There are (at least) two parts of my sketching process.
- Spit-firing all of the ideas: getting them out on paper (or dry-erase or whatever)
- Selecting the strong ideas from the weak ones.
I need to have a lot of bad ideas before I can get to the good ones. I learned this process a few years ago: how to get these “bad” ideas out of my system. Once they’re materialized, there is more room in my mind for “good” ideas.
I’ve never worked at a startup, but a couple of years my peers/friends/colleagues and I got together to develop the glossy IU Student Media magazine INSIDE (and hey, it’s still going strong!).
We were building something out of nothing and had never “had a baby before” so this process was new. I was working with a co-art director to selecting typeface, color, page numbers, baseline grid numbers, masterpages, illos, paragraph styles and all the elements of the visual language. After some difficulty with progress, we arrived at a simple rule for the Phase 1 of sketching (spit-firing):
When an idea is being proposed for the first time, discuss it. Avoid, with all of your might, to say “no” immediately.
This helped so much! Our design styles (and personalities) were very different. Very frequently, we wanted to say no. If we kept doing that, no ideas would have ever materialize. Instead, when an idea was proposed, we talked about why it would or wouldn’t work (this mocks the critique process in a way).
Now, “What about time?” you ask, “Who has time to talk about every single idea?” And no, we don’t have all of that time. But simply eliminating “no” or “I don’t like that,” or “that would never work,” from the initial phases helped us make room in our brains for good ideas. “Bad” ideas also, often, spark really good ones.
I am not perfect and surely have been saying no, but I’m going to try to practice this during the semester.