Sketchnote Army Podcast (Mike Rohde)
Explorez tous les épisodes de Sketchnote Army Podcast
| Date | Titre | Durée | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 29 Nov 2022 | Raven Henderson - S12/E09 | 00:34:20 | |
In this episode, Raven Henderson shares how her experiences as an Army Brat prepared her to be adaptable in all sorts of situations, including visual challenges. Presented by The Sketchnote Handbook’s 10th Birthday GiveawayPeachpit and Mike Rohde are giving away 10 prizes in The Sketchnote Handbook 10th Birthday Giveaway! Here are the prizes you could win:
To see all the details visit: rohdesign.com/giveaway Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by: Concepts: an infinite, flexible creative tool for all your good ideas. Available on iOS, Windows and Android. The new Concepts 6 for iOS has exciting new features, including a modernized canvas interface, a freshly structured, easier to use gallery that integrates with the iOS Files app, and RGB and HSL color options added to its already extensive Copic color palettes. Concept’s infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Draw and take notes with liquid pens, markers and brushes in your favorite colors. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size — with simple gestures. Drag+drop images onto the canvas, and use layers and grids to organize your creative space. When you’re ready to share, export straight to your friends or team. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 30 Aug 2021 | Season 10 Preview - SE10 / EP00 | 00:02:10 | |
I have great guest interviews for your listening pleasure, including:
I think you are going to LOVE season 10! New episodes start next week Monday, September 6th, 2021 with Alejo Porras, so keep your eye on your podcast app every Monday morning! CREDITS
SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 11 Oct 2021 | Josie Dee brings sketchnotes to the office - SE10/EP06 | 00:39:21 | |
In this episode of the podcast, hear from Josie Dee — a sketchnoter, author, script-writer, and poet as she shares how she entered into visual thinking and continues to use Sketchnotes every day in unique ways. Josie found a niche at work where she captures sketchnotes that help clarify communications, and how initially it was a challenge to convince her colleagues of the benefits. Hear the unique ways she meets colleagues where they are to teach sketchnoting and how she documents her research, using sketchnotes. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Draw and take notes with liquid pens, markers and brushes in your favorite Copic designer colors. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. Drag and drop images onto the canvas, and use layers and grids to organize your creative space. When you’re ready to share, export straight to your friends or team. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
Links
ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Tips
Credits
Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 12 Apr 2022 | Lai Chee Chiu loves drawing the process - SE11/EP09 | 00:30:00 | |
In this episode, Lai Chee Chiu talks about her use of drawing to define and improve processes and how drawing is a secret superpower in her solopreneur business. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
Tips
Credits
Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 26 Dec 2023 | Gary Kopervas visualizes business innovation with cartoons and creativity - S14/E09 | 01:05:02 | |
In this episode, Gary Kopervas shares how drawing and writing freed his imagination and got reactions from others. He’s built on his early skills to become a cartoonist, copywriter, creative director, and brand consultant. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Tips
Credits
Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike, and I'm here with Gary Kopervas. Gary, how are you doing? Gary Kopervas: I'm doing really well. Mike, thanks for having me. Really excited to be here. MR: Yeah. Did I say your name right, Kopervas? Is that the right way to say that? GK: That is spot on. MR: Really. GK: And that doesn't always happen, so I appreciate that. MR: Yeah. Well, I just came back from Holland, so I've been aware of very unusual names, and trying to pronounce them, that was about a month ago, end of August, early September. GK: I think everyone who's been mispronouncing my name, I should ask them to make a visit and bone up on the pronunciation because I often get the "coppervas" as in the metal or the copper. So, appreciate that. MR: Yeah, not a problem. I always try to make sure I say the name right at least. At least that's the one kind thing I could do for somebody. But let's get into a little bit about you. We've crossed paths because I think we ran across each other on LinkedIn and I really liked your stuff, I think you liked my stuff, we got chatting and I said, you know, "You'd be a really good candidate for the podcast 'cause of the work you're doing." And I'm always trying to push the boundaries of who I talk with to go more toward the edges, so. GK: And I think we have some people in common who introduced—you know, I was aware of your work prior to that, but some people have talked about the podcast and I think we have them in common. So that helped facilitate today. So I'm grateful for that too. MR: Yeah. Now that I think back, there was someone who recommended you, I'm trying to remember who it was that recommended you, but I'd have to. GK: Martha. MR: Martha, yes, of course. Yeah. So, once I saw your work, then that totally made sense. So, I'm glad. Thank you, Martha, if you're listening. GK: Yeah, and I think she will. So she'll be happy for that. MR: She's a pretty dedicated listener. I do know that. GK: Yes. MR: Well, why don't we get right into it? Why don't you tell us a little bit of who you are and what you do, and then jump right into your origin story? How did you end up here? You can go back all the way to when you were a little kid if you want to. I just love the origin story 'cause it tells me so much about the person and what motivates them. GK: Yeah, that's very true. As far as today, I guess I would describe myself as really a cartoonist turned, copywriter, turned creative director, turned brand consultant. It has been an evolution and not really stopping something and starting to do something else, it was always continuing to do what I did in the early days which we can talk about. But it started to evolve it to to the career that I was in. And I went from college to advertising agencies. I live in New Jersey and started in New York. And just to answer your question of who I am Gary Kopervas, and then I'm all those things that I just mentioned. I grew up in East Coast, so advertising was always something that I wanted to do. Growing up, there was this great television show called "Bewitched." MR: Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah. I watched "Bewitched" all the time. GK: She was a genie out of a bottle, you know, I think it was a documentary, I'm not sure, but she was a genie—oh, no, a witch. Sorry about