Every craft, every medium has its own version of sketching.
A guitarist riffing through a mess of notes to find a melody. A chef prepping base ingredients — onions, garlic, oil — not knowing exactly where it’ll go, just knowing it’ll start here. A writer free-falling through half sentences and ugly metaphors until one suddenly lands clean.
It’s the act of getting in that headspace, and often, that physical space.
The warm-up routine.
The thing you do to get ready to do the thing.
Paper
With art, digital or physical, the act of sketching is… well, sketching. Taking a pencil and roughing out the shapes and lines for the thing you want to draw — or at least, an attempt at what it might be.
For me — a modern-day, self-proclaimed Designer with a job title that says “Engineer” — my medium often ives somewhere between the browser and the code editor. My version of sketching starts not in Figma or VS Code, but with pen and paper.
And it almost always starts with a list.
It’s a familiar space — a blank canvas that used to terrify me. Now it’s an endless playground of possibilities. A place where bad ideas not only have room to roam, but are encouraged to. Better to get them out here than built into the product.
Sometimes it’s a brain dump — a logjam of miscellaneous thoughts with no order, no hierarchy, no objective other than to exist on paper. Monstrously ambitious tasks like “invent a new system out of nowhere” sit right beside small, mundane chores like “send that Slack message to so-and-so.”
Sometimes it’s a collection of things to try — ideas stacked like dominoes, each one giving me a little momentum for the next.
There’s no pressure to be good or bad. It just needs to exist.
Sometimes it gets fancier — mind maps, flowcharts, weird math that makes sense only in the moment.
Sometimes you arrive with a clear idea of what you want to do. Sometimes you don’t. Often, you don’t. But you sketch anyway.
You scientifically throw spaghetti until something sticks. Summoning clarity, while creating the conditions for it to visit.
Reveal
And here’s the funny thing: your sketches may barely resemble the final thing, but they certainly reveal them. It’s like seeing Pixar’s early concept art for Woody — a completely different character with more "rough and tough" energy vs. the “Reach for the sky!” cowboy we know and love.
That’s the truth about sketching: the first version only needs to contain spirit, not accuracy.
You discover the real character by redrawing him a hundred times. The shape of your overworld starting to form — waiting for the rest to fill in. Every stroke teaches you what doesn’t belong — until what remains finally feels true.
Kinda like it did for Webflow's Interaction feature. Who would have known the Timeline could have looked and felt the way it did, starting with a logjam of lines and some made up math.
You can't force clarity, but you can always choose motion.
Motion
Sitting idle — staring at a blank Figma canvas or a blinking cursor — that’s not where clarity comes from. Movement is.
With modern tools and workflows, we still sketch. We’ve just forgotten to call it that. It happens in the layers, in the "wip" commits, in the sandbox experiments that no one will ever see. But when you stop calling it exploration and start expecting it to be execution, that’s when creativity begins to decay — under the pressure of being right too soon.
Sketching is motion. And it doesn’t just happen during neatly scheduled “creative time.”
It happens all day, at least for me. If I have an idea while walking to grab the mail or standing in line at Costco, I sketch. I write it down. I stack ammo.
Because I know breakthroughs come from breadcrumbs — and it’s worth collecting every crumb I can.
Creativity
So if you ever feel stuck — in a task, a project, or a problem — sketch. Sketch as much as you can. However it looks for you.
Create and curate your environment so sketching isn’t an event — it’s a reflex.
Sometimes creativity isn’t about thinking. It’s about doing until the thinking starts working again. Sketching keeps the creative engine from rusting. It’s not the appetizer before the “real” work. It is the work.
Sketching is how you stay in conversation with your own ideas. To stay in motion long enough for the next idea to find you.