Let the first draft be ugly
Polish applied too early is not craft. It is a very convincing way of avoiding the hard part.
The most expensive hour in any project is the one spent making something beautiful before anyone has agreed what it is. Colours get chosen, corners get rounded, and a decision that should have taken five minutes becomes an argument about a thing nobody is willing to throw away.
Ugly is honest
A rough sketch tells the truth about how finished the thinking is. Everyone in the room reads it as provisional, and so they say what they actually think. Show the same idea rendered in full colour with real photography and the feedback quietly changes register: people start suggesting tweaks instead of asking whether the whole thing is right.
Work at the resolution of the question
If the open question is what goes on this page and in what order, boxes and labels are the correct fidelity. If the question is whether the tone is right, write the actual words and leave the layout crude. Fidelity should follow the question, never the calendar.
Then finish properly
None of this is an argument for staying rough. The point of a fast, ugly draft is to get to the real problem early enough that you still have time to solve it well. Once the shape is settled, the detail work is not decoration, it is where the quality lives: the empty state, the error copy, the moment the connection drops.
Start ugly. Finish carefully. Most bad work gets those two the wrong way round.