that, that's actually not a genie. MR: Bewitched, yeah. GK: Bewitched. She was a witch, Elizabeth Montgomery, a cute witch and married to an advertising executive. So it was always like, man, I have to look into this advertising thing because it was always creative and it was always, you know, Darren creating these cool campaigns. And then his wife, the witch, would always splash it up with something really cool and amazing and Darren would get all the credit, you know, for being so creative. So, you know, it was a sitcom when you're a little kid, but I just thought this advertising seems like it might be a good thing which did dovetail into I guess an origin story, is that I was a quiet kid. I just didn't talk a whole lot. But I found at some point writing and drawing and playing the guitar became really great forms of self-expression for me. So I started to just you know, write stories and comics. I grew up around, "Mad Magazine" and "Marvel Comics." I had a mom, like many moms who saved a lot of things, and I would see there's elaborate stories of things that I had written and illustrated. So the cartooning thing was really a great thing for me because it just allowed me to, at some level, make sense of the world around me. I didn't write journals per se, but I kept pretty good—maybe unconsciously at that age, but I would always draw what I was into and draw what I was interested in. And to look at it years, years later, it was always amazing. One of the examples, and I still laugh about that was parent-teacher night. The teacher said to my mom, is like, "Oh, we asked the kids to draw something that they like, you know, a house, maybe a Turkey made out of their hands, some cotton and clouds." And I brought into class the illustrated, as best I can, the parody of The Godfather from "Mad Magazine" by Mort Drucker. You know, just painstakingly drawing Sonny Corleone, and my mother was like, "Wow, all the other kids had, like, you know, houses and trees and yellow suns, and you came in with the Godfather parody." And they kept an eye on me for a little while, but it was just an example of us fascinated by getting lost into writing words and drawing pictures. But the true origin story goes back maybe a little bit further, but like most, and looking at your wall, it's fun to see and reminds me of superheroes and Marvel. And like most kids that are, you know, six, seven years old Superman and Batman, maybe Captain America or Thor. And I would draw them which was really great for things like anatomy and drawing just what human beings look like. And that was fun. But in drawing that, I like many kids wanted to be Batman. Batman was really a fun thing, and I would have stuff on walls, but there was a period of about a year or two when I can't explain it, but that's how the culture works, is I really got excited about Zorro. Do you remember Zorro? MR: Yeah. GK: Zorro was the swashbuckling— MR: He left a Z, and when he would fight crime or whatever, right? GK: And I thought that was a cool thing. So me being a quiet guy and using drawing and writing to express myself when I was around that same age, six or seven, I thought it would be like a really cool idea that on one rainy day, I did have a Sharpie, maybe it was my first experience with Sharpies, where I put Little Z's under the furniture in my family's living room furniture. So I thought it was cool, I had Z's all underneath, you know, put under various pieces of furniture until my mother did see that and said, "Come here a minute. What gives on all this furniture, there's little Zs under our living room chairs. What's with the Zs? Did you draw the Zs? " And I want to remember it this way, I'm not sure if it actually happened, but it was like, "Mama, I really didn't draw those Z's. Zorro did. I had nothing to do with it." After talking to and probably a grounding, I realized, "Do not deface furniture with Z's." But at a very young age, I found there was something really interesting about drawing and writing and letting your imagination run, and to get a reaction from people. What I think it did, is it allowed me to build confidence, you know? 'Cause I was quiet and played sports and did things like, you know, hung out with friends in the neighborhood. But I think I started to find, "Hey, I'm actually okay at this. I can write and I can draw, and I usually get reactions outta people. Not always favorable, you know, with the whole Zorro thing. But it was an opportunity to express. And I followed that into jobs and started to shape this idea that I was very visual, but also wrote, so sort of a left hand, right hand. Then what sealed it for me was, to follow this little arc of an origin, I was in high school like many, and in a chemistry lab in high school, maybe 10th-grade 11th-grade. Maybe it was a bio lab. And it was a three-hour lab, and the teacher was, I still remember him, he was a really serious guy. And I remember wearing earth shoes, and he wore his pants really high, and he had a beard with no mustache. So I couldn't help but say, man, he sees really sort of a comic character. So it was an afternoon of learning about the Doppler effect, about the little dropping of balls into the water and the rings of things, which is, you know, pretty important at the time. And it was long though, for me. My mind started to just wander in my hand and my imagination. So I started to, in my notebook draw a picture of this teacher talking about the Doppler effect. And it was a bit of a caricature, but it was taking something he said about the Doppler and, and drawing it. And a neighbor nearby said, "Lemme see that. That's funny. That's really funny." So I started this, a Doppler effect of distraction in this classroom where people grab the notebook and passed it. All of a sudden I realized it was getting away from me. And people laughed and they're like, "Oh, man, this is—" And as teachers often do, they pick up on that right away. And he saw about three rows away from me, saw disruption. So he walked over and he looked at, "Hold on one second. May I see this?" And he saw the picture that I had drawn, and with this little scenario, and in a poker face, didn't say much, and he said, "Oh, who did this?" And I was like, "Uh-oh this is gonna top my Zorro experience. This is like, serious now." So he came over and I heard this little earth shoe squeaking, you know, as he made his way through the rows. 