Calling all designers, engineers, and would-be sketching aficionados! Grab your drawing sticks because Inktober 2017 has officially kicked off! For those of you not familiar with Inktober the short story is that it’s a 31-day drawing challenge created by a guy name Jake Parker back in 2009. His aim was/is to inspire creatives to improve…

One of the basic tools-of-the-trade for creative types the world over is our writing sticks, a.k.a pencils, chalk, crayons, markers and the like. I don’t know about you but when I want to lay down some lines my go to permanent marker is a good ole ultra-finepoint Sharpie. I like how it forces me to commit…

As a teenager growing up and living in Venezuela, architect and illustrator Rafael Araujo became enamored by the intelligent patterns found in nature, particularly after learning about Phi – otherwise known as the Golden Ratio. The ratio, which equals 1.618 and is represented by the Greek letter ϕ, is commonly found in nature as natural…

As a research group focused on making user experiences more seamless, natural and integrated into our physical lives, MIT’s Fluid Interfaces research collective exists at the forefront of what’s next in interaction design. Founded by tech pioneer Pattie Maes, the goal of the group is to design and develop interfaces that are a more natural…

When it comes to sketchbooks, most people have a tried and true formula that ranges from specific binding styles and paper types to stacks of whichever recycled paper is available stapled together. Considering that some of the world’s most revolutionary ideas were sketched on the back of a soggy napkin over pints, there’s reason enough…

It was a long corridor woven with vines and beast furs, damp yet glittered with the lightening all around. Who would they find? The one they sought. Dry, old, stacked between the vines and threads of times feeding on the sap of these links. Tianhua Xu – Odd creatures and trees, but mostly the trees…

For some, working between the worlds of art, design, craft and technology seems like a part of your everyday workflow. For inventor Dominic Wilcox, these means literally taking objects and ideas from across the widest points of any given scale and merging them into singular concepts that mix the four disciplines to create innovative and…

Along with other Quirky hits such as the more recent Aros Smart Window Air Conditioner, the Pivot Power falls in line with one of Quirky’s well-positioned design strategies: make existing and dull products that people use daily ‘smarter’…whether it’s a simple reimagining of an age-old hardware design or by incorporating a connected software ‘smart home’…

If you were asked to present a sketch for a new product design concept in the next ten minutes, there’s a good chance you would probably reach for a pen and paper versus your tablet or computer peripheral device. Why? While there has never been a better time to sketch and work digitally , the…

Open up the pockets or bag of your nearest design or engineer buddy and you’re bound to find at least a couple of common items: a sketchbook, a pen, a multi-tool or knife, and if you’re lucky…an embarrassing driver’s license photo that you can run and make copies of to post around the office. In…

In theory, if I were to take a hot glue gun and adapt a CNC-machined nozzle with a heat-sink on it to replace the existing glue-gun nozzle, then I could do what a 3D printer pen does in wax instead of plastic…but would I call the result a 3D print? No. It would be a…

Several months ago, the world was presented with the “3Doodler”—at the time, a conceptual analog device proclaimed to be the world’s first 3D printing pen. After achieving much notoriety, esteem and extensive international press coverage, the small Boston-based upstart behind the project, WobbleWorks LLC, shattered its now comparatively-modest $30,000 fundraising goal to make the device…

Stepping back into the school routine after a summer of endless squirt gun fights, milk chugging competitions, and road trips to obscure Route 66 destinations can be hard…we’ve been there. Or perhaps you’re not a student but the first sight of a big yellow school bus and lunch box displays at your local Whole Foods…

Between incorporating their color library into Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro and providing drool-worthy retail displays, Copic is stepping up their marker game even further with the upcoming release of 288 color chips. Featuring matte or gloss on curved and flat surfaces, the new chips will be highly-beneficial for better envisioning your product before you even put…

Having been a user of Wacom pressure-sensitive products for years, my expectations going into testing the Pogo Connect pressure-sensitive iPad stylus were set at a pretty high bar. Up until the Pogo Connect came out, I always asked myself, “Do I really need to sketch something on my iPad or can I just wait until…

For those ‘Paper Junkies’ out there, your world just got a whole lot more colorful. FiftyThree has released a much-anticipated color upgrade to their Paper app, as well as a new touch sensitive feature for your iPad masterpieces.

I declared a couple of months ago that Lenovo had marketed its ThinkPad Tablet to the wrong crowd. It’s 10″ screen and pressure sensitive stylus made it stick out as the first real contender for the title of Cintiq-on-the-cheap. Lucky me, someone at Lenovo read the post and offered up a review unit. Of course,…

Today Wacom announced the Inkling,  a new digital/ballpoint sketch pen that captures your real world sketches digitally for easy manipulation/refinement later. Say what? It digitizes your sketches so you can skip the scanner and go straight to work. Those familiar with the Livescribe note-taking pen will be familiar with the concept already, but this time,…

It came to my attention this morning that Wacom, the purveyor of drawing tablets for your computer, has issued yet another iPad product under their Bamboo brand: Bamboo Paper. It’s pitched as “a natural and realistic writing and sketching application tool” as a “perfect complement to the Bamboo Stylus for iPad.” After playing with it…

Do you see those three words? Cloud, Mac, and Sketch? The triumvirate of contemporary CAD computing, those are by golly, and if you’re CAD slappin’ 3D code pro or have a little marketing and management panache, SolidWorks is hiring. What’s more interesting, and also no big surprise, is what job titles these lie under. There’s…

So, you like to draw a bunch of sketches and create really complicated sweep geometry in SolidWorks huh? You should be commended for your bravery, but sometimes there’s a simpler way to get curvy with your parts. All you need is an open part file and about two-minutes… depending on how mad your 3D modeling…

Ok, you’re in a room of SolidWorks experts and starting to sweat. You feel like bustin’ out you modely moves, but wonder if they’re good enough. You start to twitch a little and get into the groove, but only the cat gnawing it’s paw in the corner seems to notice you shakin’ like André 3000.…

I’ve just picked my monitor up off the floor and guess what I see underneath? The warm glow of a video showing some extremely cool sketch technology coming out of AutoDesk University this week. You remember I (Heart) Sketch? The 3D sketch system that brings conceptualization back to a native hand-drawn environment. Amazing isn’t it?…

It’s hard to get away from sketching if your an industrial designer. It’s at the core of conceptualizing your designs. I love the sketching and if you love it too… heck, if you’re even slightly interested in how new interface technology is changing the idea of working in 2D and 3D you’ll want to see…

I’d have to say, forgive my Industrial Design tendencies, but then this site would not be SolidSmack if I did. I’m not an Industrial Designer officially, but I like the drawin’ and the inkin’ and the sketchin’ and that is exactly where IDSketching.com curls up nice and snug in your arsenal of super freakin’ cool…