Notes from the sketch table

Every project at Kobalt begins at the same long table, with pencils, tracing paper and a pinned brief. Screens come later.

Drawing is thinking out loud

A sketch costs nothing, so we make a lot of them. Forty rough marks in an afternoon tell us more than four polished options in a week.

Paper also slows us down in the right way. It is hard to fiddle with kerning on tracing paper, so we argue about ideas instead of details.

What we keep

At the end of the first week we pin everything up and keep three directions. The rest go in a box marked with the client's name. More than once, the idea that won came out of that box months later.