Sketchers is known for their shoe design for every age group, catering to the lifestyle footwear market with more the 2,500 individual styles. The brand’s image has been built around eye-catching graphics, which as of recently, will be using Wacom’s Cintiq to draw their designs. As a Graphic Artist and Ilustrator at Sketchers, Anwar Madrigal designs advertising graphics, packaging and illustrations that are applied to the shoes. In the art department, Anwar originally used a Wacom Intuos graphics tablet until he upgraded to the benefits of Cintiq. Anwar is responsible for lobbying Art Director Fred Machuca for a Cintiq, selling him on Cintiq’s all digital workflow. It was soon after the Sketchers ordered their first 2 Cintiq 21UX LCD displays. Once they proved to increase productivity, more Cintiqs were ordered for the whole art department.
“The Cintiq also saves time creatively,” Anwar adds. “Your ideas flow directly onto the screen, which ensures you get a design right the first time. You can easily try different approaches without worrying about the time it will take. I love the fact that I can just turn over my Wacom pen and it’ll just erase like a regular pencil.”
Before much time was spent scanning illustrations into the computer to finish them. The Cintiq gets rid of the need to scan, and draws right onto the computer. “Simply by eliminating the scanning process, I would say the Cintiq increased my productivity by a good 25 percent,” Anwar continues. “It has become an essential tool that I use constantly.”
A typical Cintiq-enhanced task for Anwar involves working in Adobe Illustrator to create characters in vector art from scratch to adorn the boxes for kids’ shoes. Opening a template, he draws with the natural-feeling cordless, battery-free pen directly onto the Cintiq screen. Anwar was elated to find the Cintiq fit perfectly into his workflow.
It wasn’t long before the rest of the building was talking about the art department’s boosts in productivity with the Cintiq. Soon the Sketchers design department upgraded to Cintiqs as well. Anwar is proud to have been the pioneer blazing a trail for Cintiq’s at Sketchers. With some of the strongest graphics and shoe designs in the competitive footwear industry, the commitment Skechers has made to Cintiqs is clearly paying off.
To read an Architosh review of a Wacom Graphite 640 tablet read here.
For more information visit www.wacom.com/cintiq/