Sketching

Every project I work on starts the same way — not in Figma, but in the corner of a notebook, as a messy little thumbnail that only makes sense to me. Sketching is where I let ideas be bad on purpose. Nobody critiques a doodle in the margin, which is exactly why the best ideas tend to show up there first.

I carry a small sketchbook most places, not just for design work. Half the pages are wireframes and app flows, the other half are whatever caught my eye that day — a chair, someone's shoes on the train, the way a shadow fell across a table. It's less about the drawing being good and more about the habit of actually looking at things closely enough to draw them.

Before any screen gets touched, a project usually goes through five or six thumbnail rounds — tiny, fast, thrown away as often as kept. It's the cheapest way I know to find out an idea doesn't work before spending real time on it.