Drawn to scale.

In 1977 Charles and Ray Eames made a nine-minute film that opens on a couple picnicking by the lake in Chicago.¹ Every ten seconds the camera pulls back until the view is ten times wider: the park, the city, the planet, the galaxy.

Sarah’s work makes the same journey by hand. A crochet stitch. A painted tile. A shelf a cat can walk along. A room, a café, a five-storey building, a courtyard in Lucknow. She draws all of it, and she is drawn to all of it.

That is the idea this book is built on, and the reason her portfolio is laid out like the thing she makes every week: a drawing set.

Architects choose a scale for every drawing, depending on how big the thing is and how much of it you need to see.

A detail is drawn full size; a room at one to fifty; a building at one to two hundred; a site at one to five hundred. Sarah’s work covers the whole range, so the portfolio is ordered by scale rather than by semester. Below is each piece at the scale an architect would draw it.

Look at the corner of any sheet Sarah draws and you’ll find her titles: thin, even capitals, with a few letters painted in.

Furniture Layout. Sectional Elevations. Isometric View. Above and below the letters you can still see the faint guide lines she ruled to keep them straight.²

We use her lettering the way she does: once, at the head of a sheet. Everything that has to be read (titles, captions, navigation) is set in type, so it’s the same everywhere, clear on a phone and findable in a search. Her hand gives the page its character; the type gives the facts.

By day the site is cartridge paper, the warm white sheet she paints on.³

At night it becomes a blueprint. From the late nineteenth century, architects’ drawings were copied as cyanotypes: white lines on a deep Prussian blue.⁴ In blueprint mode her watercolours sit on the blue as paper sheets, and her working drawings turn into true blueprints.

Every colour comes from her paint. We sampled each one from the studio apartment drawings, and only deepened a colour where it has to carry text.

Two typefaces, chosen the way she chooses pens.

Gambetta is a warm serif with fine, sharp hairlines, close to her ink line; it sets her name, her headings and every sentence. Martian Mono has the even rhythm of a title block; it sets every label, sheet number and scale. Both are free.

On Sarah’s drawings the title block is the small box in the bottom corner: the college, her name, the date, her teacher’s signature.⁵

On the website it runs along the bottom of every page: her name, the sheet you’re on, its scale, the sheet number and a north arrow. The scale bar inside it fills as you read.⁶ On the A3 portfolio it stands down the right-hand edge, exactly where it sits on her working drawings.

They slide, they are laid down, and sometimes they are cut.

The home page pulls back through her work by scale, from a stitch to a courtyard. Project pages let you cut a section through her plans and see her real section drawing appear. Her small objects sit on a desk and lean, a little, towards your pointer. When a visitor has asked their device for less motion, everything simply fades.

Try it: press A, B, C or D on her plan.