Paper-first design

Designing on paper might seem slow at first, but it will save you time down the road.

I used to treat paper as a pitstop. A space for quickly jotting down ideas before jumping right into Sketch. That’s where the real work happened, after all. Not on a piece of paper.

The problem with digital tools, though, is that there are so many things you can do. Before you know it, you get caught up playing with typefaces or tweaking icons. All while the real design problems linger untouched.

But on paper you have none of that. There are no temptations and no distractions. No eye candy to kidnap your attention. No shortcuts and no copy & paste either. Only you and the problems you are trying to solve.

That sort of preparation makes a difference when you finally do fire up Sketch. You know exactly what you are going to do. You don’t waste time. You don’t get distracted as easily.

Digital tools have supercharged design. But it’s easy to abuse these superpowers. Spending more time on paper can help. Although it might seem slow at first, it will certainly save you time down the road.