Find your sketching language
There are infinite techniques and frameworks for achieving great sketches, but you shouldn’t focus on the quality of sketches, but their purpose.
For illustrations there’s guiding shapes that help us create harmonious drawings; ovals and line grids to sketch a character head, face, hair, eyes, nose and mouth.
Wires
In digital design sketching has even its own name: wireframing. And it comes with its own basic visual language:
- Thick horizontal line = heading
- Several thin horizontal lines = paragraph
- Crossed outlined rectangle = picture
- Small outlined rectangle = button
- And so on…
This system gives you all the analogies you need to create quickly and test, connect, delete, add. To finally build a paper prototype, ready to be migrated into a screen.
Layouts and slides
Similarly, a group of horizontal lines and boxes (representing a paragraph or a picture) can be used for sketching a layout for a publication or an on-screen presentation.
My recommendation is: sketch! Always.
Make sketching a mandatory step in your process and gradually build your sketching language. Don’t focus on the quality of the drawings or the fancy details, but the functional role they’re playing in your task.
They will help you define concepts in your mind and communicate your ideas with others.
