It doesn’t matter who you are. If you’re a creative, it makes sense to sketch as much as possible. Even our resident photographer, Jorge Menes, sketches all the time. As much as this looks like chicken-scratch, it actually means something to him!

I tell my students this all the time: If you don’t start your designs with a grid, then you’ve already screwed up. I don’t care what you’re trying to accomplish, you need a grid. Sure, you don’t want that grid to “own your ass”, so you can always intentionally “break” that grid after establishing it. But opening Photoshop / Illustrator / InDesign / Fireworks / etc. without any idea of how you’re going to lay something out is going to kill you in the end (and your designs will most likely be crappppie).

Good creatives draw inspirations from personal experiences. Many mentors of my own have emphasized the importance of putting myself and my own experiences into my creative efforts. Sometimes, it is very easy to struggle with the issue of What the Client Wants vs. What You Want to Do. When faced with a situation like this, it is best to pull back and search for new inspirations. Otherwise you put yourself in a miserable hole and you end up hating the work. Even worse, you give up and do “exactly-what-the-client-wants-and-you-want-to-jump-off-a-bridge-because-you-hate-yourself-for-being-such-a-pushover”. This leads to you delivering a P.O.S. that no one is happy with. And guess what? It’s your fault!

I’ve been lucky enough to travel over the last 10 days, and over the weekend I found this little nugget in Austin, Texas. It speaks volumes to me about some of the design decisions our creative team has made with our line, PROCESS, and where we are headed in the coming seasons. A bad designer would re-render this exact imagery and drop it on a tee or bag or whatever… For me, finding this gem is more about the “ah-ha” moment I had when I picked this up. This is truly the inspiration I needed for a thousand new ideas. Time to jam!

The past few days, I’ve been working for Franco from XTM Online as he gears up for his big event, Exposure, on August 7th. Our line, We Are The Process, will be featured in his fashion show, as well as some of our favorite designers from Atlanta. This post isn’t really about the fashion show, per se. It’s more about one of the fundamental skills I learned while in design school that I was reminded of today. It dawned on me that this could be the proper forum to drop some knowledge on (or at least remind) a few readers on the benefits of sketching.

All too often, designers will skip the essential step of sketching. Going straight to the computer to work through all of your good and bad ideas typically leads to a generic/cold result. People forget that a freakin’ Apple computer is really just a design tool, not a way of doing things.

Usually my sketches aren’t very detailed (I like to spend more time getting the ideas out as quickly as possible), yet I still take the time to put pen to paper. Whether it is a layout challenge or a logo, you have to commit to working things out by hand before going to the computer. Sketching actually saves time in the long run!

I apologize if this post has put-off anyone. However, if you guys are into this kind of post, I have a lot more where that came from… “Logo Basics” could be a 10 part series in itself!