Has silicon graphics made the pencil redundant for designers and creative minds?
Whether you were Leonardo da Vinci, Enzo Ferrari or even the Mad Men, a pencil and some paper had always been the way to download your creative thoughts from your mind, play about with them and share them with other people. Fabriano started making their paper in 1200. The Chinese 200 years earlier. Slate and chalk goes back to the dawn of time. Anybody who grows up turning thoughts into pencil, ink or chalk sketches will get quite good at it if design is their vocation. You only need to look at the sketches and drawings of artists, designers and stylists. Where do you start? Sarum Hydraulics found Alexander McQueen’s sketch book quite amazing, Ridley Scott’s highly tonal storyboards are a revelation and Thomas Heatherwick’s sketches brilliant. We particularly liked Pinky Lai’s Porsche 996 sketches on which are just lovely for the petrol heads at Sarum. All these are very much a window into the creative mind. 
Would a designer who has grown up exclusively with very fast and flexible solid modelling or graphics software still use a pencil? Maybe their creative mind is wired up differently nowadays. Diving straight into silicon graphics might indeed allow you to try out five possible ideas whilst your old fashioned designer is messing about with pencil and paper. Some old designers moan that “youngsters” dive straight in to model “the idea” without thinking it through, only to find that their beautifully rendered creation is a no-go. Or will launching straight into solid modelling give you an adequate design rather than something inspiring? It is quite ironic that designing on a screen allows you to pull in ideas, parts and chunks of designs that you have used before, often with dramatically good results. Why reinvent the wheel? Except of course that going back to basics and turning existing designs inside out to come up with something truly innovative can often be done better whilst fiddling about with a pencil and paper. We do both, but will always back pencil and paper for fresh and innovative. That’s what we think!
You could probably imagine the two opposing camps rubbing along. Art school and old school designers would be sketching away whilst modelling bods are spinning their creativity around on a screen. And then suddenly, the designers’ designer Jony Ive pops up with the new Apple pencil. Yes, designers have used graphics tablets for years with cursors or pointers, but this new product sees Apple attempting to replicate electronically the exact feel and power of the humble pencil. It is quite amazing. In an interview in the Telegraph last year, on Jony-Ive-interview-The-story-of-the-Apple-Pencil , Jony admits that the design team in Cupertino still carry round their sketchbooks and pencils. How interesting! The product “feels” like a pencil and is said to provide all the nuances that people who draw have used since the Middle Ages. Given Apple’s influence, will this innovation take us back to the ‘pencil’ days and change people’s thinking back to the ‘old ways’?
Much as the comrades at Sarum are Salisbury’s greatest Apple fans, we think that those beautiful Pentel aluminium pencils and Fabriano paper won’t be retired just yet. They are something special. There will be lots more innovative Micropac hydraulics taking shape on paper. Look at what we do on www.sarum-hydraulics.co.uk.
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