Why Can’t We Draw Blog Posts?

Why can’t we draw blog posts? Or emails? We have so much to say, but only a keyboard to help us say it.

We’re rediscovering sketching, a wonderful thing. But our tools have to help us sketch and communicate our sketches. We spend an awful lot of time inside email, word processing, blogging, and instant messaging software, wouldn’t it be nice if these had drawing tools? Perhaps they will as touch screens become more common, but I’d rather see us actively widen our means of expression rather than wait.

Lazy web?

7 comments

  1. I have the same question. Our electronic communication and publishing mechanisms are constrained only by our mental models — in this case, the printing press.

    In a Gutenberg era/movable type environment these constraints make sense, but in a digital world anything we can imagine is possible.

    Also: I love the way you expressed this.

  2. Well, lots of blog tools let you upload/inline a “photo”. A JPEG sketch should be just as easy.

    Growing support of SVN should be helpful, too.

  3. Right, and that’s how I created this post, by using a Wacom tablet to make a file in Photoshop, export it to a PNG file, upload it to my blog tool, and preview the post to see it. It’s a very second-class input citizen compared to typewritten text which is native to these tools.

  4. I used to work with Logitech’s io digital pen. It allows you to write and draw in a more or less regular paper note/sketch-book. Then you connect your digital pen to your laptop and upload the content.

    This means at the end you have the writing and sketching in paper and in digital form.

    However, one day I just didn’t used it anymore because it wasn’t integrated enough into my daily routines and ways of working…

    Too bad actually, now I’m back to sketching in powerpoint. How poor is that?

  5. Actually there are some who take the efforts of that “second-class input” to blog, just check out my website tintenblog.de :-) But you are right: it means a detour on getting your thoughts onto online media, and I am still waiting for a better solution.

  6. Pingback: Dibujar posts o emails… « Conectando los puntos

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