I have a feeling that my group is suffering from a type of paralysis that makes it hard to produce sketches. But sketching is exactly what we need to do. We’re almost halfway through our two-week intensive Design Experience module, where we have to come up with a navigational device for tourists and present our work in the form of a poster. And the only way we’re going to arrive at a design is by sketching it out.
But I have a feeling that some of us feel that sketching should be a “finalized” output. That one or two should be fine. And we spend time instead discussing what the sketch should look like rather than actually doing it.
Then, I stumbled across this post on metacool, and it gave me a sense of comfort that design isn’t about being as good as someone else or something else. In fact, there are probably a ton of stuff that expert designers have produced before stumbling upon “the right one”. Sometimes, we just need to get over ourselves and get stuff done.
That being said, sketching is an art, not a science. I’ve used it in at least these following ways:
- to understand high level requirements
- to visualize types of designs
- to visualize ways of presenting information
- to illustrate flow and sequence
- to illustrate interaction
- to provide contextual background
- to highlight portions of a design
- to consolidate designs together
- to tell a story
There are probably a million other things you could do with sketching, and that’s the point. It’s a visual language. Think about the million and one ways you could say “hello”, and try to put that as a sketch on paper.
I guess I consider myself lucky that I got into comics at a very young age, not just reading them, but drawing my own comics. Sketching was just part of the whole process. It does takes practice, and after the millionth time you’ve drawn a wireframe with pencil and paper, you’re not going to ask the person next to you – “so, how do I do this?”.
So, I guess I should get on with it.