Why More Studios Are Sketching by Hand Again
By Sana Kovač
The first hour of a project, in five of the studios we spoke to, now happens without a screen in the room.
Process stories are easy to romanticise. The studios worth listening to describe theirs in terms of what it costs them, not what it saves.
Sana Kovač, who visited eleven studios for this piece, has been close to it from the start.
Background
The argument is not nostalgia. It is speed of disagreement: a pencil drawing can be argued with before anyone has invested an afternoon in rendering it.
The timeline tells its own story: eighteen months from first conversation to the point anyone outside the room saw anything, and then six weeks in which everything visible was decided.
Not everyone is convinced, and the objection is a fair one: hand drawing privileges whoever draws best.
You cannot fall in love with a sketch. That is the point of it.
one studio founder
The method
Three of the studios have gone further and banned laptops from the first client meeting, after finding that a visible screen turns a conversation into a review.
None of this scales cleanly. Ask any of them to run it across forty people and they go quiet.
Reaction has split along predictable lines. The people who have to maintain it have the sharpest questions, and the fairest ones.
They are careful about what they claim. Two of the decisions that look deliberate now were, by their own account, the only option left by the time anyone noticed.
Where it goes
The compromise most have landed on is an hour, not a week.
