Whitelines
Anyone doing technical or design work has burned through reams of graph paper. I’m a designer, and I use Whitelines to do technical drawings in accurate scale, which are then turned into 3-D models and die tooling diagrams. Whitelines is the best graph paper I have ever worked with.
The concept is simple and powerful. Ordinary graph paper is paper with a graph of lines printed on it in a light color, often blue or gray. Whitelines is paper with a very light gray grid of squares printed on it. The graph is unprinted, hence, white lines.
This is genius. Pen strokes, and even pencil, are startlingly clear against the background. The distracting visual noise of a printed graph is gone entirely, while retaining the precision and ability to see scale, which is graph paper's reason for being.
I've been using Whitelines extensively for the past few months, mostly for technical drafting on the MakerBeam project, an open source metal building kit like Meccano for the Arduino set. The grid is .5 centimeter pitch, perfect for working on a metric standard. With ordinary graph paper, pencil lines are close in color weight to the lines themselves. When scanning pencil marks on ordinary graph paper, the pencil lines often vanish completely. With Whitelines, I can scan a pencil sketch, if I'm satisfied with it, without having to go back over it with pen.
Available in A4, A5 and pocket sizes, as tablets, spiral bound, perfect and hardbound, both lined and graph. Better graph paper makes better drawings, and this is genuinely better graph paper.
Available from Amazon
Manufactured by Whitelines
Favorite (15)
scruss
Good graph paper uses non-photo blue ruling at 1mm pitch. These lines don't show at all when scanned or photocopied.
Andrew H.
scruss: can you recommend a good graph paper brand whose lines don't show up when scanned or photocopied? I don't think most people (myself included) know which brands would function that way, or where to get them (I've definitely bought graph paper before where the lines showed up when scanned and photocopied).
Scott
So this paper is grey with white lines instead of white with grey (or blue) lines? Am I reading the description correctly?
c-dub
@scruss:
The benefit isn't just that it copies and scans better. Because you’re drawing on top of white lines, rather than blue or gray or black, the drawing shows up better than it does with conventional graph paper -- while you’re working on it.
@Andrew H:
I’ve found that most modern scanners and photocopiers detect “non-photo blue” quite well; back in the good old days, you could always count on it disappearing, but that’s not the case anymore. It’s still easy enough to get rid of the blue (at least in grayscale images) but it’s not quite the no-brainer it once was.
@Scott:
Yes, that's it.
Dan
I saw this idea promoted by Edward Tufte years ago, but I didn't know it had been turned into a real product.
Jong Chen
You could also use http://www.staples.com/Ampad-Evidence-Engineers-5-x-5-Quadrille-Pad/product_601021?cmArea=SEARCH
This has been around forever. Though the paper is only single sided. The back side is printed with a very dark grid. When viewed from the front you can see the grid through the paper. The paper is designed so that when you copy the paper the grid is not visible. Engineers use the paper to take notes, and design things in pencil. For permanent record keeping the page is copied (so that changes can't be made anymore, the original is in pencil).
Fazal Majid
Behance's Dot grid book (http://www.creativesoutfitter.com/Products/Dot-Grid-Book/9) is a better approach IMO. They just have dots at the vertices of the graph, not the actual rules themselves.
Dacker
@Jong Chen
I've been using Engineers-5-x-5-Quadrille since I was in college in the late 70's. I refer to it as "Engineer's Stationary."
I still use it when working with my kids on their geometry homework.
scruss
I don't remember particular brands, except that the cheap stuff you could get at W H Smith. It was a little thin, but it was A4, the size that paper wants to be.
Ron
Does any of this stuff come in larger sizes? I have a pad of 17"x22" graph paper (1/4" grid) that comes in very handy at times.
Dave
Very cool. Also thanks for the link to Makerbeam! I have been looking for something like this. Hopefully after things go into production this will end up on the site as another cool tool.
christopher
My problem with buying the gridpaper is that I can make it easily enough.
An Excel spreadsheet with cells 11.5 row height and 1.29 column height, white gridlines on light grey background, does the same thing.
Yes, I'm using my own consumables and I own a copy of Office. I'm sure you can do this with a free spreadsheet tool as well; no getting around the paper and ink costs but really, in this case I'd rather use what I already have than add a single-purpose tool to my life.
-C
c-dub
Nice point, Christopher. I've occasionally used a CAD program to draw my own "specialty" grid paper for isometric drawings and oddly-scaled drawings. It can be a very convenient option.
Michael Brown
WONDERFUL discovery, thanks so much!!
Mike D
For "print your own graph paper," I've been using this site for years:
www.printfreegraphpaper.com
I don't often have a need for it, so it's nice to print out some when I do need it.
bifyu
I shared the Whitelines concept with the maintainer of another free graph/grid paper site, and he added an inverse version for the square grid paper.
http://www.incompetech.com/graphpaper/inverted/