Against the Grid: What Unfinished Pages Know That Portfolios Don’t

For the past twelve months I have kept a sketchbook with no intention of showing it. That was the rule. No tidy presentation spreads, no curated process shots, no retroactive narrative that made every wrong turn look like a necessary step. The pages are stained, overworked and frequently embarrassing. They are also the most useful record of design thinking I have made in years.

This is an argument against the perfect grid — not against grids themselves, which remain useful tools, but against the portfolio culture that treats the grid as a moral position. In too much UK design work, the polished page has become the point. Projects are presented as seamless systems, resolved layouts and confident typographic hierarchies. The result is a kind of visual sameness: work that is technically competent, well spaced and almost entirely without risk.

The portfolio problem

I have judged student shows, reviewed portfolios and sat through more process presentations than I care to count. The pattern is consistent. A project begins with research, moves through a few elegant iterations, and arrives at a final outcome that looks as if it were inevitable. The grid is immaculate. The colour palette is restrained. The mock-ups are photographed in soft daylight. Everything is resolved, and almost nothing is revealed.

The problem is not that the work is bad. The problem is that the presentation has become a genre, and genres breed imitation. When every portfolio uses the same grid, the same floating captions and the same three-quarter-angle photographs of printed matter, the work starts to look interchangeable. You can no longer tell whether the designer thinks in systems, in images or in words, because the presentation has flattened those differences into a house style.

What the messy pages show

My sketchbook from this year tells a different story. It shows a project that began as a poster, became a book, then returned to a poster because the book was solving a problem that did not exist. It shows four abandoned layouts for a packaging brief, each annotated with reasons why the hierarchy failed. It shows a colour test that looked dreadful on screen and quite good on uncoated stock, and a note in the margin that simply says: stop designing for the screen.

These pages are not attractive. They are not shareable. But they are honest, and honesty is a form of information. They show the gap between how work looks when it is finished and how it is actually made. That gap is where the learning lives. A final layout can tell you what a designer decided; a messy page can tell you why, and what else was considered, and what was lost along the way.

The tyranny of resolution

There is a commercial reason for hiding process. Clients want confidence, and confidence is easier to project when the work looks settled. There is also a cultural reason: design education and design media have spent years celebrating the resolved artefact. The grid is photogenic. The sketch is not. A neat process diagram suggests control; a page of crossings-out suggests doubt.

But doubt is not a weakness in design. It is the mechanism by which better decisions are made. The sketchbook page where three layouts collide, where the type is too big, where the colour is wrong, where the annotation reads 'this is boring' — that page is doing the work. It is testing, rejecting and recalibrating. When we hide that page, we present design as execution rather than thought.

A practical case for showing the mess

I am not arguing that every client presentation should include a scanned sketchbook. There is a time and place for polish. But there is a practical case for showing process more often, and for showing it honestly. First, it differentiates. If everyone presents the same resolved grid, the designer who can explain a decision, including the wrong turns, becomes more memorable. Second, it builds trust. Clients can see that the final outcome was chosen, not defaulted to. Third, it improves the work. When process is visible, it is harder to skip the awkward middle stage where the real thinking happens.

For portfolios, the implication is simple. Show one unresolved page alongside the final outcome. Show the layout you abandoned and explain why. Show the annotation that changed your mind. You do not need to make the mess look beautiful. You need to make the thinking legible.

The perfect grid will always be tempting. It photographs well, it signals professionalism and it satisfies the part of us that wants design to look controlled. But control is not the same as thought. A year of deliberately messy sketchbooks has convinced me that the most interesting work happens before the grid arrives — in the false starts, the bad colour tests and the pages no one was supposed to see. It is time we stopped hiding them.