Thumbnails, and why you never show a concept you would not ship

Quantity first, on paper

The first twenty ideas are the obvious ones, and they are obvious because everybody has them. Getting past them requires producing them and discarding them, which is faster on paper than on screen.

The method:

1. A sheet of A4, divided into 30 boxes about 30 mm square.
2. Fill every box. Thirty marks, in perhaps forty minutes. Nothing careful, nothing shaded, no lettering unless the lettering is the idea.
3. Do a second sheet. The second sheet is where the work is.
4. Go away for a few hours. Come back and circle six.

The box size is deliberate. At 30 mm you physically cannot draw detail, so you are forced to work in silhouette, which is the same discipline the 16-pixel test enforces later.

Everyone who does this seriously says the same thing: the good idea is somewhere between sheet two and sheet four, and it is never on sheet one.

Why not to start on screen

On screen, the tools push you towards refinement. You will spend twenty minutes adjusting one curve on a mediocre idea instead of generating the next fifteen ideas. Paper has no undo, no alignment guides and no temptation to pick a colour, so it produces more ideas per hour.

If you have no paper, use the crudest tool available: a brush in Krita at a large size, on a small canvas. The point is the constraint, not the material.

Developing six into three

Take the six circled thumbnails into vector. Build each one properly: primitives, booleans, real geometry, black only.

Then apply the tests you already know:

• Black on white, and white on black.
• 16 px on a phone.
• Flipped horizontally.
• Beside the competitor sheet at the same size.

Two or three will fail one of these outright. Good: that is the test doing its job, before anyone has seen them.

Show three, and mean all three

This is the rule that separates a professional presentation from a portfolio dump: never show a concept you would be unhappy to see used.

Clients choose. If you show one strong concept and two weak ones to make the strong one look better, you will sometimes get a weak one chosen, and then you have to produce it. Everyone who has done this has a logo in the world they are quietly ashamed of.

Three is the right number. One looks like you did not explore. Five or more makes the client feel responsible for design decisions they are not equipped to make, and the usual outcome is “can we combine the top of two with the bottom of three”.

Presenting the three

Each concept gets:

• The mark, large, in black.
• The mark at 16 px and at 30 mm.
• The mark in its intended colour.
• One realistic application from the surfaces list: the actual shop board, the actual bag, not a generic mockup of a billboard in a European city.
• Two sentences of rationale, about function rather than story.

The rationale is where most presentations go wrong. “The upward stroke represents your journey of growth” invites an argument about whether the client feels they are growing. “This holds at 12 mm on your invoice and can be embroidered in one thread” cannot be argued with, and it is also true.

The uncomfortable part

Clients will ask to combine concepts, ask for a fourth direction, ask what their nephew thinks. This is normal and it is not disrespect; they are anxious about a decision they cannot evaluate.

The answer is to return to the brief you wrote down. “The brief says it must work embroidered in one colour at 8 mm. Concept two does; the combination you are describing does not.” A written brief converts taste arguments into requirement arguments, and requirement arguments have answers.

Presenting remotely

Much of this work is now shown over a video call or as a PDF sent by email, and both weaken the presentation in the same way: the client sees the work without you beside it, at a size you did not choose, on a screen you have not seen.

Two defences. First, send a PDF rather than images, sized so each mark appears at a sensible physical size when the page is viewed whole, and say in the covering note “please view at 100%, not zoomed”. Second, if it is a call, share your screen and present it rather than sending the file in advance. People form an opinion in the first four seconds of looking, and if those four seconds happen alone in an inbox on a phone, you were not there for them.

If the client insists on seeing files in advance, send one page: the recommended concept only. The other two follow in the call.