Sketching Your Startup
Ridley Scott is by far and away one of my favorite directors of all-time, along with J.J. Abrams, Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, Edgar Wright, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, and James Cameron. I remember watching Alien for the first-time as a petrified kid and being transfixed by both the terror on the screen and his attention to detail in every intense shot. Watching his gritty hardboiled vision of the future in Blade Runner for the first time as an awe struck teen was pretty much a religious experience. Needless to say, I’m pretty excited about Prometheus coming out in a few days.
Happily found this on HN today and it was a nice reminder of the value of paper and pen storyboarding. Anyone who’s sat with me in a meeting has seen me pull out my trusty Ziplock bag packed with multicolor Sharpies, pens and pencils and start sketching personas, business ecosystems, wireframes, logos and notes during the meeting. I try to spend at least two hours a day now iteratively sketching wireframes and concept notes, and know that a project or startup is worth giving a shot if I can generate a full spec of sketches, a logo, and a user narrative that passes the smell test with my wife, Cathrine, gets my teammates excited, and, most importantly, clicks when I hit the streets and talk to users.
I’ve caught the occasional raised eyebrow from a suit whenever I do this, but to me an hour or two a day spent sketching on paper like this is worth it. You can photocopy your drawings, come in the office, and just tape them to the wall during a meeting with your teammates to talk through the user personas, the interaction design, and let the technical requirements and workplans flow from that dialogue. As humans, we’re built to tell and understand stories, especially visual stories, not 30-page business plans, financial models and corporate Newspeak. Plus, your documentation becomes much thinner, direct, and collectively absorbed with such a tangible reference point of the product vision on hand at all times.
Best of all, because this is all paper, folks won’t feel so bad about delivering constructive criticism and the cost afterwards of tweaking or killing off ideas is just:
Step 1: Get more paper and a pen
Step 2: Start drawing
After that, you can just go straight from paper to an HTML, CSS, Javascript prototype to polish and finish from there. I’ve found Twitter Bootstrap, TypeKit and Google Fonts, The Noun Project, and D3 to be more than enough to get a first draft done in a reasonable amount of time.
Speaking of which, I should get back to my latest set of storyboards and sketches for Project Phoenix…
