One thing that is often easy to let slip, during a long-term frenetic pace, is thumbnailing ideas out in advance of anything else. Back when I was a freshman at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the first couple weeks of Intro to Visual Communications I involved manually cutting out simple shapes and putting them to bristol board. This was a means of learning the basics of shape, form, and placement. Once we had the opportunity to use the Mac to design, everyone immediately threw the basics out the window, and tried to out-Photoshop each other. The resulting designs, of course, sucked. My professor wisely said, "Photoshop should only be a tool to complete the piece, not the source of the graphic design itself. Did anyone sketch their ideas first?" Of course the global answer was a resounding "no". That was a very early, and essential, lesson for me to learn.

The fact of the matter is that no one — from seasoned designer to production staff to project manager — is above the sketch phase. For me personally, the "sketch phase" implies literally thumbnailing iteration after iteration on paper; a quick glance over my desk at any point yields dozens of Kimberly lead-based ideas. The exact same method/approach doesn't need to apply across the board for everyone. In the same spirit for web designing, modern applications have wisely placed themselves preceding the Photoshop phase for rapid prototyping.

There are innumerable amounts of rapid prototyping UX-geared apps available, like OmniGraffle for wireframing, or even Skitch for "back-of-the-envelope simplicity". For my money (or hopefully someone else's; expensive Adobe apps are expensive), Illustrator is the way to go for fast digital-based UI thumbnailing. Then there are web-based applications, like Protoshare for example, that even take the wireframe concept to the next level. With providing immediate clickability on "site sketch" prototypes and enabling commenting on various bits of functionality between team members in real time, there's simply no excuse to make Photoshop step 1.