[Images: Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, thinkquest.org /Artwork: designslinger]

How many times during a phone conversation, or sitting in a meeting, have you found yourself
picking up a pen and making little squiggly lines on the nearest piece of paper. At the conclusion of the call or rambling conference, you are amazed to look down and discover that this seemingly innocuous activity has produced a dynamic piece of artwork.

I doubt that when Leonardo da Vinci sat down and filled his notebooks with drawings they
were mindless doodles. But, I do like to think of him sitting at a table with pen, ink and parchment letting his mind wander and drift. He lets loose and doesn't work an idea, but lets it flow, almost unconsciously, as the spirit takes him, without over thinking things too much. For me, that's the art of doodling, just the random thought, put down on paper, starting to form an idea or concept, without rigidness.

[Images: LCW chair, Charles Eames; Sketches, Charles Eames, eamesgallery /Artwork: designslinger]

Charles Eames was one of the greatest designer of the 20th century. The image on the
right hand side, is a page of doodles that Eames did as he was working out ideas for one of his chair designs. Now, some may argue that this page contains sketches, but look at how the ideas seem to move around the page, there is no pattern, no formal resolution from drawing to drawing. They are random, as though he saw something in his minds eye and jotted it down, simply as a way to record an impulse. He fills the page without attention to scale. Each one probably took a few seconds to record on the paper, and later would be used as the inspiration for sketches and working drawings that would ultimately produce a chair.

[Images: Photograph, Disney Concert Hall via wikipedia; Doodle on paper overlay, Frank Gehry, arcspace
 /Artwork: designslinger]

One of the best doodlers of all time has to be architect Frank Gehry. His notebooks must be
packed with these doodles, but most will be want to call them sketches. Perhaps even Gehry himself would describe these images more academically as sketches. But, when you look at many of them they are so lighthearted, that they seem to flow out from him in a less studied manner that most sketches require. The image laid over the photograph, is actually the doodle/sketch that eventually became the Disney Concert Hall. How remarkable that a building of such inspiration started out as a few squiggles on a piece of paper.

[Image: Paper napkin /Artwork: designslinger]

When we were trying to come up with a layout for the masthead of our blog, we were sitting
having coffee and I took a napkin and started doodling while we were discussing options. I have started the design of many a movie set on a napkin, and have delighted many a construction coordinator, by using a napkin to work out a design problem without having a set designer spend hours redrafting a solution. So, the next time you've filled the margin of a sheet of lined paper, before you toss it in the trash take a look at it, and you may or may not be surprised by what you see.