A new board is a grid

The title is Untitled. Layer 1 is the only layer. Snap, meetup, and the grid are on. The pen is the tool, the stroke is solid, and the page is empty. That is the whole product before I have done any work, and I want it to stay that honest.

A whiteboard that opens onto someone else's sample drawing is a whiteboard I have to erase before I can think. I have deleted a lot of sample drawings. The grid is not a sample. It is the paper. Meetup is how two strokes agree to share a point. Snap is how I stop pretending my hand is a plotter. Both can be turned off. Neither is a tutorial character waving from the corner.

The tools are the sentence

Pen, line, the shapes, text, eraser, select. Fill is a checkbox, not a mode I get lost in. Width is a slider. The colors are a row, and a custom swatch when the row is wrong. Under that, the layer: visible, locked, and the usual stack of undo and export. PNG and SVG leave the file. The file itself is the board. I can put it on disk without first choosing a poster layout.

Sketch Studio ships as that window. The status line at the bottom is allowed to be dull. Pen, solid, the current color, the width. I read it when a stroke comes out wrong. I do not read it for encouragement.

Empty is the first save

I will not preload a diagram of the architecture, or a sticky note that says hello. The first save of an untitled board should be a grid and a layer, so the next open is the same object I closed. If a future version draws on the page before I do, that version is decorating. The grid can stay. The ink is mine.