I got interested in circuit design a while back as despite being an actual area of expertise, most designers seem to stray from it due to it being such a dificult bridge to cross, understandably so.

 

But looking at some well designed circuits it's obvious from the degree of care and how they were laid that that there was design involved even if a Designer wasn't, Apple motherboards notwitstanding. And they clearly tend to follow design's first rule, form follows function.

 

It is to much dismay that on the other hand there are circuits that are so ugly that one can only assume they were randomly thrown together by a computer. Or by a person without a sense of aesthetics.

With some open source diagrams in hand I downloaded CadSoft Eagle PCB Design and meddled with it for a bit, I also tried to understand circuits and soldered a few things together, but I won't bore people with my non-results there.

Along the way I got acquainted with circuit illustration... it's not a very common thing to see but popular PCB Raspberry Pi has a tradition to have them. It helps if one wants to prototype something real size before it has the board or just to see how it fits somewhere. Me, myself like the look of a circuit appearing in illustrated form.

 

Incidentally I needed to prototype some PCB's I purchased in actual size before deciding which way to go. Amongst the circuits I had in hand was a SLG3000, which is a video acessory that generates scanlines.

I quickly had what I needed for a rough representation of it, but I didn't stop there.