'Cause people were like, "Who drew this?" And people gave me— MR: They kept pointing backwards. Yeah. GK: — people gave me up. I still remember, walked up to the side of me, you know, and I was just playing it cool. And he looked down and he said, "Did you draw this?" And he put the notebook in front of me. And I was like, "What am I gonna say?" I was like, "Yeah, I did do that." And I was expecting, oh no, I'm outta here. I'm gonna probably go somewhere, someone's office. And he looked at it and he goes, "So you did this?" I said, "Yeah, I did this." And he goes silence. It was like two seconds. And I thought, "Oh, it's just boiling up. This is not gonna go well." MR: It's getting worse, yeah. GK: He goes, "Could you add color to this? And I wanna put it in the frame and give it to my wife." And I just thought, "That did not go the way I thought it would go." MR: No. GK: He said, "This is so funny. I would love if you can just maybe pull it out and clean it up and put some color in it. And I like to give it to her for fun in a frame." And I realized at that point, the reactions that you can have, even in the most, you know, unexpected places of just an idea and a visual be it comic or just a diagram or what have you, that just captures people. And I just thought, "This is starting to get interesting." And then from there, I went into to college and studied business thinking, advertising, and then got into creative departments. And then it's been that trajectory ever since. So it's funny though, those early stories, the early days led up to what had been, you know, a pretty, pretty long career now. MR: Wow. Yeah. It prepared you in some ways to be ready. I love that you're channeling the spirit of Zorro to your mom, right? GK: Oh. MR: I guess she probably was thinking like, "Well, at least he drew it on the bottom of the furniture," right? GK: He said, "Maybe he was thinking a little bit." But it was on the bottom. I don't know the mental process then, but it was so important that I did not do the top. And I think it was that you know, Zorro had that little mask, and he was sort of mysterious, so he didn't wanna go over the top. That was one of my early memories of that whole creativity. MR: Wow. One of the first taggers, I guess Zorro. I never thought of it that way. GK: Yeah. At least Sharpies could rub out and wash out if you wanted it to, but Zorro went right into the wood. MR: He would cut into there. Yeah. GK: He would cut into the wood. So I wasn't completely Zorro, so, but they were forgiving, thankfully. MR: Yeah. And as they were on the bottom. Yeah. That's really cool. I love the story about the teacher as well, you know, because we have had a fair amount of teachers on this show, and they really embrace visualization. It seemed like this teacher was open enough to do the same and see the value. Like, wow, he really was. I would think any teacher that walked up and saw that, leave aside the humorous drawing of him, which he enjoyed, right? It worked out that he enjoyed it. GK: Yeah. MR: You were paying attention, right? You were capturing information and the stuff he was telling you, you were receiving it, right? That's a reflection of what you received, so. GK: And that's a really good point. And I hadn't thought about it before, you know, trying to pull out what maybe would become mechanics of some sort that I would do later. But I was listening to Doppler and I had him in some context that said, "Oh, I heard you, but I'm just gonna interpret it." And I think that's what, whether it's either sketchnoting or even workshops that I often do is I'm hearing what comes out or comes from and then quickly interpreting it and putting it into somewhat of a visual context, as, you know. And just isn't solely reporting what you hear. It's not like it's a court stenographer or something. It's interpreted and enhanced so it's more memorable and sometimes even more entertaining, you know? MR: Right. And you're often connecting—I find myself connecting dots, like it may be unsaid, but there's a connection between these things that as I look at it, these have impact on each other, or one doesn't exist without the other. And you can visually connect those things, which could be pretty interesting. Maybe you did that as well in the work you did. I think the other thing too, as an a scientist, right? So he was a scientist. GK: Yes. MR: His whole job is observation. You have to be a good observer of what happens and then document it. You did all those things. You were observing him. You're almost, as though he were a monkey in a zoo or something, and you're observing like all the details. GK: Yeah, that's true. MR: And then, you're capturing what he was saying, and on top of it, and putting it in context. I'm curious, did you ever hear back from him, what his wife thought of your drawing? Did you get feedback on that frame drawing? GK: I did. And it was a hallway because I remember it was, and I still had another year. I think it was like a junior year, I was still there around for a year. But he was a tough teacher grade-wise, but he did have a bit of a sense of humor. And it was almost like Catskills kind of humor where, you know, I think I hit a nerve, and he might've been like, "I don't see that here often." So it was a bit of a surprise. And I think probably the following year, my senior year, and oftentimes if I remember correctly, a lot of teachers would hang out in the hall or near their classroom and welcome. I remember walking down the hall towards him and we made eye contact, and he was just like— MR: I remember you. GK: He did a little bit of the De Niro from his movie, "You, you, just wanna tell you, I gave it to my wife around Valentine's Day or whatever it was." And he goes, "She loved it. Now, she'll never let me forget about how high I wear my pants." So he even had a bit of self-effacing humor and order to just want me to just tighten it up so he can give it to his wife. And I think we had in a way a bit of a connection there where he was grateful, but still maintaining his teacher status. But we had a moment in the hallway the following year where I walked away feeling pretty good. Oh, I kind of probably forgot about it, but it made me feel good. Other kids in my class, yet again, kind of quiet guy. And I find there's a little bit of a relationship of sometimes the quiet guys, the instigator. As they say, "You gotta watch the quiet guy, you don't know what he's up to. " And it was a moment where people remembered that and said, you know, that it was fun and they remembered it years after. It's like, "Hey, how about that lab class, you remember that?" "Yeah, that was funny." MR: Gary, the mastermind. GK: Yeah. MR: Talking about all that, so obviously you went to school and you ended up in, you talked about cartoonist copywriter, creative director, and now brand consultant. I'd be interested to hear the—it sounds like you didn't really stop doing the one thing. You just layered things on top, right? So you built all those things into the way you operate. Tell us how those things layer and what does that look like now that you're a brand consultant? How do those different parts come into what you do? GK: And that's a great question. And it was a little bit of that. I'd started out as a junior writer at different agencies. One was in New York, and then I wound up going out to the Midwest. And so you're just doing what you're told and, you know, you're writing for whatever clients you were working on. I found myself—and this was years before even knowing what sketchnoting was, or people actually did it. I was in many meetings, lots of meetings, and some boring meetings. And there were times when we didn't all work on our laptops, which was a little bit like, "Geez, I don't know why