These photos illustrate not just a messy desk but my preferred way of working. Screens off and paper, sharpie and pencils on. This is how I work and how I have worked for years. It’s immediate and easy – we have practiced our whole lives to transfer thought via pencil to paper.

Regularly I contemplate giving up working for myself and enjoying the regularity and structure of working for people presumably more skilled at business than I, at least skilled enough to afford hiring people like myself. I continue to resist and procrastinate; my wife continues to listen as she has heard the same words for years and years.

One of the challenges I might face is not ageism, though that’s a thing, or even finding work, a possibility, but the simple fact that so many I have talked to have abandoned creating low fidelity prototypes in favour of spending all their time using tools like Figma or my current tool, Sketch. I can’t imagine spending all my time creating high-res prototypes that would never be used. But these are just tools and tools can be learned by anyone. I can’t help but feel working time would be better spend communicating approaches and ideas vs. near pixel perfect output.