Thinking with a pencil
by Henning Nelms · first published 1957
6mentions
5recommended by
5HN commenters
2011–2026first – last mentioned
100% recommend
Why HN recommends it
Practical guide to visual thinking with a pencil, covering sketching, diagrams, isometric drawing and tables. Readers use it to build everyday drawing and design skills and for storyboards and visual communication.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Rapid visualization techniques. Focus on charts, diagrams and graphs. From the cover: "With 692 Illustrations of Easy Ways to make and Use Drawings In Your Work and in Your Hobbies"
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You might try Henning Nelms Thinking with a Pencil, it is a great source for learning practical sketching and drawing.
on “The Growing Divide Between Silicon Valley And Unemployed America” ↗Thinking with a Pencil, by Henning Nelms, would be a better choice for practical drawing and design, rather than Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Pencil-Henning-Nelms/dp/08981...
on “Books For Learning to Design, The Hard Way” ↗…grid, commonly used for making isometric drawings: http://web.mit.edu/16.810/www/Isometric%20Drawing.pdf For those of you looking to improve your by-hand visual communication skills, a cool old book is _Thinking with a Pencil_ . I picked up a copy a few months ago, and have been enjoying working through the exercises as I find time (which also includes isometric techniques): http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Pencil-Henning-Nelms/dp/08981...
on “Old graph paper” ↗…carry a note book with me. It has my plan for the day (https://medium.com/@kristiandupont/high-resolution-planning-...), random notes and random doodles. I got into it after purchasing an old copy of Thinking With A Pencil (https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Pencil-Henning-Nelms/dp/1626...) which I think was a recommendation from some thread in here. I am not sure what it does for me, but I've been quite consistent for well…
on “The Art of Doodling” ↗That is a great site. Many years ago, my father, a mathematician, gave me a well-worn copy of the book "Thinking With a Pencil." I still have it and, even though I have internalized much of it over time, I sometimes still refer to it when drawing storyboards for UX scenarios. I just discovered that it has been re-published:…
on “How to teach technical concepts with cartoons” ↗…stencil, but it wasn't for camera ready publication use or anything. Just visualisation and discussion. My book suggestion is more illustration than technical drawing but still has a 1940s/50s vibe: Thinking with a Pencil by Henning Helms. Covers illustrations, tracing, tables, maps and diagrams as well as 3d sketches. I gather that Tufte was influenced by John Tukey's 1977 book Exploratory Data Analysis which introduces…
on “I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph” ↗