I recently had the pleasure of visiting the Edward Gorey House. I was particularly pleased to see some of his rough work. Before he got going with the pen and ink, Gorey would do a basic forms layout on paper. What you see in his initial scribbling is the genesis of form. This becomes more impressive as some unfinished works showed the finished and the rough there all in one.
I think that anybody who touches ink to paper thinks about layout and composition. You have a little spark of an idea and you start fleshing it out. And then you realize you have a space to reckon with and you need to do something with that space.1 But you don’t necessarily want to lard it up; well, maybe you do if you’re Martin Handford creating a Where’s Waldo? So you think about what belongs and what doesn’t. What creates harmony, what furthers discord.
At work in the Gorey sketches are the slow ruminations of a planner. Not all people need to work this way. Frank Gehry’s doodles don’t indicate much of a process to me at all; I’m sure it’s there, but I have a hard time differentiating it from chaos. Process is understandable, chaos isn’t.
Not all draft work requires significant planning. Christopher Bowns spells out his preference panel interface design (via df.) in a series of steps. The process, consciously articulated here, is one of iteration. What Christopher Bowns describes is a series of discovering deficiencies and attempting solutions. It’s a little meandering, but I think it’s generally indicative of how people work. Computers support this approach much better than the relatively unforgiving ink.2
If you’re very familiar with the problem domain you probably don’t roll out ideas that have known deficiencies–at least not without good reason. Lucky for us Christopher Bowns took screenshots along the way. Articulating these deficiencies through example is much different (and more accessible) than something like the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. The Yahoo! library is great, but it starts from the point of success and appropriate usage. Usability is inextricably linked with the unusable. In other words, you often learn more about what works (and why) from what doesn’t.
Notes
You can be much more daring with Photoshop than you can with oils. Screw up? Ctrl+z. But because you can be much more daring, you’re not really as daring. #
Gorey, always particular (he hand lettered his manuscripts), was choosey about the forms of his books. Web-pages and dialog boxes don’t come in 8 1/2″ x 11″. But UIs have their own set of conventions and constraints. #