Sketch-A-Day started as small idea to get people motivated to doodle, scribble and scratch something every day. Now that I’ve been at it for 39 days without missing a beat, I’ve decided to switch things up a bit. Let’s admit, sometimes the sketches aren’t exactly Industrial Design Related or even design related, but they’ve serve as good inspiration for some based on your comments and feedback, and I’ve gotten some good feedback myself via the idsketching facebook page and post comments themselves. It’s as much practice for me as it is inspiration for you.

With that said, I’ve decided to “upgrade” the feature and move it into it’s own entity. Now, I know it’s become a mainstay here idsketching.com, but never fear, I’ll get into what this means a little later in the post.

Sketch-a-day.com is now live and features a very simple to use interface that is still organic and in progress, but should get you what you need – home, an archive link, facebook page link, link to the twitter page if you want to follow and interact there, stumble upon link so that you can spread the word, rss feed link, and a link for you to contact me with questions, suggestions, or if you just wanna chat.

Another cool feature I was able to include is facebook connect, so if you want to, you could connect with facebook to post a comment on the site. I’m working on adding a few more cool features, but that’s it for now.

My favorite part of the new site though is the post gallery. Now you can see all the sketch posts in an easy to navigate gallery mode. This way, if you’re new to sketch-a-day.com or simply missed a few posts, you can get to them relatively easily.

So what does this mean for idsketching.com, well, it means that I won’t be posting a sketch-a-day post here daily, but I’ll be doing a weekly wrap-up of what sketches got posted on sketch-a-day, interesting tweets, and comments from you.  Something of a quick thumbnail overview of what I posted. It’ll also help pull things back into focus on articles and videos about technique, rather than a random smattering of sketches by me every day.

There’ll also be a permanent link on the site here to sketch a day in the top navigation so that the mini site is easy to get to.

So what about the people in the forum? If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, you have to check it out. There’s a Sketch-A-Day forum for people inspired by the sketch-a-day feature where they’ve been sketching everyday. There’s some great stuff there, so be sure to check it out. The forum will remain intact, and I encourage you to get involved.

I get asked alot how to improve skills, learn a technique, have a certain style, and almost always the answer I give is simply practice. There’s a bit of talent involved, sure, but I can guarantee that if you can sketch-a-day with me, (or on your own if you choose) you’ll see some great results in no time.

So my challenge to you for 2010 and beyond is to sketch-a-day. Doodle, scribble, jot, just get something down on paper or on your tablet. The payoff will be a marked improvement in your skillset.

I know it may seem like a bit much at first, but trust me, it’ll be much simpler and sweeter on it’s own. I plan to have some guest sketchers every now and then if I can rally them, so hopefully there’ll be some diversity here and there.

Thanks for all your awesome (no,seriously) awesome support for the sketch-a-day feature. Be sure to bookmark sketch-a-day.com and check there daily for a sketch update.

Tags: sketch-a-day

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 8:39 am and is filed under News, sketch-a-day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.