Psssst: If you’re not sure what Crazy Eight’s are, read this first!

After writing my step by step instructions of how to use Crazy Eights to generate design ideas for your design sprint or workshop, I received a couple of questions about the first instruction:

Give each person an A4 sheet of paper with 8 boxes on it (or you can fold a sheet of paper into 8 sections)

Some people had noticed that in the image I had used, it looked like we had printed out our own custom template for Crazy Eights, rather than just drawing some boxes on a sheet of paper:

These eagle-eyed people are totally right. When I am running a large workshop, or if we are tight on time, I use pre-prepared Crazy Eights templates so I can just hand out sheets to participants and we can get started straight away. Easy!

My Crazy Eight’s templates

There are two templates that I use.

The Crazy 8’s template

The first is just a simple template with 8 boxes on, as well as some blank space at the top that people can use however they wish. Sometimes its useful to have people label their Crazy 8’s with their name or the theme their sketches are covering. People sketch out a different idea in each of the 8 boxes within 8 minutes.

Download Crazy 8’s template

The Storyboard template

The second template is for the second round of Crazy 8’s. Once people have sketched out their initial 8 ideas and people have voted on their collective favourites, a second round of sketching can be used to allow people to flesh out some of these chosen ideas more.

The template is to be used for one chosen idea at a time. The three boxes allow people to storyboard the idea out and give it some more detail.

You should end up with a storyboard for each of your chosen ideas, that depicts the idea at three different points. There is also space underneath each box in the storyboard for people to label what it is portraying.

Download Crazy 8’s – Storyboard template

How to use the templates in a design sprint

Simply print out the templates before you run your Crazy Eight’s exercise – always print a few more than your confirmed attendee list to be safe.

Remember that the Storyboard templates are to be used once per chosen idea so you’ll need enough to cover the number of attendees x the likely number of chosen ideas after the first round of sketching.

Finally, enjoy your workshop! 🙂