hey im still in highschool but im really interested in design. im going to do a summer program, but other than that i dont know what i can do as far as industrial design. i take art at my school and i plan to do ap art studio next year. what kinds of things can i do related to ID? or what did you guys do when you were in highschool?
Hone your sketching skills, and work on your idea development. Don’t throw away any of your sketches either. You’ll need those to get into design school. They’ll want to see how you think.
Does your highschool have a technology or shop department. Take whatever mechanical drawing and shop classes you can… it will help. Also if you school has any graphics classes, or if you can learn layout programs in the Yearbook club or anything, that will help out as well.
Getting on here and other sites, getting some gnomon DVD’s, and trying to immerse yourself as much as you can will give you a jump-start.
if there are physics courses available, take one. understanding motion and dynamics helps understand some of the engineering principles needed for design and manufacturing. geometry? understanding geometry and geometric constructions is crucial, some trig helps, too. i hardly ever use calculus.
english and composition. verbal articulation will really help when you need to present ideas.
i also agree with the previous two posts.’
good luck!
Yeah, I used to do what Yo said, which was a lot of illustration for the yearbook. It was useful as it showed initiative and almost showed that people recognised the ability to draw well or get to grips with layout software. I also designed logos for the hockey uniforms which was kinda cool.
As for sketching, do as much as you can. At your stage it may be best for you to pick objects (clock? Mp3 player? Watch?) and just draw them in lots of different ways, using different things to draw them with and viewing them from different angles, so you get an idea of how you are communicating the form of an object through sketching.
One thing you must learn from even this early stage is that if you are interested in ID, then you are a 3d designer: yes sketching is the most important thing going, to be able to communicate, but the fact is what you draw in 2d is completely different in 3d. You may draw a watch, and like it, but do a quick model of the form and put it on your wrist and you’ll soon find out all the problems, whether it’s proportions, face size etc.
Definitely keep an eye on this site though, you’ll learn a lot by coming on here every day and just seeing what is emerging and also keep an eye on the discussions as they are usually discussions about things which are happening at that moment in time.
This is very true… as a kid I had all these models, and I used to just turn them around and around in my hand and study how the light bounced off form in 3d and think about how I would draw it… yeah, I was a dork. But studying form in 3d is very important.
At my first job there where no modelmakers and we had to make our own sketch models (this was before 3d software was big mind you)… my sketching got so much better during this time period…