When I start a project, I need to get into understanding the problems we’re trying to solve, what’s the core function we need to perform. This is the most critical part of a project; it’s where we get everything out in the open and figure out where to start.

Before we touch design software or write a line of code, we need to conceptualize what we’re building together. Paper is a great way to do that, it’s a low barrier to entry and highly disposable; it makes it easy for everyone to contribute ideas and get something not quite concrete out into the open.

Style Tiles are method to convey abstract ideas quickly without sinking a lot of time into it. They’re a great nimble way to process and iterate through a lot of different assets.

After we land on the direction from the tiles, we’ll move into creating higher fidelity, modular pieces of design to work with in our project. The tools here can really vary but the key is to affirm the work done so far and have a clear picture of what we’re building.

Now we need a prototype of something in the browser with real code! We’ll build out something to coalesce all the assets, components and ideas we’ve worked with so far into something that you can work and interact with to solve the original problem we defined.