Thinking with a pencil

What Hacker News says

1. 2b3a51May 2026
   The list of books was welcome, and the work is impressive. I always made do with section pad and a hard pencil and a simple 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 the box and whisker plot, dot plot and so on.

   As to software, another poster has mentioned Tikz (usually used with LaTeX) and yes it is amazingly flexible and can produce just about any kind of plot (or diagram) you want. But there are older tools such as the groff (GNU Troff) system's pic and a pre-processor for pic called grap which is much more barebones. The latter was also influenced by Tukey's book. The groff/pic/tbl/eqn/grap install is something like 30Mb and it is available in most Linux distribution package repositories.

   https://www.lunabase.org/~faber/Vault/software/grap/example/

   Oh and remember star charts for astronomers! Many hand plotted before the photographic surveys were produced. Norton's Star Atlas is a famous one (prior to the 2000.0 epoch edition) that was hand drawn.

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2. WistarJan 2021
   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:

   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1413805.Thinking_With_a_...

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3. kristiandupontMay 2019
   I always carry a note book with me. It has my plan for the day ([link redacted]), 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 over a year now and I do find all my old note books are quite fun to scan through.

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4. oasisbobAug 2015
   Another fun type of graph paper is composed of triangles in a hexagonal 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...

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5. billswiftNov 2011
   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...

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6. billswiftJul 2011
   You might try Henning Nelms Thinking with a Pencil, it is a great source for learning practical sketching and drawing.
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