Who: John Muhlenkamp and Spencer Nugent
What: Idsketching.com
Why: To Provide a library of tools and techniques for industrial design students and enthusiasts

Designers like Nike Innovation Kitchen’s Steve McDonald  were raised in an era of pen-on-paper sketching, but the pervasiveness of digital tools—both hardware and software, mostly Mac-based—in the field of industrial design has changed that for the next generation of industrial designers. Especially “kids” like John Muhlenkamp and Spencer Nugent, who founded IDsketching.com, a website that houses a large and rapidly expanding collection of industrial design–related how-to videos, sample sketches, and blogs. The duo graduated with design degrees from Brigham Young University and now work as full-time industrial designers for Astro Studios in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Muhlenkamp and Nugent conceived the idea for the site in college, when, as teaching assistants, it became clear that an online repository of digital sketching tools and techniques could be a huge help to their fellow students. “We taught ourselves how to do Web programming and video editing,” Nugent says. “We use iMovie to do all of the editing and voice-overs for the videos, and iShowU for the screen capture. Then we whipped up a site and started getting some interest online, so we decided to make it a free resource for students, to give them things we didn’t have—having two professionals running a site with interesting and helpful content for them.”

A design education, Nugent adds, is not based on learning formulas “like in mathematics—it’s learned by observation and by repetition.” He‘s quick to point out the value of the design theory that students pick up in college. But the video walkthroughs on IDsketching.com are meant to “give them a jump start.”

The site is an unpaid side project for Nugent and Muhlenkamp, avowed Apple users who do most of their design work on 17-inch MacBook Pros and Wacom Cintiq and Intuos pen tablets. “We can just hook those up to our Macs, and it’s like you have your own little portable studio. With that equipment, you can do it anywhere,” says Muhlenkamp.

Which is not to say that they don’t keep paper sketchbooks and writing implements on them at all times. There’s an entire section of the site, the Sketchbook, devoted to quick-and-dirty sketches created in the moment.

You’ll find all of these sketches—and many more—on IDsketching.com. Click to enbiggen

“With industrial design, a lot of it is practice and working out a sketch style,” says Muhlenkamp. “Ultimately, you’re going to work in an industry that’s based around producing products and selling products—it’s a business. So you have to be able to sell your ideas through sketching and be able to get people excited about those products.”

So, yeah, the guys know that part of their job is to sell good design ideas, but commercialism doesn’t factor in much to their commitment to IDsketching.com. “We’re not really looking for a quick buck,” says Muhlenkamp. Nugent adds: “We want it to be a free library that design students can access.”

For digital sketching, Muhlenkamp relies mostly on AutoDesk SketchBook Pro. “John’s pretty much the master of SketchBook Pro,” says Nugent amiably, “so I let him handle that.” Nugent uses the app too, but also sketches with Corel Painter.

“We’re the younger generation of designers, who have fully moved toward the digital space with the ability there is now to do digital sketching, digital manipulation of sketches and so forth,” says Muhlenkamp. He describes the “old-school” manual methods as “cool and inspiring,” but, he adds, “we’ve taken that to a new level with technology.”

The guys are in the midst of trying to balance the somewhat unexpected popularity of the site with their other time commitments. “Spencer just got engaged, and I’m married with a little girl who’s 1-year- old,” Muhlenkamp says. “And we both have jobs.”
To make sure they can keep their gainful employment, they say they’re looking for additional site contributors—one of whom is Nike’s McDonald.

Ultimately, they’d like IDsketching
.com to be a “living library” of industrial design sketching tools, techniques, and work samples. Part of their long-term plan involves organizing the site by categories including product type, technique, and digital tools.

For now, anyone with an appetite for learning how products are conceived and designed using a range of digital and traditional tools and techniques can find plenty to chew on at IDsketching.com.