When you make things for a living, ideas are precious. They're also incredibly pesky. They come to you right before sleep, in the shower, walking down broadway, almost always at some point when the last thing you thought you were going to have is an idea.

Documentation of these specifically and keeping an archive generally, is critical to the creative process, especially when ideas are in their infancy. We wrote about this at length in APPLIED IMAGINATION.

But capturing fleeting thoughts in today's world can feel like something between a full tech stack and another day job.

We’ve found — through trial, error, repetition, and multiple cancelled Notion subscriptions — that the best way to take notes is the fastest. Not the prettiest. Not the most organized. Not the kind your future self will thank you for. But the kind that doesn’t ask for permission and has been there since the days of our cavepeople ancestors — a writing instrument and a surface.

Writing by hand or on paper, or on receipts, or in the margins of a printout you no longer need is, strangely, less rude in meetings than typing. You don’t have to stare down into a screen, or angle your body behind a rectangular shield. You just write.

It's like thinking out loud in total silence.

You're not limited by trackpad and keyboard — you can free form notes, write anywhere, link thoughts together with lines and quick diagrams.

And then you can sketch and prototype out what you mean and just show people!

Not everything is best described in words. Sometimes what you need is a squiggly line pointing to a square. Sometimes the answer is a diagram, not a sentence. A fast sketch has a way of clarifying intent that two paragraphs in Google Docs will never quite reach.

As you know, postmodern tectonics is medium-agnostic. We sketch, we scan, we move to layout, we add grain, we print it out and scribble on it again. It’s not romantic, it’s practical. It’s also emotional, chaotic, nonlinear, and occasionally profane. The important thing is speed. Capture it before it floats off. Think with your hand, not just your head. Because most ideas do not arrive with a timestamp. They show up whenever they want, unannounced, at your brain's door, and they are HUNGRY!

One of the sad truths about making things — and design in particular — is that you have to try a lot of different options. Design requires trying a lot of bad versions before you land on something tolerable. And while a lot of folks have workflows and systems and perfect file naming conventions, we’ve found that those usually show up after the idea — not before. In other words, you can organize once it’s real. But first you have to catch it.

There’s that apocryphal story about Paula Scher drawing the Citi logo on a napkin in a cab on the way home from the very first client meeting — a napkin that would retroactively become worth $1.5 million. Which is, of course, the exception, not the rule. You don’t always get the logo in one go. But you do often get something in one go. If you’re fast.

And while it turns out NASA didn’t actually spend millions on a space pen (and the Soviets didn’t just use a pencil — they had their own pens too), the myth persists for a reason. It’s comforting and true, in our opinion, to think that sometimes the oldest tools are still the right ones. Even when — especially when — they feel out of step with our slick, subscription-based reality.

Figma’s great. Canva’s fine...just. But hey those licenses add up. And a 99-cent pen doesn’t crash mid-idea.

There’s something beautifully non-volatile about paper. It doesn’t ping you. It doesn’t need charging. And when you look back at it weeks later — smudged, messy, barely legible, you normally still remember exactly how you felt and where you were when you wrote it.

So we like to take notes as close to as fast as we can think as possible.