I wish I knew at that point." We all wrote in notebooks and things, so, we would often sit in, you know, circles or semi-circles and just notes and say, "Hey, let's take a break and we'll come back in 10 minutes." And oftentimes, people would go by and in matter of casually walking by and look at my notebook, and it was just organized differently. Everyone else had the same notes taken the same way they took it back in high school and in their biology classes, just that everyone's notes looked identical. But in that 90-minute meeting, they would look at mine and go, "What kind of going on here? What is this? What are doing? You should be paying attention. Your notebooks should all look like everyone else is." It just didn't process that way. My mind would work, as I often described it, in sound bites and snapshots. As the information came out an image would pop into my mind, and all of a sudden I would just doodle, a lot of doodling. I would doodle an image and then write what I heard around it. And they were just little episodic sketches during a 90-minute meeting. And people will be like, "How do you do that? How can I do that? Because I wanna take a guess and say, I'm gonna remember yours a little bit more." So it's that idea again, of verbal visual working together. And I got somewhat known for amongst clients and creatives of that odd note-taking style. And then, and then the progression said, "Hey, we have a large meeting where we're gonna do a whiteboard, or we're gonna just put your paper up on the wall, could you just track notes and can you stand up and do that?" And I was like, "I think I could do that. I mean, I haven't, but I'll put my notebook aside and grab a couple of these markers, and sure let's do it. And I started to do that in a larger scale at meetings, and I noticed people would take their phones out later on, people actually took photos with their phones. Took their phones out, took pictures of it. And I was like, "Wow, why are you doing that?" He said, "I don't wanna forget it. I don't wanna forget what we just did. And plus, I wanna share with my team." So I was finding those moments where be it a high school moment where it connects and someone engages with it, years later engaged with it when they saw it on a conference room table or in a room. So it just continued to progress. And people kept waving me on, just do it over here and do it over there. MR: Kind of encouragement. GK: And then there was a moment where it went from, you know, doodling and sketching for my parents, you know, to some positive and negative effects. And then doing it in high school and having a moment with some teachers where it's just like, "That was a reinforcement." And then being in the working environment and ad agencies and with companies, them calling it out is kind of different and helping me to remember the material. And I thought that's really kind of cool. And then there was a moment in the working world where I worked for maybe 10 years or 12 or more in new product development. As a group that I was one of the four charter members of a company in Cincinnati that started to do new products. So we would go into rooms and work with teams and research and sales and various others and start to build concepts for either beverages or foods or with hotel chains on how to build these new service programs. But it was basically going from nothing to prototypes and just loosely done sketches. And that was really a great call of a decade of that kind of work where you're working in the intangibles and being able to sketch quickly. And, you know, that was always a great expression that someone shared with me is that a doodle is really the first prototype for anything. And that really lived in the new product era. Another moment where I thought, okay, it's on now, it's kind of interesting, is I was doing an innovation session in Chicago for an education company that in essence trained accountants to become CPAs. So it was training-based and education-based. So a friend was running the program and said, "Hey, can you come out and join us for a couple of days and help facilitate and work their group for new ideas and new approaches, strategic planning kind of thing." And I said, "Sure, I'll do that." I showed up on a Friday—or no, I left on Friday. So I showed up on a Wednesday the night before, and we often grab a bite to eat and talk about, okay, what's the next two days gonna be about? I really hadn't known much about it. And she was always, "Ah, just go with it. You're pretty good on the fly. It's the usual thing except for an education brand." It's like, okay. But meeting with her and the rest of the team, somewhere between me leaving and showing up in Chicago, somebody had said. You know, I spoke to the client and they're really excited to do this, but someone sent me something in a PDF and it's called some kind of sketching." And we were all like, "Well, what do you mean exactly? You know what you mean prototype, just like writing sketchbooks and sharing it?" She said, "No in front of the room to hear the ideas and then to live sketch them in the room and move on to the next." It was a strange request because somebody said, "Hey, any of you guys do that?" MR: Here you are. "I can do that." GK: "Anybody with any experience?" And it was a very good friend of mine said, "I didn't even see this coming so don't feel obligated, but do you wanna try?" I said, "Well, I haven't done it in this capacity. And it was always fairly loose and spontaneous, but now this is part of an expectation of a two-day conference." MR: Right. It's different. GK: So, I remember asking, "What is the client's expectation?" So they said, "I'll send you PDFs of what it is. "And it was largely what you would imagine it would be, you know? A lot of just loose sketches and a lot of mind mapping. It was more energetic and more, excuse me, visually interesting mind maps than just circles and hubs and spokes kind of thing. So at that point, it's like, "What do I have to lose? Yeah, okay. I'll do it." So they went out and got foam core or other types of materials, and handed me the markers. And I showed up in the morning going, "This is either gonna go pretty good or okay, or—" MR: I'm never gonna do this again. GK: "— I'm never gonna do this again." It might've been when you really started to make this more mainstream and make people aware of its sketchnoting, all of a sudden people are like, "Hey, I saw this thing, can we do that?" And it was a moment in time where probably a lot of what you were doing and some of your, you know, colleagues, someone on this client team said, "I'd like to incorporate this into our session." And now, it was maybe one of the more lucky instances that I could imagine because it went really well. It's just while I was doing it, you have that out-of-body where you look down and go, "Man, this is like so much energy. Look at these people. There's laughter." And I found that that point, the style started to emerge a little bit, which was, it had a lot of that cartoonist in it. Some of my objects, and some of my people