You can’t draw. And that’s great.

Why people who say they can’t draw become invaluable during design workshops.

If you “can’t draw to save your life”, you’re my favourite person to have in a group workshop. That look of fear in your eyes because I’ve asked you to draw 3 sketches in two minutes means it’s going to be a great session.

Not being able to draw gives you a big advantage over more art-savvy individuals and here’s why: you spend your time creating diagrams that can communicate the idea, rather than spending time making things look proportional and technically correct. This means you work faster and can achieve more in the allocated time than the graphic designer sitting next to you. But it’s more than just the sketching, you actually think better to. Whilst others around you are over-thinking, you are busy just finishing.

Over the course of the workshop you adapt to being a reactive thinker, and naturally solve problems better by understanding less. After the ice-breaker exercises you will realise you have nothing to lose by giving things a shot. People like you often go on to be the champion of the workshop.

When we do these workshops, no one creates great looking sketches. They are not meant to look great. That’s why we encourage chunky pens and varying paper sizes, with exercises that last only a few minutes. Most of the time the exercises are done simply to get you to think in a different way. Your brain is working at a very fast pace to simultaneously think of ideas and get them down on paper in a certain format for the exercise at hand. Once the group is over the fact that their sketches look a bit shit because they’ve seen everyone else’s equally shitty looking ones, the real fun can begin. It’s an intense day, but one that generates a lot of ideas and maybe, just maybe, the next million dollar startup.

So if you worry about the fact you “cannot draw”, don’t! You may well play the most important role out of everyone in the room.

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Want to know more about how a design workshop could help your business? Feel free to send me a tweet to get the conversation started @lawsmith_

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Thank you for reading 😀