A friend who works as a toy designer recently told me her new intern--an ID grad--had never used a glue gun! And I wonder if today's ID grads know what graphite smells like. I believe my graduating class was one of the last to learn drafting the old-fashioned way, with an assortment of mechanical pencils.
Nowadays most ID curriculums revolve around the computer, whether for modeling or drafting. I don't mean this to be another "When I was your age" type of post; but I just came across "The Decanter," a promo video from design consultancy Walter Landor and Associates, which details the design process of the titular product way back in the 1960s, before I was even born.
If someone dropped a project on you today to design a decanter, you'd probably look at pictures of other decanters on the web, and do your drafting and modeling on the computer, which you'd also use to e-mail the client for updates and feedback. What the heck would you do in the 1960s when, needless to say, they didn't have any computers to run the design through?
Many of you may be curious as to how they got projects like this done back then. Here's to hoping you're fifteen-and-a-half minutes worth of curious, as this video was edited in the 1960s (the project doesn't even really start until 1:23 into the video). Check it out:
Design story: The Decanter from Landor Associates on Vimeo.
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