[HN Gopher] How to draw ideas
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How to draw ideas
Author : Sujan
Score : 102 points
Date : 2023-01-14 18:33 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ralphammer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ralphammer.com)
| girafffe_i wrote:
| My dev team has now spent more of their career without physical
| whiteboarding and seems to think of it as a waste of time, so I'm
| looking for more guides like this, as well as explanation of the
| psycho-mechanics of why this works.
|
| My understanding is that we think in abstract (we'll say
| "shapes"), and then to interface with the world, we learn
| language to bucket objects into words and compost them to
| describe the "shapes".
|
| I leverage visuals heavily whenever speaking with others (Miro,
| physical paper or whiteboards), and have trouble communicating
| with (smart) people who can hold a lot in their head while
| speaking at length about it without providing concrete
| references. The transformative process of people getting their
| thoughts out on paper means 1. they can share context and aren't
| referring to their "shapes" referentially in their head 2. more
| than 1 person can see their thoughts concretized and can share
| context, discuss, and re-shape the thoughts 3. the act of
| reabsorbing the concrete representation reveals incompleteness
| that others can contribute to (edge cases, weird use cases)
| maCDzP wrote:
| Hm, this workflow is similar to the one I was taught in a writing
| class.
|
| Does anyone write programs using the same workflow?
| turtledragonfly wrote:
| I do, at times, somewhat.
|
| I think software is often seen as a "rapid development"
| process, esp. when compared to hardware development. But
| somewhat ironically, I find actually writing software to be
| pretty slow compared to just doodling out ideas on paper, so I
| tend to do a lot of that first, especially when treading new
| territory.
|
| On occasion, in a REPL-style environment, I can get some amount
| of that same freedom of exploration and experimentation at a
| keyboard, but it's still hard to come close to pencil and
| paper, for me.
|
| Sometimes I wonder what it would be to have the mind of someone
| like Tesla, who could reportedly design complex objects in his
| head, down to the details. The freedom of experimentation in
| one's own mind is even better than pencil-and-paper, but I have
| trouble holding on to the details in that mode.
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| Very fun! I've found sketching and journaling super valuable.
|
| I follow the methods from https://bulletjournal.com/
|
| My journal is full of different layouts, diagrams, decision
| making tables, for example doing a quick SWOT analysis on paper
| by diving a page into 4.
|
| Paper is good and helpful for the process.
|
| I'm continually trying to produce 'evergreen notes" and writing
| on paper helps me push towards that a bit.
| (https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes)
| gozzoo wrote:
| > Internal Server Error
| Simran-B wrote:
| If you get an Internal Server Error like me:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20230114194140/https://ralphammer...
| hemmert wrote:
| Beautiful!
| mistermann wrote:
| FTA:
|
| --------------------------------
|
| After we have taken in as much information as possible, we now
| want to go "crazy" and draw as many ideas as possible.
|
| But what if our mind goes blank and we don't have any?
|
| Then we still need to draw.
|
| Ok, but what?
|
| Anything! Just put that pen on the paper and keep it moving.
| Scribble, make random marks and shapes. This will kickstart our
| visual thinking process. rough sketches
|
| And what are we thinking about? New plant pots of course! We draw
| everything that comes to mind. Everything! Those drawings just
| keep pouring from our mind through our hands on that sheet of
| paper. We have created a loop where our imaginations turn into
| drawings and those drawings initiate new imaginations.
|
| --------------------------------
|
| This is eerily similar to (my understanding) of how AI image
| generation works.
| gradys wrote:
| Any recommendations for learning to draw at the level depicted in
| this article?
| kleer001 wrote:
| Learn to see what you're looking at. An hour or so of practice
| from life every day for a year is a good start.
| pavlov wrote:
| An hour a day is a massive commitment for most people with
| lives (work, family etc.) You can get very meaningful
| progress in drawing with much less. Don't be discouraged from
| starting.
| weaksauce wrote:
| even doing < 5 min a day of learning a new language sees
| results in a year. drawing probably has a higher startup
| cost to get into things but i'd expect 10min to be
| sufficient.
| SimDeBeau wrote:
| They actually link an article they wrote on some drawing
| exercises. https://ralphammer.com/a-quick-beginners-guide-to-
| drawing/ Remind me of a lot of what we did in some of my old
| beginner art classes.
| turtledragonfly wrote:
| As far as I know, the main thing is to do a lot of it, and with
| purpose.
|
| Depending on your personality, this may be a big ask -- if you
| get discouraged or distracted easily, for instance.
|
| On the other hand, it's a very accessible skill: pen and paper
| are easy to come by.
|
| Personally, I've always felt rewarded by doing it. It soothes
| something in me, so I haven't had the struggle with self-
| motivation that some report.
|
| I think that's a key to getting good at many things, really:
| find some emotional satisfaction from what you're doing, and
| the motivation will follow. As opposed to simply saying "I want
| to be good at X" and mechanically pushing yourself to do it. If
| you don't have some baseline love for the activity, you may
| learn to dread it, by that approach.
| yardshop wrote:
| Step 1: be great at drawing
|
| Step 2: DTROTFO! [1]
|
| Seriously though, these seem like good steps for getting
| started. Just start scribbling to get your hand warmed up, then
| redraw and refine and keep practicing.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/eccj2/how_to_draw_an...
| imrat wrote:
| Original substack article here:
| https://ralphammer.substack.com/p/how-to-draw-ideas
|
| with a bunch of other good ones too - like The Creative Switch
| DavidPiper wrote:
| The Creative Switch is explores similar ideas to John Cleese's
| theory of creativity:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
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