What are your sketching shortcuts?

I like to sketch really quickly and loosely when ideating. They’re not at the quality I’d present to clients with, but are fine when communicating to another designer. I used to draw in perspective all the time, but have found that sometimes a 10-second profile sketch is enough to get an idea across. Then I have like 20 of these thumbnails on a single page!

Sketching on post-it notes is great, too. One idea per note, stick them on a wall, and move them around/group them to develop additional ideas.

I sometimes switch media if I’m getting to constrained, specially during ideation. I’ll go back and forth between pencil, pen and gray marker w/pen & sketchbook pro. I try not to use templates at the beginning so that I don’t get too constrained.

Like others have mentioned, once I need to create presentation drawings or proportions need to be correct then I’ll use a 3D CAD template. You can reduce the opacity to 10-30% and print multiple pages and then just sketch over them. I’ll use my loose ideation sketches and modify them to fit the proportions. If it’s a simple model or basic geometry I’ll even create renderings and digitally sketch over them.

Whatever works.

I don’t have anything pre-prepared for a certain sketch, but I’ll use absolutely anything that helps me sketch it better or faster. Underlays, guides, roughing the shape out with light gray marker, sketchbook line and predictive stroke tools, whiting parts of the sketch out, scanning and sketching over the top etc.

Whatever gets it done better, faster or both.

Best shortcut, practice. :slight_smile:

Practice, yes.
I also find that when I get stuck, unsure, or just want a new perspective, reversing the sketch often helps.

Isn’t practice the opposite of a shortcut? It’s what you try to cut down with shortcuts.

It depends on your point of view. If you practice all the time, then when you have to do something for a client to communicate an idea you do it in 1/4 the time, twice as good, for three times as much. I’ll take that short cut any day.

If you practice all the time

But that’s the important part. I don’t get paid to practice sketching. I get paid to design stuff. If I spend less time practicing by taking shortcuts I have more time to actually make money with design. Otherwise I would mainly be an illustrator.

My main shortcut is the massive use of any sort of underlay I can find. Also outsourcing the sketches to the intern works pretty well :smiley:

I hancent found any of that to be true, but to each their own. :slight_smile:

I don’t think of underlays or things like that as short cuts, they are techniques.

astute observation! drawing/sketching and design are separate skills albeit ones that seem complementary or parallel but not really; one could be good at one and not the other…kinda like a rapper’s ability to spontaneously freestyle vs. actually make a song; impressive to see but kinda unrelated really to the business of making the end product…

sketching does help with the communication/visualization but i guess everyone’s process is different

Ding, ding, ding.

We have a winner.

How much do you get paid to be out of practice? All experts practice their skills. Athletes train, musicians and actors rehearse. Investing in a little practice time always pays dividends. Of course you can have the intern do it… and I’ll outsource renders and final presentation materials as needed, but the thinking sketches, the ones where I’m working out the idea, those are important. Everyone’s workflow is different of course, I tend to think on the page.

Nothing wrong with developing techniques to improve your sketching… those take practice as well.

Frequency impoves efficacy.

I get paid to think not sketch – sketching one way or another, faster, slower, good, bad, doesn’t make me think faster or better or make me more efficient as a designer.

I agree with Dan Lewis.
“All experts practice their skills”. I do, I am a designer, I train designing stuff every single day (well, monday to friday). That is my skill. My employer pays me to tell our enginneers what I want and how I want it. I do a LOT of this with sketches. But my boss doesn’t give a shit if I sketch my designs or dance them. The sketches I do are mostly rough dooodles, usually no perspective, no details, nothing and most of them are done within a few seconds. I don’t think you need to have good technical sketching skills at all to “think on the page”. Even most of our engineers do it without any formal drawing training. Those thinking doodles are nothing you will ever show to a client. Usually we show them prototypes. If we need fancy marker renderings the intern will do it. But honestly? I don’t think most clients give a shit either if you give them pretty sketches or not. I don’t remember a time a client actually got really excited about a sketch. A physical prototype makes them always around a thousand times more happy, guaranteed. How often do you practice your skills at design model building? When was the last time you were sanding foam to get the shape juuuuuust right? Isn’t that an essential design skill as well?

