Whether you design a website, mobile app, logo design or even a product, you need to have some basic ideas. The power of sketching is something that would give you the foundation of your final design. Being a designer, you should always prepare 10-20 rough sketches of a web or interface product and share them with your team, stake holders or end client before creating the actual wireframes.
Photo credit goes to Bombardier
It’s your brain that makes design decisions but not by any software tools. Most of the web design companies or design schools ask you to generate quick ideas by sketching on paper rather than using computers. Ask me why! Because this is just about generating different ideas within a moment no matter how bad they are.
Now, sketching is the solution if you are running out ideas. Get some plain sheets and a pen/pencil to sketch some of the ideas on paper. You don’t need to be an artist to do this..believe me you don’t need to make a perfect circle or square, because they are nothing but the sketches.
For an instance, If your project is about a logo design for a sports company, you have to go through the client brief or probably having a discussion with the client (face to face if possible) and asking such as what are they targeting, their turn over, which are the end users, what are the age groups, what are they trying to sell and so on.
The most important part of your project phase while discussing with your client. I would suggest, you should ask as many questions you can at this time and don’t give any rapid answers as a solution at this point. Now compile all the points and fix it up in your soft board or write them on your white board if you have one. The good thing is that you have got all the keywords from client to get started with your sketches before the final design.
Photo Credit Goes to?juhansonin
Now grab a coffee or tea and get your sketch book in front of your soft board/white board. Try to sketch anything that comes to your mind based on the keywords that you gathered during client visit. Don’t worry about the layout of your page or size of your sketch either since these are your only ideas for the design.
The best thing in sketching is that you have no restriction of using pre defined shapes than sketch/draw anything that you can think of. I believe that you can make more than 10 sketches within an hour and keep those for one concept. Once you have more than 10 sketches, you can review them by putting a tick mark (works/doesn’t work) next to it. Now you are ready for the next step, the actual design mockups.
You can get those sketches along with the computer generated refined printout during your next client visit. Explain your ideas as solution over the logo and show the sketches with the final printout. This would help your client to understand the real process involved during making the logo design.
You can apply the same sketching process not only in logo design, but also in rest of the design verticals. Try and apply the power of sketching as a thumb rule for your current or upcoming projects for a perfect design work flow.
Here are some useful related articles from external links:
- 3 ways to sketch your diy idea
- Sketching the visual thinking power tool
- Innovate sketch out your ideas
- Sketching how a simple pen and paper can transform your web designs
- Messy art ux sketching
Thank you for reading this article.
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