While computer drawing dominates, I still like hand drawing. Whatever technique I use for finalization, I always start from hand drawing, and when appropriate, I use hand drawing as a final product.

In Product Design, hand drawing is used in the Conceptualization stage as well as in the Design Development stage. It is a vital tool when developing ideas, especially when exploring initial ideas.

I used to dislike marker rendering when I was a design student simply because it was difficult. It is still difficult, but I have found that marker rendering is a decent medium of graphic design.

In Product Design, marker rendering is used in the Conceptualization stage and also in the Design Development stage as well as in Design Considerations. It is handy when developing ideas, refining them and presenting them.

CAD (Computer Aided Design) is a vital tool for product design, and it is also a powerful tool for graphic design.

CAD works well to design mechanical components and to study its geometry. Once a CAD model is built, it provides sophisticated methods to study the appearance of the model; how it looks with different materials, texture, or lighting conditions. Results can be rendered to present design ideas. In product design, this technique is used in the Design Refinement stage and in the Product Considerations, and of course in the Design Finalization stage.

I wonder if I need to explain how useful Illustrator is in graphic design. As many of you probably know, it is de facto standard software in graphic design. It is used to create elements of graphic design; it enables designers to create digital images from scratch like this example, and also to process scanned hand drawing. Most of the examples in Applications are created with Illustrator.

In product design, it can be used to make Presentation boards.

Adobe Photoshop is widely used to process digital images from photos to scanned hand drawing. It also enables designers to create, like this example, digital images based on simple hand drawing, or even from scratch. Most of the graphic elements in this web site, buttons and background images for examples, are created with Photoshop.

Colour pencils can be used to add some details to marker rendering.

For product design, as described above, marker rendering is handy in several stages of product design; from generating initial ideas to presenting refined ideas. Wood is my favorite material, and the combination of marker rendering and colour pencil can be used effectively to draw wood. Some examples can be seen in Design Considerations in Product Design.