81–90 of 118 posts
Even if they aren't always as nice, a kid can have graphs for weekly homework that would have been hours of work by a professional back then.
I build furniture and while I do my design work digitally for remote clients, I do my shop drawings by hand. One super helpful tip I got from an actual trained draftsman is to use harder pencil lead for your layout and construction lines. Like 6H to 9H. You'll get a much lighter line to erase later. It'll also hold a finer point for longer. I prefer lead holders to wooden pencils. They take 2mm lead, and you sharpen…
Btw, construction tools have thicker lead holders, like 5.6mm, and red color too. https://www.homedepot.com/b/Tools-Hand-Tools-Marking-Tools-L...
This may me wonder that. Why people like things to be done so quick? Because life is short. You can do limit of things in your life. So just do as many as possible.
Why? Why we can't just slow it down. Why we just enjoy the life. Is that we slow down we can't survive? Is we slow down that we will left behind? So be it! Just change a life, maybe is difficault, maybe is hard. But you slow down. you can concentrate to do one thing. You can enjoy the prccess. May be meet some beautiful thing.
I envy you can focus on one thing for 50 hours straight. This is what we can't do in this noisy, rush, busy plase in this very downtown.
A comment from who live in a city and cage here can't getaway.
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I'm old enough that I took drafting in 7th grade. One tip I remember is to turn the pencil slightly as you use it. I think this was to help maintain the pencil's shape, but there my be other less obvious reasons. I took woodshop too. The shop teacher seemed to enjoy scaring us with stories of the students that goofed off in shop to horrific consequences. That's also where I learned to be careful with air compressors…
> That's also where I learned to be careful with air compressors around open wounds. That sounds like you may have learned the same way I learned that 1: when a USGS topo map indicates an unimproved road, it may be out of date, 2: don't take your father's four-wheel-drive truck down a late-winter, corn-snow-covered dirt road when the temperature is starting to drop in the late afternoon 3: Don't go down a dirt road o…
Amazing process (such patience in this day and age!), and special thanks for sharing links to the data viz books! Tufte was my gateway too but I didn’t think to look into books on technical sketching, engineering drawing, and draftsmanship. Love hand-drawn viz, recently I’ve been looking at the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) and they have a great collection of all their reports,…
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Thanks for the link to this archive. A very welcome contribution very a propos in relation to the article. An amateur of old hand drawn maps (Michelin road, and older).
If you enjoyed this I'd highly recommend checking out A Semiology of Graphics[0]. I was a little surprised to not see it mentioned in the article, but I recognize the article was less about types of data visualization than it was about how we create data vis. [0]: https://books.google.com/books/about/Semiology_of_Graphics.h...
Fantastic read! In the mid-2010s, I was interning at the German federal statistical office. Some of the team assistants were there since the 1980s/90s and had still learnt to use those tools as part of their vocational training. They also showed me the tools and the instructions for drawing exactly aligned tables by hand and the resulting bound sets of tables with hundreds of pages. Completely mind-boggling how much…
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I'm glad I'm not the only who seemingly has a taste for "older" diagrams from that period. It makes me think of the same aesthetic roots of what's now called "cassette futurism" or "NASA-punk". Older engineering charts really feel like there was more care and thought put into each line or facet, even though I'm sure it's a trick of time.
I was a big fan of two fonts (Draft Paper and Parts List) by Beth Matthews [0] that call back to this era, you might enjoy them as well. [0]: https://www.bethmathews.com/shop/partslistdraftpaperfontbund...
What if for digital fonts, there was a way to write the same letter 2 or more different ways? Adding slight variations to the same letter would mimic the effect of using hand tools.
The list of books was welcome, and the work is impressive. I always made do with section pad and a hard pencil and a simple stencil, but it wasn't for camera ready publication use or anything. Just visualisation and discussion. My book suggestion is more illustration than technical drawing but still has a 1940s/50s vibe: Thinking with a Pencil by Henning Helms. Covers illustrations, tracing, tables, maps and diagrams…