Early sketches from the web’s finest
Pen and paper
Most designers are accustomed to starting their work on paper. If you’re a designer, you’ve probably got a notebook or two sitting around with random brilliant sketches. Often the initial sketches themselves are something to be proud of — and it’s a shame that no one ever sees them.
Have you ever wondered what others’ sketches look like? We did. When designers put pen to paper the results are quite different. We’ll show you.
Zielschmerz
n. the exhilarating dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you created in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could, only to break in case of emergency.
ellipsism
n. sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out, that you’ll dutifully pass on the joke of being alive without ever learning the punchline—the name of the beneficiary of all human struggle, the sum of the final payout of every investment ever made in the future—which may not suit your sense of humor anyway and will probably involve how many people it takes to change a lightbulb.
ambedo
n. a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—which leads to a dawning awareness of the haunting fragility of life, a mood whose only known cure is the vuvuzela.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: degrassé
adj. entranced and unsettled by the vastness of the universe, experienced in a jolt of recognition that the night sky is not just a wallpaper but a deeply foreign ocean whose currents are steadily carrying off all other castaways, who share our predicament but are already well out of…



