Nearly every project starts in my sketchbook. There is something about the tactile nature of holding a pencil and gliding it across the surface of a page that helps me loosen up and get the creative juices flowing.

After being at Redhead for a year, I’ve gone through four kraft brown Moleskines and one large spiral-bound sketchbook. In all honesty, most of the pages aren’t very pretty. They’re covered in notes I’ve scribbled during meetings, layout sketches, to-do lists, and rough thumbnails of bad ideas (you have to start somewhere …). But it’s all part of the process.

Here are a select few pages to give you a little insight as to what the process can look like.

These little monstera leaves are rough sketches for a mural we did. I took these into Illustrator, cleaned them up, and made them into a pattern.

Here I was working through different styles of a feather for a logo concept.

Sometimes sketchbook pages are great for sticking stuff. This page is a color palette I was developing for a brand and a little bit of play for our ‘zine, Louise.

Occasionally, InDesign will take excruciatingly long to package files, so I doodle to keep sane.

Some more playing around for Louise.

When your boss tells you to make mid-century inspired greeting cards, you do not question her. This is the beginning stages of working out some patterns inspired by Lucinne Day’s work. We ended up going in a very different direction, but exploration is part of the process.

This beauty of a sticker lives on the cover of one of my Moleskines and serves as a reminder that all great ideas do indeed start on a blank page. It’s a process of exploring, pushing, refining, eliminating, and more refining until we’ve landed in the right spot.

It’s been a fulfilling and challenging first year. And I have a fresh pack of Moleskines just waiting to be filled for Year Two.