The ideas, doodles and concepts drawn in sketchbooks can often breed some of the most exceptional and lasting things. It's the way Doodlers Anonymous was thought up and believe it or not, it's also the way many of the icons and fonts on the Apple Mac were originally devised.

In 1982, Susan Kare, a Ph.D grad in fine arts was hired to create fonts for the Macintosh operating system. The story goes that since there had yet been an application developed for designing icons on screen, "she went to the University Art supply store in Palo Alto and picked up a $2.50 sketchbook so she could begin playing around with forms and ideas. In the pages of this sketchbook… she created the casual prototypes of a new, radically user-friendly face of computing — each square of graph paper representing a pixel on the screen."



Truly fascinating. It's no wonder why we preach to always carry a sketchbook and pen around. Read the full article in a story by Steve Silberman.