The entry below is classified as a LEGACY post, meaning that it was written (well) before the current version of Avalonstar was released. Although these posts have survived the numerous moves over years, there is no guarantee that they've survived the trip unscathed (especially the links).

LEGACY–

June 20, 2008

The Drafting Hand

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.