Design idea generation

Pencil designs on paper...

Step 1

Sketch out 6 square boxes onto your graph paper. These should measure 10x10, 11x11 or 12x12 to ensure you can fit 6 onto 1 page.

Step 2

Ghost line sketch your geometric patterns within each square. Use your inspiration poster and pattern research to help with design ideas.

Step 3

Start fine lining each design, including the square boxes.

Step 4

Render each design by following the 3 rendering steps. First, shade in a light base tone. Second, add a dark coloured edge around the fine line. Third, blend from the dark edge to the light middle.

Gemini Ai rendering example

Gemini Ai - left is original, right is Ai

Only design 1 is an original colour rendering, all other designs are Ai

Design Ideas are the ideas that you have as potential solutions to solve the design brief. Design ideas should be sketched quickly and should be unrefined, not developed ideas. They are initial responses based on your research and should just show the basic concept that you have in your mind. Some design ideas will be great! These are the ones that you will go on to develop but some design ideas will be less great and these ones just show your exploration of the design context. Look at all the example design ideas below. Not all of them will become real tables and that is a normal part of the design process.

Here are a range of design ideas that have been drawn using Procreate

How to sketch table design ideas in procreate

Procreate is an ideal app to sketch our design ideas because we can set up the canvas to match the size of our design restrictions which help us to control the proportions of the design and minimum shape size. We can also use drawing guides to help us.

The first step is to set up the correct size canvas. Throughout all of the step below make sure you use Milimeters (mm)

Press the + in the top right corner and select "Square"

When the file opens, select the spanner icon - "canvas" - "Crop & Resize"

Follow steps 1-5. Make sure you repeat step 2. for both boxes.

1. select "settings"

2. "select the size box

3. Millimeters option

4. type 350

5. press done

Once you press "done" the canvas is set to the correct size. ✅

When you have set the size once you should go to the gallery, select the file and duplicate it a few times so that you have canvases' that are already set to the correct size and you do not have to repeat the above steps every time you sketch a new design idea!

Using drawing guides and grids

Drawing guides can be very helpful when sketching ideas as we can use grids or assisted drawing modes to help sketch our ideas. Below there are several options for Grids and Guides with examples of outcome from these different modes.

2D Grid

The 2D grid is useful for sketching square or rectangle based patterns.

Open the edit drawing guide menu

select 2D grid, grid size

Assisted Drawing will "snap" drawing lines to the grid

Set the units to Milimeters and the Length to 20

Isometric drawing guide

Open the edit drawing guide menu

Select Isometric and set the grid size make sure it is in mm

Set the units to Milimeters and the Length to 20

You can turn Drawing assist on and off depending on what you want to achieve. Drawing assist on will snap to the grid, drawing assist off will let you draw any lines but still see the grid.

The Drawing grid is not part of your design work. You can switch it off and on to see how your design ideas are progressing.

Symmetric drawing guide

Open the edit drawing guide menu

Select the symmetry button

In the options menu there are different types of symmetry.

Vertical symmetry

Horizontal symmetry

Quadrant Symmetry

Radial Symmetry

Rotational Symmetry

Examples of design ideas

Add colour to your favourite 2 or 3 ideas ONLY

Colour drop can be used to add colour to closed loop shapes in Procreate.

Putting it all together

Once you have created all of your design ideas for your table, using your pattern inspiration board as a guide, you should start to think about presenting all of your ideas on a design ideas presentation poster. there are many ways that you could go about presenting your ideas. One presentation style is explained below and uses 3-D perspective views of a table outline to help show your favorite ideas in a 3D perspective style.