
As Colin Smith, the Product Marketing Manager for SketchBook, points out, “it wasn’t specifically created for architects, but instead was designed as a simple tool for digital sketching.” Digital sketching has changed dramatically in the last few years with the development of tablet PCs and this is the market that Sketchbook was designed to take advantage of. SketchBook addresses a different set of needs. Its forays into architecture, however, have not been as successful–an early modeling product called UpFront, for example, was released in the late eighties but soon disappeared from sight. Its 3D graphics software is a tool of choice for movies such as Jurassic Park, The Matrix and Lord of the Rings. Alias is a venerable Canadian software company that recently celebrated its twentieth year in business–for a computer company this equates to approximately one million years in real time.
Sketchbook pro pressure sensitivity pro#
Yet architects tend to regard sketching as a ‘throw away’ activity in which endless sheets of yellow tracing paper are used, revised and discarded, and as architectural design becomes more and more computerized, sketching remains an enigmatic part of the process that simply doesn’t lend itself to being digital.Īlias SketchBook Pro is a great general purpose sketching tool but it is more difficult to say how well it fits into the particular workflows of architectural design. When the idea is first transferred to paper or hard-drive there is no model or landscape to base it on–the architectural sketch is a creature that until then has been completely internalized, and has never seen the light of day. As such, architectural or design sketching is very different from other kinds of sketching. It marks the point at which an idea is externalized from the intangible visualizations of a single mind to a representation that can be shared with others.


Sketching is one of the most unique and important aspects of architectural design.
