Messy comes first

In design, in writing, and in most creative fields, allowing yourself to create in a draft state opens up ideas and puts your brain in a safe mode. You can try this new thing, accept that new idea, make a happy little accident.

One of the reasons that I push against using Figma early in the design process is because it’s setup in a way to create nice things, perfect things, polished things. You can, of course, design as messy and sloppy as you’d at any point. But the tool doesn’t bend that way.

For a while I was a fan of Balsamiq. You could drag and drop hand drawn components onto a page, move them around, link them up, and get a feel for your website or app without worrying about all the tiny details.

But it felt limited. At the time it didn’t have enough components, accounting for the ever growing list of affordances and items you might need at an atomic level.

So, I always recommend starting by hand. Use pencil and paper, an iPad, anything that allows your brain to think freely. We’re not like Tony Stark (yet), where we can talk to AI to create new atomic level elements and float pieces of armor around on a virtual screen in front of us. Until that day, drawing by hand is my favorite way to think out loud and move information around us.

It is, of course, just a tool, and an imperfect one. Sometimes I need to just write out my ideas before sketching, other times using Figma is exactly what I need for the stage of the project.

When we allow ourselves to think messy, we often can be surprised by the results. It’s the same in writing. Editing while writing slows me down a lot. When I write I try to freely write as much as possible, not worrying too much about what’s behind the cursor; focusing instead on what’s coming next.