Product design sketching is a crucial early stage of product development as a fast, low-cost way for designers to explore their best, most imaginative, or most unconventional ideas. Sketches are the first opportunity for designers to convey visual design concepts to collaborators and stakeholders. Improvements made during the product design sketching phase can prevent headaches and rework down the line.
Product sketches don’t have to be basic, pencil-drawn images. They can be simple or highly detailed; hand-drawn using pens, pencils, markers, and rulers; or drawn digitally within a mobile app or software using a tablet and stylus.
Creating product design sketches in software benefits designers by letting them quickly and efficiently create, edit, and share sketches with team members and stakeholders anywhere in the world for quick collaboration. In-software digital tools like pencil, pen, and marker brushes; colors; and shading emulate physical drawing instruments, combined with software efficiency enhancements like capturing lines, circles, and ellipses with predictive strokes. Layer management also makes it easy to edit and refine aspects of product sketches without affecting the entire design.
Design software like Autodesk Alias supports hardware essential for product design digital sketching, like Wacom graphics tablets. Alias goes even further by incorporating modeling tools, providing an efficient way to transfer product design sketches into 3D models. Alias also seamlessly integrates Autodesk VRED and Flow Production Tracking, merging product design concept sketches with product development in extended reality (XR) and project management workflows.
Using software helps streamline the product sketching process and offers designers greater precision and accuracy than traditional sketching due to easily adjustable dimensions, scale, and other parameters. Sketching in software lets product designers bring realistic previews of product form and function to life in a more efficient and collaborative way.
