Ten rough versions before one good one

The first idea for a mark is rarely the best one. It’s usually the most obvious one, which is useful to know but not useful to ship. So I make a habit of getting through the obvious versions fast.

For an identity, that means a page of quick shapes before anything is refined. Circles, squares, letters, crops of a single letter. I don’t judge them while I’m making them. The point is to empty my head of the first ten things it wants to draw.

Rough on purpose

Keeping the sketches rough matters. A polished version asks to be kept, and I start defending it before I’ve seen the alternatives. A rough one is easy to set aside, so the comparison stays honest.

Somewhere around the seventh or eighth try, the shapes start to surprise me. Two ideas combine, or a mistake suggests a better proportion. That’s usually where the real direction comes from, and I’d never have reached it by polishing the first sketch.

Change one thing at a time

Once a direction appears, I slow down. Each new version changes a single thing, the weight of a stroke, the space inside a letter, the angle of a cut, so I can see what that one change does.

Changing several things at once is faster, but it hides the cause. A version might look better and I’d have no idea why, which turns the next step into a guess. Small, deliberate steps are slower on the day and quicker over the week.

I keep every version on the same page, in order, with a few words under each. Looking back across the row, the decisions read like a short history of the mark. It’s also the easiest way to undo a wrong turn without losing the good ideas around it.

Showing the rough work

I share a few of the rough versions with clients too, not only the finalists. It shows how the choice was made, and it gives them words for what they like and why. Feedback gets more specific when people can point at a shape they don’t want.

Then I narrow it down to two or three and take them further. By that stage I know why each one is on the table, and that makes the final decision much calmer for everyone.