It’s Useless! Concepts in Design. Really! Are they?
If you’re anything like me, you are probably beating your head over whatever design concept you’re working on in your design program right now. Often, I am trying to finish a logo design, motion design, product design, or branding project with a lot going on. There’s a certain project that I have been trying to finish, but I have very little time during the day right now to do work. However, this project is special. I wanted to make sure I had the opportunity to use my “more professional” process. Unfortunately, I forgot a crucial part of the design process.
The only restraint you have is imagination. Being a person who has to work primarily with digital design programs to create a finished product, I had a bad tendency to go straight to my design programs and try to get a finished product. You need to focus on the speed of iteration, and that comes with sketching your designs first.
Sometimes we think we have a really good idea in our head so when we jump to digital-first, we’ll spend a lot of time creating this idea and waste a lot of time on something that was actually a bad idea. By using pen/pencil and paper, you can rapidly get as many ideas down on paper as you can muster. This gives you a good overview of which ideas are good and which ones you might want to skip.
The beauty of the “Aha!” moments. Sometimes you end up with the best direction to go from the beginning. An aha moment might come to you a lot easier if you are able to quickly scribble out all the bad concepts first. It could take you 2 sketches, it could take you 20,000 sketches, lol yeah right! Hah. I’m kidding. I’m I?
Taking great notes during the sketching phase might be the easiest way to improve a design once you take the design to digital. You have direct input to what is working well, what you might have to consider when going to digital, possible layout/composition changes, explaining interactions, or “hard to sketch” ideas.
