As much as we love the Rodney Dangerfield classic, we at Stalelife, Inc. believe that education is always important and continuing…including for us. Yes, we’ve gone back to school, taking night classes at the wonderful School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Our first class is Object Design: Sketch and Illustration (Tumblr Blog) and is taught by our friend Craighton Berman of Gravity Tank. It’s a great class on object sketching and ideation. It’s been great to work the brain with some free-form thinking about product design and usability. The class goes beyond that with exercises on communicating your idea through various media and building concept visualization.

You may ask…how will this help your clients? Simply put, by going back to basics…forcing us to breakdown our thought process from an old perspective from our college days — one that isn’t worried about budgets, billable time and deadlines. Taking a back-to-basics approach helps to gather ideas in a loose thought environment and will spawn new solutions or designs for our clients.

With just 3 weeks under the belt, I can tell this is going to help bring new insights to all of the future Stalelife projects. Check out some sketches and work from the first few classes.

Some notes and sketches from class.

Developing muscle memory for circle drawing.

Exercise with objects in 2-point perspective.