Clarity and cogency are the most important
objectives for your drawings.
To
achieve a convincing elegance (elegance is very convincing) make sure the
drawing is well placed within the sheet of paper.
Do not
crowd the sheet of paper. It makes the person looking on feel as if the design
has no controol over itself. A lot of space is quiet, calm, controlled.
It
is often a good device to place the drawing slightly off-centre, leaving a lot
of blank space around it and especially to one side. This side can then receive
annotations such as a small text, a quotation or emblem, which embodies the
leading idea around which your design has developed.
Make
sure that the composition is clear; do not clutter your drawings too much with
superfluous “effects”. Economy is far more elegant and convincing than clutter.
Make
sure that any lettering does not dominate the drawing, but that it enhances the
composition of the sheet as a whole.
Devise
systems to enhance the clarity of your design, using colour and other code
systems.
Brightly
coloured papers, such as dark browns, bright yellows, deep pinks, purples and
blacks are very difficult to use successfully for a presentation drawing. In
fact, I personally have yet to see examples where such drawings have been an
unequivocal success. Usually they succeed only in looking tacky. Lines and
colours on such a background often lose their brilliance. For this reason it
may be better to stick to whites and pale shades of grey, cream or vanilla.