NOTATIONAL SKETCHING IN BOOKS, ON NAPKINS, ON SHEETS OF PAPER, or on the back of your hand brings text and image together in a personal yet contextual way to transform ideas into visual form and help the designer create meaning and order. The acts of recording and exploring ideas are inherently different in nature; however, as a designer, you must always explore further than what you can see with your eyes. The act of truly seeing is as mental as it is visual. Celebrated New York Yankee catcher and Hall of Famer Yogi Berra said, “Ninety percent of the game is half mental.” Substitute sketching for game, and Yogi is right. Designers use sketching to record ideas, document what they observe, and project what they can’t see (hidden from view or future state/existence). The acts of recording and exploring must happen together, recording what you know and what you don’t know. It is a quick and effective means to engage your imagination and call upon all the other things you’ve seen or know that are relevant to the subject at hand.

3.1 RECORDING + EXPLORING IDEAS WITH NOTATIONAL SKETCHING

WHEN WE GIVE consideration to an idea, a written record of our thoughts can help us navigate its possibilities and see the paths of our investigation. This evolving record embodies the principle of what is called “visualization,” or making thoughts more concrete through sketching. The primary audience when visualizing your ideas is yourself. You must first be able to communicate with yourself before you can effectively communicate your ideas to others. Through notational sketching, we make notes, doodles, and diagrams to capture important fragmentary thoughts for ourselves that we may use later, piecing together these fragments into constructed ideas.

Taking notes and making sketches would seem to be a basic, straightforward process. You observe something interesting in your environment, and you draw a visual copy of its form so that you can review it again later. This sounds simple but glosses over a fundamental aspect of the act of drawing. If we want to just record what we see, we might as well take photographs or video. Notational sketching, in contrast, engages us in a deeper mode of seeing and thinking. It awakens our brain.

Where notational sketching differs from making basic observations and recordings is that it helps us identify what is relevant and significant—and discard what is not. The act of notation is a way of seeing and thinking through the potential of an idea. It is an active process of synthesis and reduction that heightens our attention, resulting in closer observation and more engagement in a dialogue with the subject. It filters and helps us capture important features and issues related to the many dimensions of any design concept. Notational sketches of things we see and experience bring greater awareness of key forms, parts, and their relative organization. This in turn opens our eyes to see the following:

3.2 SEEING WITH NOTATIONAL SKETCHING

INFORMATION-GATHERING IS A critical part of any design process in that it helps us form the basis for our decisions. Without accurate, detailed information, how can we expect to understand problems and discover the source for great ideas? Seeing with notational sketching involves using your sketchbook to record observations of what you view and experience—to make meaning for yourself. Finding inspiration starts with carefully observing people, spaces, and objects and, most important, seeing the interactive relationships (physical, communicative, emotional, and so on) that exist between them. Gathered information provides insight to recognize people’s needs and inspires opportunities for great design.

Notational sketching’s visual format provides an obvious advantage over text-only note-taking in that combining words and images together offers a richer vocabulary for expression and organization. This is important when we conceive and string together brief flashes of inspired thought. The ability to accurately express and organize is essential to the clear thinking needed for idea development and memory.

The level of complexity and detail used in notational sketches varies from person to person, and even subject to subject. Some sketches are no more than elaborate doodles that meander on the page in playful study. Others employ strict framework structures, such as matrices and grids, to organize with a clear analytical intent. Both ends of this spectrum are equally valid, depending on circumstance and need. Good notational sketching enhances the speed and depth of your thinking process.

Insights gained from notational sketching include not only “aha!” inspirational discoveries but also greater understanding of our own means of perception and thought. It helps us study problems and to gain a better understanding of where and what to look for when seeking inspiration.

By nature, notational sketching is an introspective technique, a way for you to actively reflect on your thoughts and observations. Some people question whether notational sketches should be included in presentations to clients since they demonstrate thoroughness in design practice. This does involve risk. It is easy to misinterpret the loose nature of notational sketches as disorganization. It is also possible to disrupt the thinking process with too much focus on presentation merits. If you choose to show notational sketches, do so with care and restraint. Otherwise you may find your client embracing an unintended design idea or direction.

3.3 THINKING WITH NOTATIONAL SKETCHING

BESIDES HELPING YOU record information, notational sketching is a great “sandbox” for exploration, a tool to facilitate the working out of details and possibilities. The capacity to doodle and work out your thinking on paper can help you “see” challenges and solutions more clearly. Perhaps the most important aspect of notational sketching is that it creates a clearly documented trail of your thoughts. This can be incredibly valuable as you explore and develop your ideas.

