Palette. A Sketchbook for shoe designer |TIP118

I am following a cool page about Footwear design on Instagram: @PaletteStudioCo
Credit featured image on the home page from Rob Maston or @raw_mass

@PaletteStudioCo on Instagram

It showcased amazing works of pro, beginner or passionate of footwear design – drawing with the Sketchbook Palette. What is there so special in ?

• Palette offers 130+ pages of shoe template per sketchbook. (A set of common shoe templates of low cut, high cut sneakers…)
• We can drop in ideas instantaneously without caring about shoe proportion.
  Many young designers know how it’s pretty hard to get that at start. Isn’t it ?

Palette Sketchbook – Sneaker and Stiletto – 25$USD  each

I haven’t try the palette myself. So I can’t make a review.
But, this product is interesting enough to be shared and considered. If you guys are already user of the Palette, I would be glad to receive your impressions.

 Thumbnails = Multiply ideas = Challenge creativity

I am not super fan of using template as a learning process. I believe that it’s much better to learn from drawing fundamentals. However I foresee some real benefits.

Each designer start with a different background

eg. How to draw a shoe – Adidas sneaker

I was driven by sketching first, the love for footwear came later – when I was student at the Design school, I was looking and drooling at shoes from Conceptkicks footwear magazine. There was no footwear design course in my school, so I improved my footwear sketching skills importing Industrial design techniques. An example above.

But how about people “who are opposite” ?

Moodboard on palette

I mean people who love design footwear, but yet don’t know how to draw ? And want to draw NOW. It might be frustrating to have so many ideas in mind but yet not able to translate them in sketch. I guess that’s one of the problem that the creators of Palette want to solve.

Motivation booster

@SavethePanduhs artworks with the Palette

I start to believe that it’s good to get some facilitators sometime. We may postpone a bit our learning of sketching fundamentals, we still experiment some shapes, curves and a good feel about footwear proportion. It may be a “simplistic approach” using 2D, we still feed our memory of forms. I believe that Palette is a great boost of motivation and confidence.

Inspired from professional workflow

High end Lady shoes Moodboard

Some shoe designers also use templates during the phase of research. They sketch a first template, then duplicate it x 12 thumbnails (more or less) per page.

Why ? When a design is reconducted from a season to an other, we don’t need to redo the whole design. We keep it as a base and apply on it some minor modifications”.
eg. adding tassels, perforations, stitches, prints, metallic accessories…
This method is a time saver. That’s actually what Palette offers.

My impressions

Rob Williams Hand sketch – Nike designer.

• Palette is NOT made to teach how to draw shoes – from an ID sketching perspective. Yet Palette inspire designers and let them express there ideas now. From what I see on Instagram, it works pretty well !
• Don’t get comfortable with shoe templates forever.
  As soon as you got your confidence high, jump into learning the sketching basics – and look for your ‘”sketching autonomy”. (Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean you won’t work with template anymore.)
• Target the next level of sketching and you exploration of footwear design will reach an other dimension. You may create your own templates from side and even quarter views !

In few words, Palette is a great motivation booster and kick starter !
User of Palette ? Tell us about your story.
Leave the comment in the box below ! Thanks !