SketchBook O, Made for Oprah Winfrey

You don’t normally expect an Autodesk design product to be part of a fashion and lifestyle magazine featuring beauty tips and celebrity interviews. But thanks to talk-show diva Oprah Winfrey, Autodesk’s lines and arcs are about to meet the circle of O, the magazine co-published by Winfrey’s Harpo Print, LLC.

Autodesk and Winfrey’s publication staff are teaming up to develop SketchBook O, especially developed for the Creativity Challenge that’ll appear in February issue of O. Led by writer and filmmaker Miranda July, the challenge encourages readers to express themselves in a series of exercises.

If you want to take up the “Draw Their Hair” challenge, for example, you may, “Think about the people who stirred you up last year—the ones who enraged you, made you feel lustful, brought out your tenderness, and so on. Now think of their hair. Using the SketchBook O app or a piece of white paper, draw just the hair of each of these people. Draw carefully,  using a picture as a reference if you have one, and notice the details.”

SketchBook O is free. At the end of the magazine’s challenge (March 11), you will no longer be able to submit drawings to Oprah’s site, but the drawing tools will continue to work. Autodesk also plans to release an update to turn SketchBook O into SketchBook Express, also free.

SketchBook Mobile, another app from Autodesk, costs $2.99, a negligible price tag compared to the cost of other Autodesk software titles. Nevertheless, the success of this easy-to-learn, consumer-friendly app for iPad and iPhone is “beyond our wildest dream,” according to Autodesk Labs’ VP Brian Matthews.

Sales of SketchBook Mobile and other lightweight apps on iTune app store (such as AutoCAD WS and Inventor Publisher Mobile Viewer) may account for just a small fraction of Autodesk’s profit margin. At least for the foreseeable future, profession design software suites remain Autodesk’s core business. But the popularity of its mobile apps may give the company a foothold in the consumer market and Mac community, both previously untapped markets for the CAD giant.