As a student studying design, coming up with quick sketches is a must-have skill. Being given a brief at the start of the day and having to churn out multiple sketches is a common part of student life. We have been taught to sketch in pen to force us to deal with every stroke we make—starting light with initial outlines and then pressing harder to define final features and shapes.
However, nowadays the majority of students have iPads and tablets that we can sketch on. This has made sketching so much easier with the addition of apps like Procreate. They allow us to turn on layers when we want to see the full picture and turn them off when we want to focus on specific things, create perfect shapes in an instant, and manually adjust how dense the shading is on a color fill. It’s an amazing tool.
But with these pieces of kit, I feel as if we as designers sometimes use them too often to hide our mistakes instead of embracing them. We erase or hide errors instead of letting them show us something we hadn’t thought of before—turning off a layer instead of exploring a happy accident. It also stops us from practicing key basic skills for freehand shape drawing and manual shading.
I think these tools definitely have their place in the design world to help refine how things look and give the best visualization of an idea before prototyping. But I do feel as if we can be too quick to skip straight over grabbing pen and paper, making mistakes, and allowing those mistakes to improve our work.
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