8th February 2012

Diagrams and Colour Pencils

When working through the creative phase of a design, I use colour pencils to layout diagrams and think through issues. So I thought that I would put a sample drawing and get some comments back from people.

Are you doing something similar ? Do you have any suggestions ?

Note: In Europe, we don’t have cube walls, so there are very few whiteboards around so we tend to sketch diagrams at our desks

Data Center Outline

So this is a rough sketch of a Cisco Data Centre 2.0 type using Service Chains for a single data centre. I think using colour pencils make it more compelling and more interesting.

ColourPencilsSample.jpg

Postscript

Occasionally I wish I had done some more creative stuff at school, or could I make time to to do some drawing or art classes. But then, I start reading a new book or design notes and forget about it. After all, people don’t hire me to draw pictures…….or do they ?

This post is copyright of Thropos Ltd ©2008-2011 at Etherealmind.com - contact | email: greg.ferro@packetpushers.net - twitter: @etherealmind | All rights reserved
About Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus

  • Onur Yirmibesoglu

    A decent part of any networking job is drawing IMHO. If not for documentation, then for one’s own comprehension. I correlate my knowledge of a specific network with how well I can draw it from memory.

    A big white-board with 5-6 color markers does the trick for me. I’ve been known to confiscate other departments’ boards if one is not immediately available :)

  • http://eatyourpets.com/ yeled

    my best tools are my A3 sketch pad and my clutch pencil!

    I only learn visually – and this includes my own networks. when i make a reasonable image in pencil, i photocopy it large and stick it to my wall.

    omnigraffle is only used for clients :)