Design Journals
I. Design Journals
March 1, 2009
The words and images we have give us insight into the process of civilization itself; in fact the strictest sense of history relates singularly to written documents. And much of the time, the unpublished writings of historical figures are what fascinate us the most—correspondences, drafts of inventions, notebook doodles on the anatomy of pigs—these documents which were never meant to be public provide at times the greatest insights into the minds of their writers. Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Edison—all great minds, each one illuminated by their journals and notebooks where they developed their arts, inventions and methodologies. The shared characteristic of journaling in nearly all of the great minds of the past may say something about the necessities of invention and innovation; it may say that writing things down, making illustrations—keeping a personal design history—is a crucial part of the process of design. This entry of Design 101 is dedicated to exploring the utility of design journals in the creative and bureaucratic realms, methods of using the journals, and current products.
How Do I Use a Design Journal?
The point of a design journal is to document your thoughts and the development of your design through its various stages. As a designer, you probably have at least a minor obsession with detail and aesthetics—but remember this: a design journal is not a design project itself. It can be messy, and it should be messy.
But often what ends up happening is the very practice of writing ideas down creates more ideas, so some good things to keep your journal in mind for are brain-storming techniques, observations—pictures of things/designs that interest you, what you like and don’t like about products, society, life in general—contact information for clients, collaborators, and craft/material stores, and, later—as the design becomes more concrete—story-boarding usage scenarios, and tracking user observations.
As a disclaimer, the troubles with telling you what to do in your design journals are plenty. First, design journals are guided not by what someone like me says you should do in journals, but what works for you. For instance, even though designer Michael Bierut—who has gone through 85 design notebooks in his 26 years designing—acknowledges that it is probably smarter to keep separate journals for separate projects to keep things less confusing, he uses his journals linearly. For that reason, I encourage you to try out as many mind-to-paper methods as possible. Second, design journals should be visual if they are to clearly reflect your ideas. For this reason, take a look at entries from BI’s guardian angel Lora Oehlberg’s design journals:
Your journal should be a place to explore creativity-building techniques.
Note the coffee stain in the corner.
You do not have to be a genius to have a design journal—but sharing your design methodology with history’s greats never hurts. As I mentioned above, journaling styles vary from designer to designer, but you should keep some journal basics in mind as you fill the pages.
- A Table of Contents (for linear journals)
- Dated entries
- Write down your raw data (such as user observations)
- Numbered pages
- Personalization—you should feel at home inside your journal
- and finally Spontaneity
For Whom
An important thing to note is that you should never assume that 500 years from now someone will be paging through your work to write papers on you. In the tradition of Thomas Edison, who wrote of some inventions: “invented for myself exclusively, and not for any small brained capitalists” (Jenkins, 1987) your design journal should be explicitly for yourself—and not for small-brained capitalists. However, various figures will—in the course of your successful career as a designer—want to look at what you’ve done.
Mundanely, something to consider is that when you end up actually inventing or designing a product, your journal will be important for legal reasons—especially if disputes over patent rights arise, which is why dated and signed entries are incredibly important. In the industry, numbered, dated, and signed entries are the norm.
The most important figures (other than yourself) that will be looking at your design journal from time to time are your collaborators. Some philosophers argue that language and thought require visualization, and often the clearest way of conveying your thoughts is through the industry-standard in the initial phases of design: doodling.
As a master doodler, Leonardo Da Vinci and his notebooks exhibit the usefulness of design journals to your collaborators. Though whom I term as Leonardo’s “collaborators” are working with his notebooks 500 years after he put pen (quill?) to paper, the basic concept of collaboration is there; today’s academics are using Leonardo’s illustrations and writing to pursue his goals of understanding and invention. Craftsmen and women still work to create models of his flying machines, and though much of what Leonardo discovered—such as how fluids, air, and the eye work—was discovered independently before we found his notebooks, people still use his work for scientific reasons. In researching for this article, I saw papers published as recently as 2000 that dealt with understanding the anatomy of pigs “as previously described by Leonardo Da Vinci.”
Even the Renaissance-man himself wasn't the neatest writer. (source: www.artknowledgenews.com)
What Kind of Journal Should I Get?
You’re in luck if you’re thinking about buying a journal any time soon. Any campus bookstore and places like Borders Books are guaranteed to have several types of journals to suit your needs.
When choosing your notebook, you’ll have to compromise between two ideals: bigness, which is great for drawing out ideas (and creating enormous mind-maps); and convenience, because if your notebook is too big you won’t carry it around with you everywhere you go—and inevitably you’ll have an idea and nowhere to write it down. If you have the backpack/purse space for a giant sketchbook that should be what you consider. Otherwise, a standard size composition notebook is a suitable solution.
Critically, you’ll want a blank notebook for the clearest possible workspace. The good thing is that apart from coming in a variety of sizes, blank notebooks, though harder to find than lined notebooks, come in a variety of prices. The cheapest I’ve been able to find was the environote composition notebook at little more than two dollars. If you’re the fancier type, or if you have twenty dollars to spare, Moleskine offers a great selection of soft and hard cover notebooks in an attractive leather-esque covering (check out www.moleskine.com). Moleskine seems to be the favorite of designers everywhere, and part of that may come from their claim of producing the contemporary relation to the notebooks of such familiar figures as Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway. In any case, Moleskine is as good a solution as any other for a medium-sized notebook (and they’ll be launching sketchbook and watercolor sizes this spring).
Even within a single brand name, there are lots of notebook options. (source: moots.wordpress.com)
As I’ve said before, design journals do not have to conform to many of the guidelines above—they just have to work for you. While not recommended in the industry, your journal can even be digital. I encourage you to try out as many methods of journaling and as many varieties of journals as possible as you go through your notebooks.
Resources & Cool Things
Moleskine
Core 77
Design Addict
High-quality scans of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks
