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Sketching is one of the most important skills in design. A designer must be able to communicate their ideas clearly and quickly; good sketching is the best way to do this. Rough sketches can help the process of ideation by recording and developing concepts, while high quality renders can make ideas more believable and help sell them during a presentation.

My sketching has never been brilliant. I have an A-level in fine art, but spent the majority of my studies working in paint or oil pastel, painstakingly creating photo-realist and abstract images over many hours. The professional world does not permit such a luxuriously long winded process, instead requiring the majority drawings to take just a few minutes – this allows for many ideas to be visualised during a divergent ideation stage, hugely increasing the chances of finding that perfect-specification-meeting or truly innovative concept.

Because of this, I recently made the decision to improve my sketching skills through daily sketching, also known as the ‘a sketch a day‘ challenge. The premise is simple, complete one sketch or series of sketches each day for a year (or more), slowly filling a sketch book as my sketching abilities develop. I plan to focus on ink drawings (although I hope to explore different media too) and complete each one in around 20 minutes. To keep me motivated and stop me skipping a day, I have been uploading each image to my Instagram page and this website, hopefully getting some valuable feedback on my images too. Please take a look, let me know what you think and follow the page to join me on this journey to better sketching!

You may have seen the new (or more accurately first) logo for Andrew Taylor Design. The logo was developed by following a few simple rules and ideas I have come across during my career as a designer. Firstly, a logo should be simple. Over complicating a logo can make it look messy and cause the viewer to struggle to identify it. My new logo features only three letters, with a simple border to make it stand out on a page or screen. Secondly, the logo should be identifiable. Some designers choose to insert a deeper meaning to a logo, or a fairly abstract link to the company. This technique can work well very, but also can lead to a logo which fails to portrait the brand it represents. Therefore, I chose to represent Andrew Taylor Design in a very obvious manor, using an acronym to create an instantaneous link between the brand and the logo in the mind of the viewer. Finally, a logo should be easily recongnisable from a distance. A good check is to to see if the logo can be read when printed at the size of a postage stamp, held at arm’s length. In many case, particularly when logos incorporate full words, the logo becomes impossible to read when on a distance poster or on a website’s favicon.

I feel I have made good use of these principles to design a logo which is representative of Andrew Taylor Design. The use of only black and white allows the logo to stand out on a page and the colours can be inverted to allow them to be read on any background. Following the example of many designers before me, the use of Helvatica gives a clean, professional feel which I hope reflects the ideology of the company. The white space between the letters and enclosed by the border help to emphasis the text, without distracting the eye, presenting to the viewer – as all branding should – a direct link between the image and company that the image represents.