Thinking on Paper – Where is This Going?

Putting lines on paper… its like thinking out loud.

One thing that I’ve started to learn over the past few weeks/months is the value of sketching stuff out. It doesn’t have to be exactly “pixel perfect” to help think through a page design, complex data structure or flow of traffic.

I’ve found that I tend to learn things when I actually start to work with them. When I sit down and just start writing down how I view something or feel about some decision someone has made, I start to develop an opinion or see how I really feel or believe about that certain subject.

The same thing works when I start scribbling designs/structures/traffic flow down on paper. I start to get a glimpse of exactly what it is I am trying to accomplish and where whatever I am working on is going. It’s a tool to think things through. Even if I think I know what I want to do already.

Yesterday I got a lot of the basic page styling, spacing and content “areas” in place for my portfolio/resume web page.

Today’s job is to translate the projects that I want people to know that I’ve done from an app that lives elsewhere (github and heroku) to a few bits of text, maybe a screenshot and then links out to the github repository as well as the heroku site.

Condensing things has never been something that I’ve been extremely good at. I once wrote a cover letter that was way too long. 🙂 You may have noticed some of my past blog posts just seem to go on and on. I probably should stop this one once I get what I wanted to say finished.

I guess that’s about it for today. Hopefully next week some time I can show you the final product of what I’m working on right now. Because that’s “what its all about,” showing real humans things that I have built, can build and would like to build.