I started college studying Industrial design. Industrial design is a relatively small field and not widely known. As a quick primer industrial design is essentially the design of manufactured goods, and this design comes from aesthetics as well as logistics such as useability and manufacturing constraints.
As a highly visual line of work Industrial designers typically share their work online in forms of sketches and prototypes of future products. As a freshman that’s what I did as well.
The following is a semester 1 technical drawing of a hand saw of some sort. It was video recorded on a whim using Snapchat and phone with a dirty lens. This was pretty much the extent of how I documented my work in terms of sharing it with the vast public of the internet.
There was a variety of different prompts and some personal projects that were also recorded like this. They had a repetitively small effect in terms of their distribution.
I have a small Snapchat following and most of the people who do follow aren’t active. Roughly 150 people on snap chat view my postings consistently. So I continued to share on Snapchat . Taking note on the professionals and other students on Instagram I had decided to take some time when crafting a post to share. Here is a side comparison of the two different mediums.
These two methods are the same project shared on the internet just for different purposes. The low-fidelity Snapchat model is a kind of narrative of my life through school for my close friends to see and the high-fidelity Instagram model ends up being almost a portfolio of my work for anyone to see, including design industry peers.
I see these high-fidelity post through Instagram all the time and this is an example of some student and professional work that is kind of standard.
Seeing this type of work online is inspiring to me and other students. I continued to post high-fidelity content as I find it kind of fun to see how they are reacted to online. As I learned more from school I gained enough skills to measure up to the kind of post I was seeing online.
I was receiving positive feedback from people I know and some people I don’t and I had looked into how some of the more prevalent design accounts work on Instagram. A lot of them are curated accounts that accept submissions from other people. So with my most recent project I collected the best work that I’ve done and set up a spread of sketches. Photographed it and sent it to several Instagram accounts that I follow.
Surprisingly one got back to me.
Took my work and put it in front of 19.5 thousand accounts to see.
I found it was super cool that just a couple years ago as a freshman I just looked at these kind of post for inspiration. Now after some practice and studying I can replicate that kind of work, and fully participate in the inspiration process. Part of me just wants to feel important by being #instagramfamous, but there is a function to these kind of post on Instagram in our industry. It helps other designers benchmark their work and pull ideas from other creatives.
Literature & the Internet 