Idea development is rarely a clear, linear process. Successful experimentation and invention often involves failure; for every successful idea, there are invariably alternate directions and possibilities discarded along the way. Being able to see this trail of alternates is important for continuity. When you get stuck, the ability to step back and review prior thinking and missteps is very helpful. Maybe the concept path you chose is incorrect and requires restarting at a prior point in development? Maybe there is an earlier, unnoticed omission that needs study before you continue forward? The documented trail of thought you create with notational sketching is a history that can yield invaluable insight into what you did, where the failure occurred, and what you need to do to continue forward.

Notational sketching can also have long-term value. Sketching over a lengthy period of time can build a library of ideas and idea fragments with tremendous residual value; think of this as building your own personal sketch library. Any idea, design concept, or method of structuring information that might not be the right solution for the task at hand can become an ideal source of inspiration for another. In design, the best ideas can come from the ashes of others, so having them on hand and in a place that is easily accessible can prove to be invaluable.

Notational sketching presents an opportunity to practice and experiment ways to describe something through drawing, without the self-consciousness caused by the necessity of appealing to or persuading an audience. Using your sketchbook frequently for personal, open-ended exploration will help improve your practice of design and become more comfortable at communicating your ideas to others.

3.4 BEST PRACTICES FOR EFFECTIVE NOTATIONAL SKETCHES

AS YOU EXPLORE the use of notational sketching for recording and exploring ideas, there can be much to consider: What should I include? How do I express what I see? How should I organize my drawings? These are questions of content, style, and structure. Several considerations yield more effective notational sketches, regardless of drawing subject.

BE RICH IN CONTENT

Visually rich notational sketches that rely on a broad visual vocabulary tend to be better sources of inspiration in support of idea development. Mixing your words and images freely together provides a greater description that expressively supports your memory and thought. As you record with notational sketching, don’t be afraid to incorporate photographs, clippings, scraps, and other found objects. If you find a key image that is significant or inspirational, paste it in your sketchbook and make it the focus of investigation. Draw over it, highlight portions, and expand upon it to make it useful.

START WITH THUMBNAIL DRAWINGS

Thumbnail drawings are simplified, scaled-down, and used to quickly consider the visual layout or structure of an idea’s form. It often is not necessary to draw in full scale, especially during preliminary stages when considering a wide range of forms, layouts, and viewing angles. Where possible, begin idea studies with a series of thumbnails approximately 1 to 3 inches in height. This time-saving technique provides a quick way to visually look at a wide range of possibilities and narrow the field to a handful of viable options. During preliminary stages, it is not necessary to draw in full scale in order to consider a range of forms, layouts, and viewing angles.

FRAME THE BASICS BEFORE WORKING ON THE DETAILS

Build up your sketches progressively, moving from macro to micro detail. Start with simple silhouettes and wireframes for objects and compositions to establish basic proportions and an order of major visual elements. Then, fill in pieces and parts that involve detail. Approaching your notational sketches in this manner not only helps you with distorted objects and “squished for space” page layouts but is also a good hedge to protect against unreadable drawings should you run out of time to complete their development.

LOOK FOR OPPORTUNITIES TO CONDENSE CONTENT

Notational sketches do not need to be masterpieces of detail. When recording your observations and using notational sketching to think through ideas, seek to efficiently capture the basic nature of things, be it a scene, environment, activity, moment, or mood. Incorporating too much detail can disrupt your thinking process and distract from the essential points. Consider what really needs to be shown and what can be omitted. For less important areas and information, use a vague representation, such as an outline or wireframe, to block in approximate details and forms.

EMPLOY GRAPHIC SHORTHAND NOTATIONS

Part of notational sketching is finding a balance between photo-realistic and symbolic form. Icons and pictograms are examples of representational shorthand notations you can incorporate into notational sketches to save time and page space while enriching the clarity and readability of your notes. A simplified graphic note can help quickly express a basic concept, such as transit or payment. This is particularly helpful when diagramming relationships and activities involved in ideas.

DON’T FORGET TO INCLUDE THE FINAL RESULT IN YOUR SKETCHBOOK

A sketchbook can serve as a storybook of an idea becoming reality, but only if you show the beginning, middle, and end. Once an idea takes form as a produced project or product, print images of the final idea or product and paste them into the sketchbook to show a full sequence of your design process. This creates a useful artifact not only for yourself but also for peers and teammates with whom you share your sketchbook.

KEEP YOUR MISTAKES, DON’T ERASE THEM

As tempting as it may be to edit your sketchbook, don’t abandon or remove an exploratory sketch if it doesn’t look great initially. Keep working on it until it takes shape. Use the page with a failed drawing to try alternatives or redraw the same subject using a different view angle, medium, or technique. Sandboxes are full of mounds from past failed creations. A sketchbook should not be pristine art but rather a working canvas that clearly shows active thought.