Yeah, many people seem to think “good sketch” = “good design”. Churning out cars and sneakers on a daily basis that all kinda look the same (which is what 90% of instagram famous designers do) - that’s not design, that’s a partytrick. Where are the ideas? Where is the innovation? Being a designer means having a specific mindset, not having perfect lineweight.

Quote of the century. A sketch or CAD model or foam model in and of itself is worthless. Only ideas which are realised have any value, which is the entire purpose of a Product Designer.

Literally the ask is how to get better at sketching guys (or using shortcuts to be exact)…

Dude, no reason to get so upset. I’m sorry your clients aren’t impressed by your sketches. I haven’t found that to be true in my case. I have a few clients that have some of my early process sketches framed on their walls, sometimes from a decade ago… this is not a bad thing.

And you are totally right, practicing making things is helpful, and I could do more of that. That is where I usually contract out work where as when I was younger I did a lot of that work myself. Now anything beyond a quick mockup to see if something might work or a print out of a tightly controlled curve to scale goes to one of my guys. To rationalize I suppose I have decide where to invest time… but the ask here is about sketching specifically, and the answer is still the best way to be better is to practice.


No need to degrade someone else skill as a party trick. Obviously I’m not going to be giving away tons of thinking for free on instagram. Just showing 30 minute warm ups. I get paid to design a lot of sneakers and cars (among other things, been a recent uptick in medical due to the consumerization of health and wellness), so I save the thinking for the clients.

Of course a good sketch doesn’t equal good design, but it doesn’t hurt it either. A great idea not selected because it wasn’t represented well is useless.

how’s those shortcuts coming?

I don’t see any mention of getting better - just what shortcuts. Ok – I use whatever is most expedient. No one but me is going to see the sketches that I use to work through the problem so underlays, grids, pencil, pen, I like to sketch on yellow tracing paper as I can use one sketch as an underlay for another as a method of iterating. I self-edit very quickly and discard quickly. I have never been married to a sketch or sketching – it’s just another tool in problem-solving.

While it may have been interpreted in this way, To be clear this isn’t the intent behind the question. I really want to know about shortcuts, or (“techniques”, as Yo says). Things that improve the speed/efficiency of the process. To me, the word “Shortcut” shouldn’t have a negative connotation, necessarily.

While I suppose the whole “Practice” argument is valid, I think that to most this should go beyond saying.

Designers are problem solvers at their root, right? Well what solutions have designers found that address their design process? While I’m sure we would all love a month to sketch on a subject, in the real world that doesn’t happen. I wanted to harvest the collective knowledge here to see where the process can be improved.

I’m sorry your clients aren’t impressed by your sketches. I haven’t found that to be true in my case. I have a few clients that have some of my early process sketches framed on their walls, sometimes from a decade ago… this is not a bad thing.

The master of the humblebrag :mrgreen: Well, but here I think lies the difference between our points of view. You see a sketch as something that needs to “impress” someone. For me it is a useful tool I use everyday, but I don’t feel very emotional about it. It seems for you to be very important to be seen as very masterful at that particular skill, I personally don’t really care what people think about my sketches as long as they fulfill their purpose. I don’t think it is a designer’s job to impress with a purely technical skill.
I can go to artstation right now and hire someone to draw my product and it would blow everything out of the water anyone could do here on the forum, including yours, Michael. And there is no shame in that, because that person will be a professional, fulltime illustrator. This person would also probably charge me only a fraction of my current, hourly salary (and no, I don’t have an exceptionally high salary). Because drawing in itself is not a particularly valuable skill. I am not saying you should give the client shitty sketches that don’t “impress” him/her. I am simply suggesting that the client doesn’t give a shit if it was me who did the visuals or my intern. Because I am not selling myself as a colorful character, I am selling the solutions I came up with.

That is where I usually contract out work where as when I was younger I did a lot of that work myself. Now anything beyond a quick mockup to see if something might work or a print out of a tightly controlled curve to scale goes to one of my guys. To rationalize I suppose I have decide where to invest time…

Which is literally the EXACT reasoning I had for sourcing out hot design sketching. I hope you see the irony.