Trials & Tribulations (and Mockups)

This weekend I took some time to practice mocking up an application. Afterall, practice makes perfect. I first started out with a normal notebook and pencil. It was going pretty great until the little things started getting to me. First I suck at drawing straight lines. I do well for a few seconds and the BOOM I get a bump. So then I took a ruler and it made things a little easier. After that I was on a roll till I noticed my pencil was getting to dull and too often. It was making my marks less precise. So then I went out to the store and picked up a mechanical pencil -- the lead breaks more often but hey its more sharp more often. While I was there I saw some graph paper -- grabbed some of those too.

At that point I had everything and spent a long time making practice marks and shadings -- it was a pertty cool experience. Eventually I'll bring it all over to Illustrator but for now I'm going to keep conditioning myself. Something I saw during my weekend was a Dot Grid Book. Basically instead of solid lines like a graph has, they have dots aligned so you can draw straigh lines and align things properly without having unecessary clutter like other lines.

There are two flavors that I've seen are popular: Dot Grid Book and Behance Dot Grid Book.

I'm leaning more towards the Behance Dot Grid Book. The only downside is they are both pricey compared to my Graph Notebook I picked up for 3 bucks. So for now I think I'll stick to the graph pages until I get good enough and can make the Dot Grid books profitable in some way. Money drives us (and pays for my lunches).

So far the experience is pretty sweet -- I feel drawing and laying out your ideas is a great way to make room and form new ideas. It's a great way to unlock new potential.