Apr 1, 2021
Sketching Ideas on Paper
One of the crucial skills as a designer is to sketch your ideas. Nowadays, most designers have design tools to jump on to designing the screen’s layouts quickly. But as an old school, I still prefer paper and pen as my best buddies for design.
When given a problem statement, I list out all the how, why, what, when, and whom to get more clarity on the purpose of designing something. All my bubbles of thoughts are put down on paper which I later connect to bring out a structured framework.
Working with pen and paper has its advantages
- It reduces my cognitive load
- It helps me think of new ideas when all my initial thoughts are on paper.
- It helps me connect to the random thoughts I am having and brings more structure and clarity to the thought process.
- A hand-drawn sketch looks more intriguing and less intimidating as compared to designs on digital screens.
- You can walk through a whole concept to your audience while drawing the sketch, which piques more interest and clarity among them.
Though remote work has reduced these instances in the meetings, we can look forward to design tools like Miro, Sketchboard, Invision Freehand integrating these features when we are collaborating with the team at the same time.
Sometimes a random scribble is more liberating than a stereotyped visual design. When scribbled on paper, a vague concept can become a discussion point in meetings that brings in more ideas and scope for improvements till we see that vague becoming concrete in shape.
When designing on design tools, we fall in love with our first solution, but when on paper, it is easy to produce twenty or thirty sketches to find the answers to various problems and retain only one. Starting over is always an option here.