looked a little Don Martin-like from "Mad Magazine," and people were like, "Oh, that's funny." But there were many drawings over the course of two days that might've been 8 or 10, which was kind of fast stuff. And I realized, man, I'm kind of gassed at drawing, you know? But I went home and they did ask to ask me to do some buttoned-up, cleaned-up versions. And I still have that set of 10 or 12 that were fun to do, live in the room. And it really helped the team look at all the ideas and go, "I see all the components and you really characterized it, get rid of this one, we'll keep that one. And my friend who organized the session said they, they loved it And it was, you know, better than they thought. And it was a lot of people who had their hand in it. But me playing this little—it was like an improv, I played in bands in high school where you'd show up with your guitar with a bunch of strangers. And they're like, "Hey—" MR: Ladies and gentlemen. GK: "—you don't walk this way by Aerosmith." And it's like, enough, and boom, you're off, you go. So it was sort of a, a jam session using sketchnoting and it was one of those moments where I thought, "Okay, I got a new arrow in the quiver, and it's a pretty sharp one and a pretty cool one at a time when there was growing need for it. So the agencies that I worked with, they had also had like, "Hey, we got this, you know, different way of doing things." So I started to do every meeting like kickoffs and immersions and presentations, and even strategy meetings where I became a little bit of the clunky monkey with the symbols where I would come out and they're like, "Do that thing. " And then years went by and I realized this is an extension of all the things I did early on, and now a market had been created for it. Again, I'll take this opportunity to thank you for a lot of what you put out that did a lot of the heavy lifting. MR: Oh, thanks. Well, I think there were a lot of other people doing it too. And graphic recording, which is more of that large scale, in the front of the room stuff, existed since the '70s with David Sibbet, some others. GK: The Grove. MR: The Grove. Yeah. And some others MG Taylor, I think Matt, and Gail Taylor were doing it. They were also part of that early way before. GK: Yeah. MR: You know, in my experience, I didn't know that graphic recording was a thing. I stumbled into and invented the name sketchnoting and practiced it just 'cause it made sense to me. I didn't know if anybody else could apply it. It was just totally me making sense out of note-taking because it wasn't working. And then come to find out, hey, all the concepts that seemed really logical to me is the same stuff that these people standing in front of rooms getting paid to do the work are doing. And so, then I got involved with many of the people in that community. So now I'm connected to that community. So there's been a lot of people, I think, over time, that have been slowly building that wall. And there's lots of people now that enter the business or the space, or the community, wherever you wanna call it. And there's a huge wall built that you can walk on. A bridge, somebody built this bridge, but it took, you know, 10, 15 years of work to put that up. GK: Yeah, exactly. Right. And the other observation, which was a moment was, I think during COVID we're, I mean, globally, all kind of stuck in place, in homes and communities started to pop up and people, and it was critical that people chose to do that, is that people started sharing. And I started to see these similar things to what I was doing, but way different. And something that I could be inspired by coming from people in Italy, in Finland, and in the UK. And all of a sudden, without noticing, a year and a half later, I am connected to and sharing and just chatting to people throughout Europe and various other places that there's a bit of a kinship there that otherwise, you know, again, for me, when you work at different agencies and things, you get a little focused just on what you're doing and who you're doing it with. And now there's such a community out there where there's always something new to learn. And I think we all learn that a while ago, is continuing to learn, keeps you plugged in, keep you relevant and there's always a new perspective to learn something by, and I could look at some people's work and going, "Wow, that is so much in the way that works for them. I could never do it that way, but I really like how maybe the mechanics of it is something that can apply to my own thing." And then the great thing is that most of the people that I've been in touch with, they're like, happy, go, "Yeah, I'm glad something clicked for you and go and use it." And now I'm adapting different tools and templates for branding assignments. And now, I mean, I'm sure is some of the work of Dave Gray and Sunni with Gamestorming. MR: Yeah. GK: There were times where, and prior to seeing Gamestorming, I just realized I'm just having fun and upfront and drawing these funny little templates and asking people to put post-Its on this cartoon head of an empathy map before I knew what an empathy map was. MR: Right. Right. GK: And I realized that's a whole nother layer of this cartoonist turned brand guy that somehow made meetings more enjoyable and clients would be like that, "That wasn't even work. That was fun." And I thought, "Okay, that's I something I'd like to hear." MR: It's pretty cool. GK: Yeah. And it was just, again, a adapting some of those muscles that got built up and some of the other muscles that were deliberately built up in terms of advertising and branding. But it's been an interesting journey, and one that it was not prescribed, you know, I backed into a lot of different environments. The new product thing was just really something that through circumstances that ad agency wanted to get into new products. And I wound up being one of the people that wound up working in that part of the agency, and thought that was no dumb luck. That was really a cool break. MR: Yeah. Well, I think, on the flip side, you prepared yourself by doing all this work as a kid and continuing, of course, you had encouragement like by your teacher in high school, but you were doing it because it made sense to you, and you were putting in the hours doing it in meetings for yourself, then called before the group to do it, and they really gave you feedback. So all this prep put you in the position. Like, so had you not been doing that and you had the opportunity to be a part of that product group, you probably may not have gotten the job at least not to do that. Or maybe not at all. I don't know, right. Because you had this skill that was unique that you could bring to the table, and obviously it was the people that decided maybe you should be part of that had seen it in practice in the past. So everything's sort of built on top of the next thing. GK: I think that's true. I was lucky in some of those respects where it was as much of a surprise or an epiphany to the people around me as it was to me. And just in a very, I think basic