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Comment by slurple | Hacker News Reader

"Anyway, if you look through the documentation, every time he wanted parts in the ‘70s he would hand draw the part. For example, a light bulb or a brake caliper, or whatever it might be. The sketches are so intricate they look like a photograph. He’d make multiple copies of his sketches and mail them out, asking shops if they had these parts."

I would love to see those!

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By "hand drawn" do they mean freehand, or drawn with manual pencil drafting techniques? Because both are done by hand, and really most trained draftsmen produced drawings of that quality (even lettering would look like it was printed).

Drafting techniques. My uncle was trained in drafting and blueprinting.

From the comment you're replying to: "The sketches are so intricate they look like a photograph."

I look at images of Apple products and can't tell if they're CG or meticulous studio photography.

see also ikea. they had their modellers take photography courses and their photographers take 3d modelling classes IIRC. good luck telling renders from photos in their catalogue.

I can confirm this. Source: IKEA communications, their marketing arm, was a client of a company I used to work for. Not only were we given a lot of source material, but we also got to tour IKEA HQ in Älmhult, Sweden, whenever we went down there for meetings and the likes. It's really quite remarkable what they've got down there. Several photo and movie studios, with essentially a warehouse full of IKEA furniture from pretty much every era, in at least three copies I think they said. The 3d department in contrast was unassuming – just a few people (can't remember exact count, but I'd guess less than 20 at least) in a room doing amazing work. We'd spend a bunch of time looking at pictures playing "can you pick out what's rendered and what's not?" kind of thing. (Side note: this was around the time IKEA decided to switch to Verdana from their proprietary IKEA Sans font as well, and it was fun to get an inside perspective on it.)

I very much enjoyed working with them – highly professional people that really know what they're doing.

Hear hear! And I think if you made prints of them, there'd be a demand!

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