What's the most important skill to cultivate if you’re interested in becoming an architect? Learning to sketch. Sketching is an important part of the design process and a daily sketching habit will teach you to see the world as it is, to divine why buildings look the way they do and to understand proportion and scale. Sketching is invaluable for communicating your ideas in meetings to clients, to your colleagues and to tradespeople in the field during construction. For most designers, the sketch is where ideas are born.

Digital tools have their place in the design process too, but they serve a different purpose. The analog sketchbook is a place to think and to move more slowly. It's in digital space that we transform the thoughts and ideas into the documents we'll use to construct our architecture and to make them real. There’s room for both in the design process and each informs the other.

To celebrate the release of the first run of BLANK sketchbooks, I’m opening mine up so you can see how I use it in practice. I hope it shows you that ideation and exploration doesn’t require perfect technique or polished renderings. In fact, the imperfect nature of an open-ended sketch leads to novel ideas and better design resolutions. Follow along as I develop a few less than perfect sketches, share my thought process, a few drawing conventions and personal musings about the importance of building a sketching habit.

Special thanks to Mike Schiano and his company Airship Notebooks for helping make the BLANK notebook a reality. This sketchbook was designed with creatives in mind. It has everything I look for in a quality sketchbook.

Specs:
+ A5 size (5.8” x 8.3”) - portable, but not too small.
+ Cover: 650g chip, debossed (front + back) Heavy stock protects your work.
+ 50 pgs [ 70# - 100g ] White-cream stock. Works for pen + pencil.
+ 5mm dot grid. Helps with layout + proportion.
+ Red elastic closure keeps things tidy in your bag + serves as a placeholder
+ Double ring spiral binding lays flat on the page and works for both right and left-handed sketchers.

Get yours here: http://thirtybyforty.com/blank

JOIN MY ONLINE COURSE:
Enjoy my teaching style? Enroll here: https://thirtybyforty.com/a-e-course

DIGITAL DRAWING TEMPLATES:
* AutoCAD: http://thirtybyforty.com/autocad-template
* REVIT: http://thirtybyforty.com/revit-template

ARCHITECT'S TOOLKIT:
* *NEW for 2020 ** Architect + Entrepreneur Startup Toolkit (includes lessons from the A+E Course): http://thirtybyforty.com/spl

ARCHITECTURE ESSENTIAL TOOLS:
* http://thirtybyforty.com/archi-gear

MODEL MAKING TOOLS + MATERIALS:
* https://thirtybyforty.com/blog/architectural-model-making-tips

PHOTOGRAPHY GEAR:
* http://thirtybyforty.com/my-photo-gear

ALL MY GEAR (UPDATED LIST):
*http://thirtybyforty.com/kit

#sketching #architect #blanksketchbook