Craft
2 min read
The Grid Paper Year
I spent a year sketching every interface on grid paper before opening a design tool. Some notes on what changed.
From the series · A Lisbon Notebook
By Mara Ellison · Lisbon
Grid paper is the cheapest design system ever made, and it has never crashed. Last year I made a rule: every interface starts as a sketch on five-millimetre grid paper, and nothing opens on a screen until the sketch works. I expected it to slow me down. It did, in exactly the right places.[1]
What the grid forces
A pencil on a grid cannot fake precision. You cannot nudge something by half a pixel or hide a weak idea behind a nice gradient. You have to decide what matters, where it goes, and how much space it earns. The grid makes those decisions visible.
What I lost
Speed, at first. And the small pleasure of seeing a polished screen early. I also lost some bad ideas that only looked good because they were rendered well, which I no longer count as a loss.[2]
What stayed
I still sketch first. The notebooks from that year sit on a shelf above my desk, and I flip through them more often than through any file in my design tool. The ones I like best are full of crossings-out.[3]
Notes
Five-millimetre squares, A5, dot or line, it doesn't matter much. What matters is that it's cheap enough to waste.
A rendered mock-up is a very persuasive liar.
I filled nine notebooks. Number four is mostly one checkout flow, drawn thirty-one times.
Written by
Mara Ellison
Product designer in Lisbon. Writes about quiet software, attention and the slow craft of making things.
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