My favourite part of starting a project is the part where I don't have a tool open yet. There is a notebook. There is a fineliner. There is, sometimes, a coffee. The rest of the day will be screens, but the first hour is paper. I don't think this is precious. I think it's load-bearing.

Drawing forces commitment without polish. When you're sketching a layout you can't accidentally fall down a font picker, or get distracted by whether a corner radius should be 8 or 12. The only knobs you have are: where things go, how big they are, what's near what. That's the design problem. Everything else is finishing work.

The other thing paper does is accelerate divergence. I can sketch six layouts in the time it takes Figma to render an autoLayout reflow. Most of those layouts will be bad. That's the point. The bad ones are how you find the good one — you only know it's good because you can compare. If your first layout is the only layout, it's just an opinion.

There's a counter-argument that AI tools (Cursor, v0, the latest Vercel thing) collapse this loop. You describe a layout, you get four versions, you pick the good one. I use those tools. They are good for the part of the work where you already know what you're trying to make. They're worse for the part where you don't yet — they will gladly generate four polished versions of the wrong idea.

So I keep the notebook. The first hour is paper, the next nine are Figma and Framer and a code editor. The work that comes out feels like one decision instead of a hundred small ones, because I made the big decision when there was nothing else to look at.