In Episode 4 of students of Product Design, I'm mainly looking at using photo editing software to render hand drawn design sketches to make my product design presentation sheets look more professional. Having photographed a sketch and imported it into Photoshop, I cover a simple set of techniques that I use for all my presentation sheets, laying down a base colour, an effect when necessary, shadows and highlights. To understand the idea behind this, I look at materials and the different properties they have, how they react to light and easy ways to look at this and apply what you see to your presentation sheets.
The most important message in this video is that most of the time I don't know what's right, but over the years I have developed a good eye for what's wrong with my presentation sheets, a bad perspective, the wrong colour etc, so all I do is keep making my sketches less wrong and each time I do this they creep closer to being right. This is all I do when designing a product, I keep tweaking each part of the design until it's as good as I can make it.
At the end of the video I look at how to develop a brand language that can be applied to other products as a company diversifies its product range and expands in to other markets. Lots of industrial designers cleverly use colour, form, texture, materials and a logo to strengthen a brand and reinforce its values with consumers. The example I create is a bit tongue in cheek and very cheesy, but hopefully shows the basics of how it's done.
I hope you enjoyed Students of Product Design episode 4. If you have any questions, let me know - I do try to answer everyone who asks a question, but sometimes it's not possible if the question is asked through Google Hangouts etc. PT
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