Idea visualization is a crucial aspect of the design process that involves translating abstract concepts and ideas into tangible visual representations. It's the stage where designers use various techniques and tools to create preliminary sketches, thumbnails, scamps, or rough drafts to explore and communicate their ideas visually. These early visualizations serve as a foundation for further refinement and development of the final design.

Here's a breakdown of the process and the different stages involved:

1. Concept Generation: This is the initial brainstorming phase where designers come up with various ideas and concepts. These ideas could be based on the project brief, client requirements, or personal inspiration. At this stage, the focus is on quantity over quality, encouraging a wide range of creative possibilities. Start with your word lists, and as you begin to think in pictures, move on to sketching directly.

2. Thumbnail Sketches: Thumbnail sketches are quick, small-scale drawings that capture the essence of an idea. These sketches are often rough and unpolished, serving as a way to rapidly explore multiple design directions. Thumbnail sketches help designers evaluate various compositions, layouts, and visual elements.

3. Scamps or Roughs: Scamps (short for "rough comprehensives") are slightly more detailed sketches that start to flesh out the chosen thumbnail ideas. They provide a clearer visualization of how different elements might come together. Scamps can also include annotations or notes to explain certain design choices or concepts.

4. Combining and Refinement: After creating a variety of thumbnail sketches and scamps, designers can start combining elements from different sketches to experiment with new compositions. This process involves merging the strengths of various concepts to create a more refined and unique design direction.

5. Feedback and Iteration: Once designers have a set of combined rough sketches, they can share them with colleagues, clients, or stakeholders for feedback. Feedback helps identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. Based on the feedback, designers can iterate on the rough sketches to further refine the design and make necessary adjustments.

6. Digital Mockups: With the selected rough sketch, designers can create more polished digital mockups using graphic design software. These mockups provide a clearer representation of how the design will appear in its final form, including color, typography, and visual hierarchy.

7. Prototyping and Testing: Depending on the design project, designers might create prototypes or interactive mockups to test usability and functionality. This is especially important in web and app design.

Idea visualization is not a linear process. Designers often loop back to earlier stages to refine, adjust, or explore new ideas as they receive feedback and gain new insights. The goal is to gradually refine the design concept from its initial rough stages to a polished and well-thought-out final design.

Throughout this process, combining elements from different sketches helps generate innovative and unique solutions. It encourages designers to break away from constraints and conventions, resulting in more creative and impactful designs. Start on your sketchpad in order to keep changing your initial designs more easily and then move into the computer screen where you can start experimenting with color palettes, typefaces, line weights, images, grids etc