From Sketch to Reality: The Power of Sketching in the Design Process
Design sketching – the process of visualizing concepts by hand can be a powerful tool. As designers, we love to sketch. It’s the excitement of creating something new and the opportunity a blank canvas presents. Design sketching is thinking visualized and helps our team to bring to life our client’s discussions, thoughts, ideas, and solutions right in front of their eyes. It is also a lot of fun for all involved – especially to those who are unpracticed – in the magic of watching ideas take form.
Often sketching is overlooked as an important stage in design development – in favor of jumping straight to computer-based approaches. But sketching allows for exploration and the fluidity of sketch allows one to move through ideas effortlessly. Its low fidelity means there is less friction in the process, and we don’t get hung up on details that are not important. Ideas have space to flow, and there is a momentum and energy created by sketching where to brainstorming process accelerates as visual feed into new ideas and back into new sketches. In client brainstorms, we encourage the unpracticed to sketch too! Design sketching is not about creating a beautiful image it is about exploring a beautiful idea.
In some cases, we use sketches to outline quick visuals of potential directions to clients in the design discovery stage. These sketches often match quite closely with the final result.
Sometimes the sketches are quick, gestural to provide feedback to our internal team – they capture the spirit of the project at hand.
Finally, we often use sketches to quickly explore concept directions to align a larger team of stakeholders on a direction for the project as with this Flagship TV showroom designed for Samsung.
From what we’ve described above, you can see why sketching is an important first step into the ideation phase of any project. To see some of the results, we’ve included some examples below. Surprisingly, those simple first sketches often turn out to be quite close to the final result.
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