There is one piece of advice I constantly give to students and new designers: always start with thumbnails (miniature drawings of a project).

For one thing, many people find writing or drawing with a pencil to be mentally stimulating. But beyond that, this exercise forces the designer to look at the very basics of design—shape, size and layout. It keeps designers from getting caught up in “What typeface should I use?” or “What will the color palette be?” These are important considerations, but they come later.

When creating concepts, drawing little pictures ironically helps you see the big picture. The act of quickly sketching broad, scaled-down designs lets you focus on idea generation rather than the nitty gritty. It lets you fail quickly and sift through all of the bad ideas to find the gems.

If you’re like Michael Bierut, you may even amass a collection of 85 notebooks full of sketches from the past 26 years. You might go back to a project’s thumbnails five years later and discover an awesome idea that never got used. Or, you might just end up with some really cool wrapping paper.

Graphic designers are accustomed to being asked to “make it bigger.” At Choke Design Company, however, we always start by making it smaller.