DOCUMENT YOUR DOCUMENTATION

Since a prime reason for notational sketching is to build a record for future reference, include features such as drawing titles, dates, project names, source names, and even page numbers along with your sketches. A brief moment spent doing this consistently is considerable time saved later on. If your drawings or pages aren’t identifiable and easy to find, it can be frustrating to have to rummage back and forth within a sketchbook (or multiple sketchbooks!) to find them again at a later date.

notational sketch style

Nearly all the best practices for notational sketch style relate to speed. Good notational sketches should be quick, especially when used to record observations in order to keep pace with your thinking.

KEEP IT LOOSE

Loose notational sketching is an activity in which the flow of drawing should feel effortless. If you find yourself too conscious of your sketch’s accuracy and appearance, relax and speed things up. This may seem counterintuitive, but the key to loose sketching is actually to keep it relatively fast. Drawing too slowly transforms the activity into a conscious act. This produces cramped drawings and a disjointed flow of thought. Capturing ideas quickly ensures a loose quality that keeps your mind’s attention on the idea. Think of the act of handwriting: imagine what it would be like if you consciously focused on the drawing of each individual letter; it would take forever and disrupt your ability to think clearly. The same applies to drawing. It should be quick and fluid.

KEEP IT ROUGHLY ROUGH

Where keeping it loose is about a level of self-consciousness, rough is about detail. “Roughly rough” involves working in a manner that shuns meticulous (unnecessary) detail and favors getting your ideas down on paper quickly. Note that rough does not mean sloppy or inaccurate. Always strive for correctness of form and good line work.

MESSY IS OKAY

Notational sketches can be messy affairs, particularly if you are exploring a range of possibilities. For beginning drawers, this can be especially concerning, as you might be obsessed with precision and getting your sketches “right”; however, notational sketches should involve a certain degree of mess—but not be so messy that clarity is compromised. They are, after all, the first rough drafts of personal thought created to describe an observation or idea. Embrace the occasional wonky cube, hairy drawing, or erring wavy line; they are minor blemishes in the scope of a much larger process. But strive to always improve your craft with good form, descriptive line weight, and organization.

notational sketch structure

Simple structures such as grids, matrices, columns, and lists can be useful tools for your notational sketches, especially for recording an inventory or exploring through an iterative sequence of variations to an idea’s form. Structure in composition establishes an ordered hierarchy that supports accessible reading. Section 4 gets into more detail on the use of structure as part of its focus on explaining ideas to yourself and to others.

Keep pages simple and open. From an early age we are taught to start at the top of a page and fill it completely with whatever we are writing. It is better to throw this concept out when making notational sketches. Each sketchbook page should contain one complete idea or theme as its focus. While you should aspire to fill your pages, try not to cram different, multiple ideas into a single tight space or it will be difficult to review your work. Leave some white space for visual breathing room and the potential to add further comment at a later date.

Use layout structures for iteration. Applying a structure such as a grid, matrix, or continuum to a page layout is useful for iterative exploration where the goal is to formally consider a range of possibilities. The content of these structures can either be a random assortment of options to a single idea or an evolutionary range. In most industrial-design sketching, the primary subject is rendered in progressively increasing level of fidelity from top left to bottom right. Complexity and rigidness to these structures is dependent upon your needs; sometimes a simple horizontal line with a title for the page is enough of a structure to build around.

Strive for organized chaos. Unless you are using structure as a tool for iterative exploration, don’t overplan the pages of your book with structure or it will turn drawing into too conscious an act. Keeping the visual development of your pages organic is important for preserving the level of “play” that supports an active—and enjoyable—thinking process.

putting it all together

In this section, we have described simple techniques for getting the most out of your visual notes. We view notational sketching as a highly personal and informative process that helps you to better understand your ideas—with better understanding comes better explanation, where you share your ideas with others. As you draw for yourself, to understand your own ideas, consider if someone else can make sense of them. Although you may be working quickly to capture ideas, remember that good craft and organization has as much to do with building understanding as does the content in each sketch.

When we are sketching to record and explore our ideas, we usually find that our mind works faster than our hands—that we have too many ideas to capture. Rather than trying to capture everything all at once, be selective and trust that through drawing you will capture enough to seed further thinking. We often describe the flood of ideas as a raging river carrying all sorts of trees, tires, objects, and animals downstream. It is impossible to pull all of these things from the river, but it may be possible to pull a key selection of them. Notational sketching provides the opportunity to make this selection meaningful and make parallels between ideas. You may also find that capturing fewer ideas allows for greater depth in their development and deeper connections that bring opportunities.