If you drop by an art store, you can pick out a set of thin anime pens or colored pencils. For a small sum of money, you can purchase a Moleskine notebook in which to save your sketches. There is a certain amount of pleasure to be gained from using better tools, however. If nothing else is available, then you can use napkins, too-and plenty of designers will swear that nothing else will do. Pablo Picasso used to sketch on paper napkins and pay for his drinks that way. Sketching has four core attributes that make it both a time saver as well as a conserver of emotional energy. You can’t know if they actually work unless you try them for yourself. Simply reading about these practices won’t ever tell you if they are effective or not. In this way, it shares some things in common with developer practices like agile and test-driven development (TDD). Sketching is a design practice rather than a design theory, and to understand it, you have to actively engage in it. This is the first post in the series, however, in which you will be asked to actually do something with your own hands. In previous posts of this design series for developers, we have covered hard skills like typography and visual communication, as well as soft skills like finding inspiration.
At the same time, it is an easy skill to learn-though not to master-and you have probably been doing it all of your life without realizing it. If design can be said to have one big secret, something that makes designers what they are and distinguishes them from coders, it is sketching.
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