When I was an under­grad in design school , I was one of the weak­est draw­ing stu­dents among my peers our fresh­man year. My pro­fes­sors, patient and inspir­ing though they were, seemed to remain con­cerned about my weak­nesses in the fields of draw­ing and craft; it was the final pin-up dis­cus­sions at which I shone.

When the sec­ond semes­ter of my fresh­man year came along and my draw­ing skills still fell short of my peers, one of my pro­fes­sors, who held a master’s in draw­ing, pulled me aside and gave me some advice. He gave me a few tips on how to improve the qual­ity of my work, but above all advo­cated sim­ply for prac­tice. One of the exer­cises he rec­om­mended was to draw sim­ple shapes over and over again– to draw until they were com­ing out of my ears. By so doing, I would be train­ing my hands to be more skilled at qual­ity of line and form. So for weeks I drew obses­sively– cir­cles, squares, cones, pyra­mids, tri­an­gles, lines, lines, lines; it was the mad hatter’s geom­e­try and it was explod­ing inside my sketchbooks.

By the time I grad­u­ated with my BFA, I was selected as the designer of the year, so some­thing must have clicked along the way; the mad hatter’s geom­e­try had pushed me fur­ther. Today, sim­ple forms like those from my professor’s exer­cise tend to creep into the mar­gins of my sketch­books and meet­ing notes– an uncon­scious habit, it now seems.

When I came across the above video from the Design Coun­cil, one of the first things that came to mind was that exer­cise of draw­ing sim­ple shapes over and over and over.

Why be good when you can be bet­ter? What do you wish you could do bet­ter, dear read­ers? And how do you plan on get­ting there?