How anyone can bring big ideas to life

Draw to communicate powerful stories. Use these simple to learn techniques.

I’ve always a mediocre drawer. Despite working in creative fields for my whole life, my freehand sketches are crude at best.

But now drawing – at least “good enough” drawings – is something key to my work. I’m certain it can become the same for you.

When to draw

When doing forward looking work, sometimes designing basic UI flows is sufficient. But what happens when the user’s journey isn’t merely contained to a digital screen? You need to show what’s happening with the human in the real world. This is where drawing comes in.

I’ve found these conceptual drawings helpful when the path ahead isn’t clear for a project, a team, or a company. Some examples:

• After Uber left China, my team and I set off to create visions that used drawings to communicate what we thought customers in global markets needed. These helped us land those designers in new teams with momentum to execute on these visions.
• In the first couple of years of Uber Freight, there was a lot of uncertainty about what the longer term vision was and how that’d impact the team manually matching drivers to freight to move. They were worried about their jobs being automated away. And rightfully so. One approach that helped was to create a vision together with them. That vision helped show they’d be able to work on higher leverage work and helped alleviate some fears.
• Early in my time at Lime, there were questions about what building our own hardware team would enable for us. I turned to drawings to show how being more vertically integrated could allow us to improve the user experience.

All of these efforts did something else: they helped the design team determine the roadmap. I’ve found repeatedly that designers can help determine the roadmap by showing the experiences we want for our users through drawings.

How to draw ‘well enough’

The tools you’ll need: a basic iPad, an Apple Pencil, a drawing tool like Procreate. You’ll also need a drawing tool on your computer like Figma or Photoshop. That drawing tool will allow you to composite your rough images for tracing on the iPad.

Step 1 – Write out your story using words. I like to frame stories using four parts: (1) The hero and their challenge, (2) the new innovation you’re introducing, (3) how this helps them solve their problem, and (4) how they feel after their problem is solved.

Step 2 – Build rough composited images using whatever you can find. These can be photos you’ve taken, images you’ve found online, or whatever else helps you visualize the frame in a rough fashion.

Step 3 – Move your rough images to the iPad and open in your iPad drawing tool. Once you have your image in, lower the opacity to 50% and lock the layer. Add layers on top of the base layer to do your tracing. This is probably the most creative step because you need to choose your drawing style. I like to have line drawings, filled with white for emphasis, and then a background to help add a bit of depth.

That’s it. Then you can move your new image back to your computer for use in decks or however else you’d like to assemble and share your story.

Happy drawing!