Visual Thinking for Business - Make Your Point

To save time and to get better at structuring and organising your content, you can use thumbnails. Thumbnails are small frameworks that show how your final content will look like. They can be used in paper form but also as powerpoint slides.

They will keep you from having to re-draw or re-sketch many times and they will help you improve your sketching.

In order to create thumbnails, it is again a good idea to create a database.

In this database, you should work with the same size of empty frames. You do not want variety in the frames or sizes but variety in the results! You are looking for good designs and thus, if you change the frames too much, this will not allow you to make comparisons.

If you are working with an A5 format, you could have 4-6 of these frames on one page - so we are really talking “tiny”!

You can pre-draw your empty frames so that you are always ready to start sketching your thumbnails.

Then, do not be too critical but really develop quite a number of options because only the small visualisation will help you imagine how it could look like enlarged. The less you pre-draw or sketch, the more you will have to change later!

Use a rather big pen - and also some colours that can have specific meanings for structure, text, elements, etc.

Try out and learn a lot from your own variety!