As a kid, I spent hours drawing and sketching ideas that popped into my head.

I used drawing as a primary language for capturing thoughts, exploring ideas, and then sharing those ideas. Teachers and mentors encouraged me, helping to sustain sketching as a key skill throughout school and into my professional career. Good fortune has ignited my passion to become a sketch advocate, helping others rediscover sketching as a powerful problem-solving and communication tool.

I’m excited to share why sketching can be so beneficial, show samples of sketches, and provide helpful resources. My goal is to encourage you—whether you're a designer, front-end developer, coder, writer or whatever you may be—to add sketching to your toolkit.

But I can’t sketch—I’m not an artist!

When I suggest sketching as a visual thinking tool, I often I hear “I’m not an artist” or “I can’t draw.” While I understand the hesitation, I’m here to tell you that the artistic quality of your sketches is not the point. The real goal of sketching is functional. It’s about generating ideas, solving problems, and communicating ideas more effectively with others.

When you feel inadequate in your sketching, pause and reconsider your perspective. Don’t worry how well you draw. Instead, think of your sketching as visual thinking, which works regardless of your drawing quality. Ugly gets the job done just fine.

Fig 1. Keep it loose! Ugly sketches do the trick.

Why bother sketching?

There is no shortage of software or hardware tools for producing amazing work. It seems that whatever you can imagine, software and hardware can make it happen.

Adding sketching to the design process is a great way to amplify software and hardware tools. Sketching provides a unique space that can help you think differently, generate a variety of ideas quickly, explore alternatives with less risk, and encourage constructive discussions with colleagues and clients.

Let’s explore these three benefits of sketching in more detail.

In the winter of 1969, Virginia Scofield faced a daunting challenge. It was a recurring challenge—more like a nightmare—and she had already failed miserably at her first attempt. This particular obstacle was one that most people consider themselves lucky to never face: undergraduate organic chemistry.

At the time, Virginia was a biological sciences student at the University of Texas. Her career plan bumper sticker could have read “Ph.D. or Death!” as there was no alternate route to pursuing her doctorate. She had to learn, integrate, and retain organic chemistry’s masochistic detail, and time was not on her side.

Having exhausted traditional learning methods such as highlighting, note-taking, and rote memorization, Virginia chose to unleash a powerful, primitive tool that ultimately turned out to be her savior: The Doodle. Virginia decided to draw rudimentary visual representations of every concept in her Morrison and Boyd textbook. She deployed a problem-solving technique that defied conventional wisdom and all the academic advice she had received. And the story has a happy ending. Not only did Virginia ace her organic chemistry final and eventually become Dr. Scofield, she also became a celebrated immunologist, earning accolades for one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs related to HIV transmission. She credits much of her success, then and now, to her world-turning decision to doodle.

So what exactly does it mean “to doodle?” If you reference any standard dictionary, it will offer up a variety of disreputable definitions: To dilly-dally, to fiddle around, to make meaningless marks, or to do something of little value, substance, or import. But considering what doodling did for Dr. Scofield and what it does for hordes of humans around the world, these definitions are nothing short of obnoxious. People have been solving problems and making sense of the world using simple visual language for over 30,000 years. A more appropriate definition is long overdue.

Doodling may be better described as ‘markings to help a person think.’ Most people believe that doodling requires the intellectual mind to shutdown, but this is one misrepresentation that needs correcting. There is no such thing as a mindless doodle. The act of doodling is the mind’s attempt to engage before succumbing to mindlessness. Doodling serves a myriad of functions that result in thinking, albeit in disguise. This universal act is known to:

• increase our ability to focus (especially when handling dull or complex subject matter),
• increase information retention and recall,
• activate the “mind’s eye,” or the portions of the visual cortex that allow us to see mental imagery and manipulate concepts,
• enhance access to the creative, problem-solving, and subconscious parts of the brain, while allowing the conscious mind to keep working, and
• unify three major learning modalities: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic.

That last benefit of the doodle is no slouch. Learning experts assert that, for information to be truly integrated, it must incorporate at least two of the major learning modalities or it must incorporate one modality coupled with a strong emotional experience. For the doodle to offer up the possibility of all three modalities and an emotional experience is an impressive feat for such an outwardly simple behavior. Lo and behold, this “useless act” is really a highly functional technique with broad applications for the way we work and the way we think. It’s no happy accident that Thomas Edison was a prolific doodler and also one of our most applauded inventors. Neither is it a coincidence that many of the most innovative companies use doodling and visual language to stay ahead of the curve.