Thumbnails are the cheapest good ideaThumbnails are the cheapest good idea

Before I draw anything big, I draw sixty small things. Tiny, fast and mostly bad. It’s the cheapest part of any project, and it saves more time than anything else I do.

Why sixty

The first ten ideas are the obvious ones. Everybody has them, including the client and whoever pitched against me. Ideas eleven to thirty are where things start to get odd. Somewhere after thirty, I get bored of my own habits and start drawing things I wouldn’t normally draw.

Sixty isn’t a magic number. It’s just enough that I run out of easy answers. If I stopped at twelve, I’d have twelve versions of my first idea.

There’s a second reason. Thirty seconds isn’t long enough to be precious. When a drawing costs nothing, I’m happy to draw something stupid, and stupid ideas are where a lot of good ones start.

The rules

Thumbnails only work if they stay cheap. So I give myself rules, and I keep them:

1. Stamp-sized. If it’s bigger than a postage stamp, it’s a drawing, not a thumbnail.

2. Thirty seconds each. I use a kitchen timer when I’m being disciplined.

3. No rubber. A wrong line stays; draw the next one instead.

4. One idea per box. If a thumbnail has two ideas in it, it gets two boxes.

The size is the important part. At that scale you can’t draw detail, so you can only draw the idea: the shape, the pose, where the eye goes. If a thumbnail works at the size of a fingernail, it will work on a poster.

my favourite thumbnail ever is a circle with two dots and a line. it became a mascot that’s now on forty thousand boxes.

Sorting the wall

When I have sixty, I cut them out and stick them on the wall. Then I leave the room for ten minutes, because I can’t judge something I made a minute ago.

When I come back, I sort them into three piles. Yes: the ones that make me feel something. Maybe: interesting, but something’s off. No: the rest, which is usually most of them. I’m strict about the yes pile. If it has more than five in it, I sort again.

The maybes matter more than you’d think. A lot of my best finished pieces are two maybes stuck together.

I also photograph the whole wall before I sort it. Every few months I flick back through old walls, and an idea that was wrong for one job is sometimes exactly right for the next.

Do clients see them?

Sometimes. It depends on the client. Some people love seeing the messy wall; it makes them feel part of the process, and they often spot something I didn’t. Others find sixty scribbles alarming and start wondering what they’re paying for.

My rule is never to show all sixty. I show the yes pile, redrawn slightly bigger and slightly cleaner, with one sentence under each. Three to five ideas, each clearly different. That’s enough choice to feel generous, and not so much that it turns into a menu.

When I do show the whole wall, I show it on a call, never in an email. Sixty scribbles need a person beside them saying what they are. Without me there, they just look like a mess, which, to be fair, they are.

One afternoon, sixty boxes, four keepers.

Thumbnails for motion

Thumbnails aren’t only for still pictures. When I plan an animation, I thumbnail the key moments in a strip, like a tiny comic: the start, the biggest pose, the end. Six or seven boxes, still thirty seconds each.

A strip of thumbnails shows the rhythm of a movement before I’ve drawn a single frame properly. If the strip is boring, the animation will be boring, however smooth it is. If the strip makes me smile, the animation usually does too. It’s the cheapest test I know for the most expensive part of the job.

One job, start to finish

For the sleepy bakery mascot this summer, I drew sixty-four thumbnails in an afternoon. Bread with faces. A cat asleep on a loaf. A moon made of a croissant. A baker yawning so wide the whole bakery fits in his mouth.

Four went in the yes pile. The client picked the yawning baker in about a minute. The finished character took two weeks of careful drawing. The idea took thirty seconds, about forty minutes into the afternoon, after a lot of bread with faces.

That’s the whole argument for thumbnails. Thirty seconds of drawing found the idea. Two weeks of drawing made it good. Skip the thirty seconds and the two weeks get much harder.