Sketch Up Your Concept
Articulate Your Idea
Conceptualizing the page or website with other principals on the project helps unify the group’s expectations regarding the final product. By sketching up the a rough outline, you’ll give your idea a small but valuable nudge in the direction of formality before the rest of your team starts working on it. By presenting your design team with a visual aid, you can better illustrate the purpose and goals of your project.
Worth 1000 Words
Working out a concept sketch allows you to communicate with your designers in a realm they understand. They are almost certainly visual problem solvers, in addition to other valuable skills and talents. When you take the time to formalize your idea into a sketch, and then communicate that idea to them verbally with the sketch, you’re greatly increasing the quality of your idea transmission. Imagine it as the difference between listening to the radio and watching TV. When listening to the radio, you have to rely on abstract reasoning and imagination to fill in the details.
Don’t Fuss Over Details Yet
Focus on presenting your creative team with a roughed out idea that illustrates the singular purpose of the page or site you’re dreaming up. Thinking about granular details now is almost always a complete waste of time, given the amount of change most web projects see before launch. Right now, your goal is to define what it does and how. Getting hung up on layout type or the specifics of an interactive UI object aren’t going to help you get this project launched.
Concept is Not Layout
It’s easy to fall in love with a sketch. On that piece of paper, your idea is just barely tangible, so full of possibility and lacking in any practical limits or concessions to reality. Unfortunately, that can often fatally cripple a project still in its early stages. When you become emotionally tied to something that is still conceptual, when your mind’s eye sees a detail as intrinsic to the spirit of the whole, change and adaptation become a battle to be won rather than an opportunity to be seized.
In more basic terms, avoid being extremely proscriptive in terms of layout, architecture and process. This is not the phase to determine if an interactive widget takes the form of a filmstrip, carousel or iTunes cover widget. Your company probably pays people a lot of money to think about those things – you want to get your money’s worth, right? Communicate your idea clearly and let your people run with it.
Get The Sketch Pad
You can really take certain things to the limit, peeling back layers of granularity to expose new benefits of formalizing things which others might simply interperet as a naked expression of OCD. Sketching your website ideas up on fancy paper is one of them. I’m super serious. Download the sketch pad that is way too fancy:
Here’s another great sketchpad
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