This is the story of a guy and his friend. Said friend shows off a product to the guy that he initially doesn’t want to buy and then buys out of peer pressure. This contains a series of videos demonstrating how the former drafter wannabe uses Behance’s Dot Grid Book.
A few weeks ago, the honorable Dan Rubin got himself a Dot Grid Book from the people at Behance. He promptly showed me and I passed it off as… well… fluff, since I already had a normal grid book. Fast forward to WebVisions and he brings the same Dot Grid Book with him to show off to me. Untouched by lead with velum cover and all. Seeing (and feeling) the notebook made me immediately want to get one for myself. Note that this is usually the way to sell me on things I would otherwise push off as being unnecessary.
From the product shots on Behance’s site, you could use the Dot Grid Book for a lot of things. Like typography or curvy things of that nature. Well, not me. To me, grid books are for diagrams and straight things. Because I only feel confident enough writing in one of those if and only if I had a ruler. Chalk that up to my days in middle and high school drafting class. I cannot sketch in books like this. Give me a loose piece of printer paper and I’ll scribble all over the thing, but put a grid on it and I’m immediately in a different state of mind.
One more fast forward to yesterday. I had told Dan that I would be using the book, beating him to the punch. He asked for me to record myself using it since he wanted to possibly learn from it. So I did and then sped them up using iMovie HD even though iMovie ‘08 should have had something that simple to begin with. D:
It does go by quite fast so I do encourage you to use the pause button if you want to see what I hold up to the screen. I also apologize for the horrible lighting, but I didn’t want to take way too much time on the setup. The session was split up into two parts.
The first video shows my attempt at trying to create a legend (think drafting) for the rest of the book and then drawing a diagram of Revyver’s server grid, something I’ll talk about after I actually finish migrating. The second video is an attempt at wireframing the landing page of Hello!Ranking, Revyver’s upcoming flagship social game. Wireframing is something I’ve really never done so meticulously before, so it did take me a bit longer to figure out what I was going to do.
EDIT: The music is a bit loud, stupid iMovie, so watch those headphones.
In any case, enjoy and feel free to dissect. I realize I’m probably in the minority of people who take 20+ minutes to draw things this simple, but I also realize that I’m pretty damn anal when it comes to stuff like this.
That’s really cool, I can totally see myself wasting hours and hours drawing obscure geometric shapes. Not sure if I’d ever put one to better use than that…
Great draftsmanship! ^^
Neat book. Looks like just the thing I could get unproductively obsessed over for a week then go back to crappy paper and never use the book again because I’m too afraid of wasting the “good paper”.
What’s the song playing in the second of the videos?
Zach, that’s Link by L`arc~en~Ciel. The version with vocals is actually the introduction song to the Full Metal Alchemist movie, Conquerer of Shambala. That’s definitely an anime series that you should watch by the way. :)
I thought both were highly watchable (and hey, I didn’t know you were left-handed!)
Thanks for sharing these with us - great stuff. I’m far-less precise with this sort of stuff, usually using plain paper with no grids just out of habit.
Music in the second one was a bit funny, hehe.
The Dot Grid Book looks nice even though I prefer blank pages for sketching. The Moleskine sketchbooks are my favorite since the books with the grid get in my way, but the dot grid seems like a balanced option for both worlds. I also like the Action products from Behance, might have to pick those up for UX work.
I want a medium sized moleskine with a dot grid pattern. Yeh, that would be cool. I also like behance’s action cards, action book and other fancy items.