and dedicated Cloud storage account. For those looking for some cloud storage breathing room Degoo Premium brings you 2TB of secured cloud storage accessible from all of your devices with high-speed transfers. That’s more than Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive combined! And for a limited time, SolidSmack readers can grab a lifetime subscription to Degoo Premium for just $59.99—that’s 95% off! Features: Send…

Those without cars often face a common predicament when going to work: “Will I take the bus or the train?” For citizens living in Adelaide, South Australia, there doesn’t seem to be much difference. Check out Adelaide’s O-Bahn Busway: Ever since its first passenger ride in 1986, the O-Bahn Busway has confounded both passengers and onlookers alike. Instead of making another tramway extension for the city, city planners decided to build the O-Bahn so fewer people could take more buses between the city’s Greenfell Street and Tea Tree Plaza Interchange main roads. The result is less traffic for everybody, and a dedicated route explicitly made for city buses. “Is it…

Get that stretch out of your system with this week’s Spotify-powered SolidSmack Radio Playlist. It’s fashioned up, ready to make you pull your shoulder blades back and knock out another week of meaningful work while you bob your head to the beat. Whether you’re in the shop milling aluminum, sketching the latest product prototypes or modeling up a 3D storm, consider these tracks as a tool for your process. This week on SolidSmack Radio we’ll get the groove going with “get innocuous” from LCD Soundsystem before diving into tracks from DARKSIDE, Beck, Vampire Weekend, The Dandy Warhols, and others before wrapping up with “Wire – Leaping Dub” from the always…

As someone who works from home, I can attest to dumping my belongings on my laptop like a food tray if I ever decide to move between rooms. When the working location I’m moving to is outside of the house, I simply throw all that stuff in a bag. It’s a messy way to go about, but it’s become a way of life for other folks who shift from workplace to workplace and me. Blau is a three-piece set of organizers by the self-proclaimed “experience innovation” company Drop—explicitly made for workers who have to change locations daily. Instead of dumping your pens, phones, and mouse on your laptop, the Blau…