Every Sketch Deserves To Be In The Trash
Paper sketches — why the ability to throw them away is the best and worst thing about them
Sketching is a medium capable of continuously evolving our thoughts while they travel from brain to hand, hand to paper and back.
I work as a UX designer, so sketching is my bread and butter.
A lot has been talked about why sketching on paper is an excellent tool for building any idea. Sketching an idea on paper gives shape to it; something that helps you start and gives you momentum to keep working.
The ideas can be about an illustration, an application, a behavior change, a joke, an animation, a video, a travel journal, a photograph, a story or anything.
Sketching does not always mean drawing. It can be a combination of written content, doodles, scribbles and anything that a pen jots down on paper.
Frank Gehry is one of the most influential contemporary architects. Every Gehry building begins with a drawing which is characterized by the natural spontaneity.
His sketches conveyed spatial relationships and loose directions in a way only he could understand. Those sketches would go through several refinements and eventually become architecture marvels, unlike any others.
If you are a user experience designer, you probably spend large amount of time creating wireframes on paper.
In the design world, there is an unwritten rule about making wireframes.
One is not supposed to think about how the final application should look like during the wireframe stage.
This rule is to let the designer’s mind focus on what is essential at that stage, that is, the user flow and information architecture.
But as a human being, you are biased.
You have ideas in mind about how your app should look or feel. You might have ideas about how the animation should work in the app, how the buttons should pop or the cards should move.
These are great ideas that help you make the product great.
So, why not sketch them too?
While making wireframes, I sketch my quick ideas on how the elements can look, animate or work in the same sheet. My wire-frames are more of a clumsy journal than neatly drawn screens. Yes, I do make those as well, but at a later stage.
What usually shapes my final output are those ugly sketches.
Securely storing the sketches is a big headache. There was a time when I started sketching directly on my iPad in the hope of saving them for the future.
Since you have the liberty of cutting, copying and moving things around in the iPad app, my sketches were not ugly anymore.
With the neat and structured sketch, I lost track of where and how the corrections were made (on paper I would strike off and change, keeping the history of changes intact on the same sheet).
I was bothered about the mess made by the duplicates of the sketches or the notes. Another worry was my ‘iCloud’ storage getting eaten up. All this lead to one thing.
I created fewer iterations than before.
It reflected in my work as well. I became proud of my iPad sketches and less open to criticism.I soon found myself going back to pen and paper.
I realized that I missed scribbling, accumulating heaps of paper and more importantly, throwing them away.
Ability to throw paper sketches away is the best thing about them.
Throwing the sketches away is as important as making them in the first place.
When you have noted your ideas down once, you have them in your mind. You are excited about them. You start dreaming about them.
But great things happen when you crush that piece of paper, take a new one and resume scribbling.
Your further sketches may not look as ugly as before because you are excited about sharing your thoughts with somebody; superior at work, roommate, your critique-friend or anyone. It does not matter if those sketches are also hideous as long as you can decrypt them.
This level of informality about paper sketches lets you maintain an iffy relationship with your ideas and preserves your creativity. And more often than not, you can channel your thoughts better with this approach.
You can sketch anything you want to make into a reality. Almost all the movies are first drawn on paper. Sometimes with stick figures, or a frame by frame storyboard at a later stage.
Once you sketch an idea, whether you choose to keep them or not, you are now elevated to a platform where the view is sharper and broader.
Good luck sketching! Don’t forget to throw them away.
Thanks for reading, folks. This is my first blog post on any medium. If you liked this article, please hit the clap button and follow me for more write-ups.
I am a UX Designer, an enthusiastic traveler, and a hobby illustrator. Follow me on Instagram if you would like to see my illustrations.
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