Sketching is a vital part of the design process with lots of benefits.
The design process that we follow here at Toast design agency is one that we have developed over the last 20 years, allowing us to achieve the best possible result for each project that we work on.
Our process is fluid and flexible and can be tailored to each individual brief, but sketching remains a vital part of almost every project.
Sketching allows us to get our ideas down quickly without overthinking them, or even dismissing them before they’ve even left our brains. It allows us explore ideas and to clear our minds, brainstorm, plan things out quickly and think away from the restrictions of the computer screen.
Click the image to view the completed project.
Click the image to view the completed project.
When sat in front of a computer with a plethora of effects, fonts and images to play with, we sometimes lose the real purpose of what we’re doing – engineering the perfect solution to solve our brief.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t the times where we can jump straight onto the computer and put something together quickly, but they usually come after some creative thinking has been carried out previously.
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Pushing ideas forward.
By working on pen and paper first, once you’ve got the idea, having sketched out those initial thoughts along the way, by the time you get to working digitally, you know that the creative options are narrowed down for you.
You know what type of layout you’re looking to create, what fonts will work, as the groundwork has been done and now you can design with conviction.
For many of the projects that we work on, we present our sketches to clients before they see anything worked up. This means that we’re not too precious about one particular direction, we haven’t wasted hours in working something up that the client dismisses in one minute because the idea doesn’t work for them.
Sketched ideas can also be interpreted in different ways by different people and then developed on paper, making the final idea even stronger before we get to working it up on screen. In our experience, presenting a client with an idea that is too polished can make them feel like they can’t change it.
Old-school.
Sketching is a big part of the craft of design that not all clients of design agencies will see, which is a shame. At Toast, we’re proud of our ability to communicate our ideas with pen and paper and not hide behind shiny visuals.
We feel that it’s just as important for our clients to know how we got to the end result as well as it is to see it. This means that our clients can be confident that we’ve actually thought about their project rather than designing for the sake of it and making it look pretty.
So, if you have a project in hand or would like to talk to us about what our design process can do for you drop us a line and we can get sketching for you.
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Toast is a full-service design agency, we work with clients on everything from business card design to WordPress websites. If you need a quote for an upcoming project, call us on 01295 266644 or complete the form and we'll get in touch.
Written by.
I’m the creative director at Toast, I look after our client’s design assets to ensure that everything we create for them looks how it should, works hard and is effective. I’m also involved in brand strategy and brand creation and I love getting involved with a brand as early as possible to bring those great ideas from the start. I encourage our designers to develop their skill sets and their craft, from idea generation to sketching before working on the mac.
