Let's Get Small

First, let's get large.

I've already written my screed on why you should sketch. But I wanted to dive a little deeper into sketching thumbnails and what we used to call tissue comps or marker comps. I was reminded of these recently because I was watching Mr. Mom where Teri Garr plays an ad exec pitching an idea for Schooner Tuna. Although in this image she is critiquing some previous ideas, and rightly so.

Behind her is a wall full of quick sketches of ideas – not really layouts or anything else – just a few words to communicate the idea and a simple sketch to go with it. We used to do this all the time. Frankly this is realer than anything I ever saw on Madmen.

I'm not suggesting you go out and buy marker pads, but there was something nice about making your ideas bigger than a post-it. It also allowed you to sketch just a little context. And you didn't have to feel like your idea was "good" to go up on the wall (see Yum Yum Tuna Bits above). All the ideas went up on the wall. You decided later on what merited moving on and maybe had a laugh over something pretty ridiculous. Nothing is ridiculous while you're brainstorming. Only after.

Next time you have to come up with some ideas, try making them LARGE.

But sometimes you want to iterate layout or storyboards or UI or logos quickly in your sketchbook (analog or digital, I don't care). That's where you're going to want to get small. Here is an example of some of my layout thumbnails, complete with unintelligible side notes.

And above is my shorthand. I think Headline and Copy are fairly universal.

I'm a visual thinker, and I like rolling layouts around in my mind. I can visualize moving things around, putting this element here or there. But even so, drawing them out quickly lets me both get away from my computer and remember what I was thinking. Keeping things small let's me draw very loosely (badly) because, in this case, nothing is large enough to feel precious.

Drawing what's in my head also quickly tells me what will actually work and if it's worth spending computer time on. Of course, sometimes I start to build something on the computer and it still doesn't work, but it doesn't take a ton of time to figure that out. Then I can move on to the next thing in my sketchbook. For this reason, sketching out some thumbnails can also be a great time management tool.

NEXT TIME YOU WANT TO WORK ON LAYOUT, TRY GETTING small.

Artists do this a lot – if they typically work small, they'll try working large to see what happens. If they typically work large, they'll try making something small. Sometimes changing the scale of something is enough to let you see it differently or even break you out of a rut.