Getting coached by an awesome Google Designer (Pt 2- Sketching)
Quick recap from part 1 of this post
In October, I started working 1:1 with an amazing designer named Xander Pollock.
Xander is a badass.
He worked on Inbox by Gmail… and before that, he co-founded a company (Punchd) and sold it to Google.
Xander’s been teaching me about Google Venture’s process of UX design
The first phase in the process is unpacking. I wrote about that yesterday.
But my favorite part was phase 2- sketching
- I did an activity called Crazy 8’s, where you divide paper into an 8-part grid.
- You get 1 minute to sketch a version of an idea for each grid (8 mins total).
- Doing this with Xander was super fun (we did this part in-person) because he rolled up his sleeves and did it with me. We would show each other our ideas & Xander’s a genius so he really inspired me and got my creativity flowing.
- Plus, once you get to the 5th sketch, you really want to stop, but Xander pushed me to finish & sketched 6, 7, & 8 were usually some of the coolest

- I learned that words are design too
- I took the best Crazy 8 ideas (some of them sucked but others were surprisingly nice ideas) and fleshed them out in Solution Sketches.
- Again, Xander did these with me & seeing how an ex-Google designer sketches, really helped me get my own ideas out of my head & onto paper

And then I took those sketches and started Part 3- the Decide phase…
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Hi there- My name is Tara Reed & I’m the founder of Kollecto. I'm a non-technical founder building software without writing any code.I’m also a first-time entrepreneur who swore I'd never become an entrepreneur…Oh well, sh*t happens! :) Follow my journey as I build a cool art startup...