Once the exploration and the design investigation is done, a good thing to do right after is to start sketching out thumbnails. Thumbnails are small sketches which are usually drawn on a piece of paper with a pencil, they can be as small as your thumbnail or as big as a quarter of a page. Think of the thumbnails as you see on napkins, or doodling on a binder or a piece of paper.
The main objective of a thumbnail is to capture the basic idea that the designer is trying to show. It should show the placement, the spacing, and anything else that works on a large scale that can be sketched up really quickly that doesn’t require a lot of time to sketch and doesn’t show a lot of detail.
Thumbnails are meant to be sketched really fast so other ideas won’t leave your head and you would have enough time to draw all of them. Thumbnail sketches can take as little as 30 seconds to do and then be moved to another thumbnail. If you don’t like one, make another one right next to it, start over again and do it as many times as you wish.
The general idea behind thumbnails is to start with small thumbnails because you have a lot of ideas purring in and you want to capture all of them. Then when you draw as many thumbnails as you think you should have, then you go back and redraw them but on a larger scale with a bit more detail.
