At our inaugural trade show this winter, we had a booth dedicated to works in progress. We weren’t really ready to show a spring line, so we showed up at the winter market to give everyone a sneak peak of what we were working on.

One wall section was a collage dedicated to sketches, photographs and inspirational images that were part of the product design process. Though it looks like an old-fashioned, analog art, hand sketching is still a part of the design process for many product designers.

Because sketches often happen early in the design process, they often never make it off the wall of the product development department. Presentations are usually made using images drawn and colored on the computer. While these computer CAD drawings look more polished than hand sketches and have become the norm now at most companies for line reviews and product presentations, they often lack the elegance and emotion of pencil, pen and marker sketches.