sense you're adding value that maybe isn't everywhere. I think a lot of the people I've met and yourself included, it's an interesting package of talents, you know? I think it's just not something you see in classified ads. You become an amalgam of your experience and your talents and it makes you, you. And I think if you could find a group that appreciates that and really feeds it which I had the opportunity to work at a branding agency over a decade where they kept feeding me more opportunity to do that it's about growth. I think I'm happiest when I'm growing. MR: Yeah. I agree. I think so too. Well, this has been great. It's been really fun to see your progression to where you're at now and how you're using all this—all the things that you've built, they don't go away. They just become useful at different points in the project, right. So, That's pretty cool. I'm really curious now if we switch over from the work, your background, and how you got here. What are the tools that you like to use? We always do this with every guest. I discover new stuff all the time. And I thought I'd seen everything. So I love this part of it because there's like, "Oh, I'd never heard of that pen, or that notebook or that something. GK: Yeah. I wish I could bring more discovery to it, but in terms of the transition from analog to digital, I'm a bit of a work in progress. Because I still love—and maybe it has a lot to do with the nature of the work was always show up. And it has changed since COVID where there's mural and it's different. But over those years of development working with markers and paper, I think it was just, you know, I love the feel of a line. I have a lot of cartoonist friends 'cause I've been doing this cartoon strip for many years now, and I have a lot of cartoon friends, and they're still like, "Man, you still dip a quill pen in ink." And then there's one or two were that I still know that are There's nothing like a feel of that line. But, you know, a lot of the tablets now and the digital tools, so I'm doing my best and I found some coaches to move me there. But I'm one of those types, particularly with being very mobile and working in a place where it's just coffee shops and other places, I like being able to walk in and buy tools from Rite Aid. Whether it's a nice gel pen or a—I have a friend, Rob Armstrong, who does jumpstart very successful long running strip. He still hand draws all his strips with a Paper M1ate pen. MR: Really. GK: Yeah. And some people are like, "That would take forever." I think it's a call you make, but I do love the times I've dabbled and toyed with, you know, iPads and things, but I need to do some work on the digital side. You may have found this too, but there were stores in the past, there was an art store called Pearl on the East Coast, these superstore, you know, where I can get lost. MR: Lost in there for a day. Right. GK: I'm buying pens and paper, and there's one in Philadelphia, which I'm not far from, called BLICK. MR: Yeah, BLICK. GK: And BLICK is one of the remaining super stores. I like Copic. I'm a fan of that. There's a couple others I think Japanese made that has a really fine brush to it where you can—I love varying lines and creating some depth. But my tools are what they have been for years. I would even turn it around and say, your tools, what do you recommend digitally? I mean, is it Wacom? I mean, where are you at in the whole transition to digital? MR: Yeah. Well, I would say just understanding that you're someone who's mobile, and I'm a mobile person too. I think the iPad and the pencil is pretty great. The resolution with the pencil and the screen is good. I recommend some kind of a screen cover. I like Paperlike, which has got little patterns that are printed or embedded in the plastic. Not only does it make it matte so it's not shiny, but it also provides a paper-like texture, hence the name. GK: Yeah. That's really key to know. I'd have to even go back and get that again once this gets out because the times that I have toyed with things, it's a little tricky, it feels like you're, you're drawing on a glass surface. I have other daily strip friends who do comics and go, "I couldn't go back to that because my process is so quick, and now I can knock work out a lot faster." Their production approach is vastly different. Which I can understand where I have some shopping to do and figure out what I'm most comfortable with, but I'm in the middle of it. I have an iPad now that I toy with, but I don't actually do work on yet. MR: In production. Okay. GK: Yeah. Latex Syndicate does my coloring and that kind of thing. MR: Okay. There's a few apps that you might consider. Procreate is popular with lots of people. It's really aimed at art. It's got layering like Photoshop. You can choose different brushes and colors and you can record it and have it animated. There's all kinds of power in there. If you need to edit your lines, if you want vectors like Adobe Illustrator, there's a couple of tools. One is called Concepts who sponsors the podcast. GK: Yeah. I think I've seen that. MR: Where you have different brushes and such. But then you can grab the points just like in Illustrator and move things around. You can select whole chunks and change to a different brush and it flips. Adobe Fresco is another tool that does both pixels and vectors in the same application. So that's another one to play with. And that's a variety of other ones. Some people who are really doing more note-taking than art, lean toward other tools. There's lots of really great note-taking tools, Goodnotes and Noteshelf and even Apple's Notes is pretty decent. It supports the pencil. There are some that are more note-oriented. If you need the organization and the structure of notes and to be able to search and all that, then that might be the better path. And then there's stuff that fits in between like I use a tool called Paper by WeTransfer. It's super old. It's designed when the iPad first came out. What I like about it is it's very limited. So I can't change the screen size. There's no layers. There's limited tools and the tools set are limited sizes. The colors are adaptable. But I kind of like the constraints. And what I've found is I've invested so much time using it that if I need to knock out an idea quickly, I just go to that tool 'cause I know it so well. I know where all the parts are. I know what it's gonna achieve. I know how to achieve them. For me, it works really well. But I also use Procreate for illustration work. 