From time to time when I go digging through drawers and cupboards looking for something, I often unearth old notebooks and sketch pads I’d forgotten even existed.

In just about every pad I open up and look through though I seem to find at least one website interface sketch, for an idea I had years ago.

Sometimes my discoveries are quite satisfying (yep, that 2002 interface was really quite fun), other times they can be cringe-worthy in the highest degree. As in, I’m glad that idea never saw the light of day.

People have been sketching user interfaces since the birth of the web (possibly even before) but the sketches usually stay locked away in old notebooks and discarded bar napkins in Austin, Texas. Many of the websites we use started out as scrawlings, and with people like Jakob Nielsen and Bill Buxton spreading the gospel of faster, cheaper paper prototypes, “next year’s Twitter” may already exist on paper.