Make It Work on Paper First
The virtues of sketching well before starting a project
“Drawing makes you see things clearer,” English painter David Hockney said, “and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.”
It’s that aching clarity that we are after here at Journey Group. In pursuit of this goal, one of our principles of good work is make it work on paper first.
If we can’t draw — physically draw, on paper — our ideas for a new project, we don’t build it. We don’t construct any component until we can sit together around a table and sketch out our ideas in their entirety. Until every participant, from the project manager to the full-stack developer, understands the scope of the work. Drawing, after all, is a path to knowing.
It may seem like a silly constraint. Why draw by hand when you have Sketch and Slack and plain old email to communicate with your team? Because we’ve learned that sitting down and sketching can yield tremendous benefits before we start working on a new assignment.
We all know when Zack, creative director for our digital studio, is germinating an idea because he’ll suddenly snatch a sheet of tabloid-sized printer paper and a Sharpie and start scribbling. His sketches, and the sketches we all develop, are an important first step in our approach to design — be it crafting a tagline, a company’s new logo, a print brochure or an organization’s homepage.
There is a sizable amount of joy — and actionable ideas — that come from the free, iterative process of drawing something that lives in our heads.
Sit around and talk to each other, sketchpads in hand. Look at someone’s drawing next to yours. Eat some snacks. Draw your own version of the idea. Use freshly sharpened Faber-Castell colored pencils. Ask questions. Don’t be afraid to say, I don’t understand that blob. Can you explain it again? Or, What if we drew it this way?
Draw for Idea Generation
There are significant creative advantages that come from such collaborative sketching sessions. As Mike Brand wrote at Prototypr.io, a sketch session generates numerous ideas, and “the ideas are often more diverse than what you’d come up with on your own.”
When you gather a bunch of coworkers around a table with a stack of paper and markers, you may be (happily) surprised at the deluge of creativity that follows.
The practice of habitual workplace sketching also underscores the belief that we draw to explore. Good products need good ideas, and good ideas are often found in undiscovered places. The delight in a handful of markers and the freedom of an unlined page can release even the most suppressed inner artist. We aim to approach all of our projects with this youthful sense of creative fervor and discovery. And so we draw.
Draw for Memory
We also draw ideas on paper to remember them. Despite relying on our computers to be our secondary brains, it turns out that our memories are improved if we write things down, by hand, rather than type them.
Sitting down with your team and physically drawing your ideas can help cement a project and its details in your collective memories.
Draw for Immediacy
Simply put: There is no faster way to download a visual idea from someone’s brain than to have them sketch it.
We encourage each other to grab a pen and give a form to the ideas in our minds. We don’t have to speak at all. In a few seconds, we have a shape, a workable thing, with no words wasted.
Draw for Consensus
Related to the urge to draw for immediacy, we also draw to create consensus.
Sharing ideas — particularly visual ones — with teammates can often be fraught with misunderstandings and misinterpretations. We often find ourselves saying, when trying to describe our plan or idea, “No, that’s not what I mean,” or “That’s not what I’m imagining.”
Words, after all, are shockingly fluid, and one person’s interpretation of a phrase may differ wildly from someone else’s. Images are more concrete. We can sit around with our team or clients and talk about a thing and feel like everyone is in agreement, but as soon as someone draws it, you’ll hear murmurs: Oh, that’s what you mean. I was thinking it was something else.
Draw with your team—and for your clients—to build agreement and harmony.
As a person who feels more aligned with words than with images, I’ve found the practice of sketching that we observe at Journey Group immensely instructive. I don’t feel as native with a pad of paper as some of the designers, but I have uncovered ideas in curious places when I try to draw them.
And this is one of the virtues of making it work on paper first: We can surprise ourselves, and our teams, with what comes out of a pencil set to a sketchpad.
Use a collaborative sketch session to uncover every angle of a new project. You will build a rich repository of ideas and ensure that every member of the team understands the work at hand. And now, with a pile of drawings and ideas at your disposal, you’re ready to tackle actually constructing the thing, be it an app, a magazine layout or a website redesign.
Happy sketching!
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