'cause It's got benefits of resolution and layers and undo and other features. So I think you almost need to take a little little tour on each one and see which one fits. And there might be need, I believe, in multiple tools, because some projects require different expectations. So if you need to make something that needs to be zoomed up to a billboard, well, you probably wanna use a Vector tool because procreates gonna pixel out at some point, even if—unless you build the canvas to be big enough, which is one approach. The other approach is to go, you know, resolution-independent with Concepts or Fresco, and then you could scale. So that'd be my list for you. GK: All good stuff. No, that's a great one. I'm gonna have to pull that off because a near-term goal I set for myself is to really get set and getting that comfort level because a lot of my cartoonist friends use the same type of a setup. And I dabbled with there. So I'm gonna have to you know, step into this century. MR: I think it's important for you to find what works for you. So even if they use something else, who cares? Like, if it works for you, you know this already. GK: Yeah. I love the point you made that if you have real stuff to that you're accountable for, you have something that's familiar and reliable and you know what you're getting into, and then create experiment time to try some other things. But that would be my ideal setup is to have my go-to. MR: Yeah. I think the other thing that works for me, and this isn't true for everybody, but it might, is I need a real project to work on. When I wanted to use Procreate, I had a big illustration project and I said, "All right, I gotta use this. I gotta figure it out." I forced myself to sit down and build the templates and choose the different inks and sizes, and I set it all up, and then I forced myself to do a project with it. And that was a good solution. For me, I learn 'em as much as I can, and then there's a point which I have to flip over and use it, and then they start to make sense together, so. GK: Yeah. No, that's, that's good advice. MR: Yeah. Going back to your analog tools, I'm kind of curious if you have any specific ones that if you go to the Rite Aid, are there certain pens or notebooks or anything that you tend to work with? Do you have any notebooks that you like? Is there a certain gel pen brand that you prefer if you can get it? GK: I think in terms of paper it, as long as I can remember, it's always been the—oh man, what's the—it escapes me at the moment. I don't wanna say Valore, but, so that's not— MR: Like Parchment paper, something like that? GK: No, it's, it's a little heavier weight paper, but it's in Michael's is another place that I go. it's just—vellum. Thank you. MR: Vellum. Yeah. GK: Whatever part of my brain say Valore. It's not Valore, it's Vellum, but it's Bristol Vellum. The Vellum has that nice tooth to the line. And I still love to see the interplay between a line and a piece of paper and scan it. Whenever I see my strips, the weekly strip I look at, and it's just like, I remember that line. It's a little obsessive. But I do the Copic pens of a lot of variety, but it's a good firm. Its tip doesn't mash. MR: Lays on top of that Bristol Vellum as well. GK: Yeah. And you could lean in and that's good. And then there's—is it Tubo? I forget. It's a Japanese pen. They sell 'em in too, and then I go through them like whenever I see them, I buy 'em. But they're mostly one's a firm paint or a brush tip. The other one's a little more of a traditional paint or a brush I should say. But that's usually in the Michaels or the BLICK. This is from Rob, you know, he does a lot of his lettering with a Paper Mate pen. MR: Paper Mate Flair. GK: Yeah. The Flair, it's like the Chuck Tailors of sneakers of mark making. I mean, it's just like tie up the Chucks and put 'em on, you know, and whenever I'm in Rite Aid or CVS, it's just like, "Okay, buy a couple things. We need, you know, milk, bread, Paper Mates." MR: Paper Mates. GK: And I always have those. I'm thankful that they don't discontinue that. I have huge, you know, just boxes of pens and I'm not loyal to, you know, other than what the ones that I've mentioned, because they've served me well. I do need to experiment and push out. But those are the Copic and the Paper Mate. MR: Simple tool set. Yeah. GK: Yeah. That's what I use for the strip. And my strip, I do on the vellum. I just scan them, clean them up, and send it to the syndicate. I work with King Features, and King Features does all the colorizing, and they distribute it to the papers and they send me the finish and it's always like Christmas. I send them these little black and white comics, and then they send me the archives of all the colorized. The strip I do a strip called Out On The Limb, and it's been like 30 years with King. And it's always that same relationship as I send them the finished black and white, and they colorize it. All my other friends are like, I still use my digital 'cause I wanna color it the way I want to. I should get used to that, but I love that King does that for me, and it's a nice joint relationship for many years now. MR: Yeah. It's worked for a long time. Maybe it doesn't need to be changed at all. GK: Yeah. It will eventually. At least being able to control that and send. I'm sure they wouldn't be mad if their production team in Orlando goes, "Oh, he's gonna do color. We don't have to do that anymore." MR: Yeah. Thankfully. GK: "It took forever." So, we'll see. MR: Interesting. So that makes me curious, since you're a cartoonist and you continue to be for a long period of time, what I think could be interesting to answer would be how do you deal with, every week you've gotta come up with an idea. Where do you get your ideas from? How do you cook up those? Are they just stuff that you encounter and you put 'em away somewhere? Do you have a tool or a notebook where you write things down? Like how do you manage that stuff? GK: It's really interesting, A lot of the same muscles. It's like listening and observing. Somewhere, somebody said this and it always stuck, which is, "You gotta do A, B, C. Always be capturing." So wherever I am, and now with iPhones, if I see an absurd notion in the world, I put it in the phone. And then I have a bit of a writing routine where Sunday nights I often go, "Okay, let me see this culmination of photos and post-its and backs of envelopes." The world is great stimulus for ideas. And sometimes I'll just stockpile them and then sit down and process it. And there was an incident where, I'm sure you've noticed is that I was walking through Barnes and Noble and went through like the top 10 books, often business books. So the top 10 business books, six out of the 10 business books had the F-bomb in it. Suddenly, major business books all have you know, F-words, we'll keep it at that. And I just thought, "What is that?" And then my mind started to play with that whole reality. And a cartoon happened where there was a woman—I took it out of the bookstore and put it into the standard library and saw a little librarian with a bit of a potty mouth talking to somebody who was directing them to the business book of the section, which is essentially, the cartoon was like, "Hey, it's okay. Let's everyone—just F-away, man. It's accepted." Because I just thought, wow, when did this this—people are now writing books to see if they could top someone else. So that was just an example of ideas happen because I just always keep one hand free. And I heard recently, there's a great quote by Neil Simon, and he said, he said it for comedy writers, but I think it's true of cartoonists, but