I love to use InkSeine on my Tablet PC to quickly sketch up ideas. I usually like to lean over my tablet on a desk for this, but sometimes I keep it on my lap, and I almost always sketch on my tablet in the "portrait" orientation when I'm involved with creative work.

To get started on a design sketch, I collect reference material (images) either as inspiration, or as actual pieces to use in my design sketch. I use InkSeine's floating camera capture feature very heavily to take screen clippings from existing applications, documents, or web pages. I also drag bitmaps from Windows Explorer folders into InkSeine. This imports them directly as images (rather than just creating a link to the file).

Now the fun starts. I throw them together, rearrange them, mark them up, and otherwise use them to explore the terra incognita of my design ideas. I like to sketch out every possible way I can think of to do something. I'll often have several pages of variations on an idea. Through this excercise, I unearth problems that I hadn't initially thought of. New ideas arise from the detritus of failed designs on page after page.

The great thing about this approach is that often the idea for a solution doesn't occur to me until after I have already completed my sketch of it. It sounds a bit like a time traveler's paradox, but for me it really works this way more often than not!

Here's an example where I'm sketching out some ideas that I have been thinking about for updates to the Tool Ring in InkSeine. Of course, many of the design sketches I have for InkSeine are drawn with InkSeine. It's a tool for designing itself. How's that for another mind-bending time traveler's paradox?!?

For my next trick, I think I'll sketch a picture of myself sketching a picture of the next version of InkSeine so that I can get it released quicker. I may just drop John Cramer a line and see how his retrocausal quantum nonlocal communication experiment is going. Receive Email from the Future would sure make a killer feature for Outlook 2010, wouldn't it?

Time travel paradoxes are cool. Sketching up ideas on my Tablet PC with InkSeine just might be cooler. [:-)]

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