also anyone who's creative. And Neil Simon said, "Comedy writers are two-headed monsters. One head is like everybody else. They go to the DMV, they go to Rite Aid, they put gas in the car. That's the one head. The other head is the one that kind of rises up and looks around and notices all the things around that other head and the rest of the body." And that's why that one really spoke to me because my wife will be one saying, you know, we're at this parent-teacher night, and my mind is like, wow. And she's like, "Earth to Gary, can you kind of dial back in here into this parent-teacher night?" So part of that is I do have that second head kind of out there looking for odd connections to make. And, you know, I'm hoping it never stops, but I'm always looking and always capturing stuff I can maybe use later. And many times it's writing it down in a small notebook and other times with the laptop. And now with the phone, that's the one piece of digital that I've become really relying on is photos and notes to myself, because it is true, you forget those epiphanies, you know? And there are times where I'll read a note, much like an old "Seinfeld" episode with a note he put on his next to his bed, where he couldn't decipher what it was he wrote at 2:00 in the morning. There are times where I can't make sense out of a note, but I still feel good having taken the note. Because there are times that some of the best ideas come from other people and just being in the right place. And that's why many of my coworkers coming out of those meetings that I described earlier, once they see me write something, they're like, "You didn't write that." When I said, "Right. I'm not gonna be an inspiration for a cartoon." And many times, they had, and I share it with them, but there'd be just brilliance that are far beyond what I'm thinking at that time. And I would just write something down and later the sweetest little gag and I'd often share it with them. And going back to my science teacher, they're happy to get it. And every single day, and particularly the world we live in now, there's just so much, to your point, you know constantly making new connections. And that's why I think, you know, there's always stuff to have fun with and build ideas around. So it's paying attention. MR: Well, let's shift into tips. I always frame it that someone's listening their individual thinking, but they feel a little bit like they're in a rut or hit a plateau. They just need some inspiration. What would be three things that you would tell them practical or, you know, mental suggestions to help them break out of that rut or just move forward? GK: This isn't too long ago myself, where I start to feel like it's a bit of a rut and also a rut, but also sometimes when you transition because I moved from agency life into now my own consultancy, which it's a different world and it's a different metabolism almost. I mean, it's just different. And I think that led me to this idea of the tip is sometimes just continue to—I'll use my case of, of writing and drawing and things, is to create and share. I mean, there are so many people that—I'm sure yourself and I know people like Austin Cleon has a book or two out there. It's just like, just put it out and let that be a source of conversation. And during that time when I started to expand some of the community with sketchnoters, I would just do things, you know, whether it was listening to a particular podcast, and I just would draw it and say, here's something I did. And it turned out to be something on LinkedIn where I started to share more, and I heard back more, and I got feedback. So whenever you're stuck put something out. And that's the beauty right now of even LinkedIn. If there are people that you admire or people that whose opinion, you'd appreciate, you know, share something and say, "There's something I'm working, I'd love to get your thoughts." And, you know, no harm could come from doing, creating something and putting it out, and sharing it. I mean, you might get, you know, feedback that people sometimes aren't always kind. But I think by and large the tip would be to just, you know, create every day and put it out there and start conversations with it. And there were times where I do, and I call it the Kopious notes now 'cause my name is Kopervas. So I will listen to a podcast or something of—an example of if I was stuck again, I'm not generating anything anymore, I will listen to a podcast or something. A friend of mine who wrote for Forbes interviewed Brian Grazer. And it had to do with this, he was launching a book called "The Curious Mind." And my friend Steve said, here, could you just listen to this interview that I recorded and can you give me some your takeaway on it? I listened to it and sketchnoted the whole thing, and sent it to him. And he sent it to Brian Grazer, who is in the process of a couple other things with this writer friend of mine. But in doing that sketchnoting, I learned a ton about this idea of I'll cut to the chase on that one is that Brian Grazer has curious conversations from his book. Every two weeks he talks to someone who has nothing to do with Hollywood or directing or producing to learn something. Maybe a long way around to the other idea of do things and share is if there's something you wanna learn, draw it. Because there's that eye-hand thing is that your mind learns when you, you draw it. And it turns out that many of that type of thing, I sent work to authors or even podcasts that guests and they loved it. And we had relationship of, whether it's LinkedIn or whatever of "send me more." I think if I'm stuck, I try to engage new people with work I've done and see where it goes. 'Cause In some cases it's led to consulting gigs. There was two authors that wrote a book, and I was taken by it and I did a quick sketchnote for each of the chapters—or actually for just one of the chapters. And they hired me to do that for all of their chapters. MR: Wow. That's cool. Yeah. GK: Ruts are just kind of like a pause and it's like, "Okay, now what?" When I get to that point when I'm stuck, it usually means I'm at a pause of some sort so I need an interaction with somebody. MR: You need a reason to move forward, I guess. Right. GK: And someone will inspire it or someone will validate something I've been thinking about. And I think I've learned to rely on others to get me through these little pauses and ruts. MR: If I were to re restate those, I guess the first one I heard was if you're in a rut, do something and share it. GK: Yes. MR: The second is, if you wanna learn something, draw it because you have to process the information to understand it. And then the third would be share your work with the people who inspired you. So like a podcast guest, an author, and you never know where that interaction might lead. If anything, you'll just have their appreciation. And all those three things in a row is you've done something to move forward, you've learned something new and you've made an interaction. That's a really great combination of things. GK: And I love the distillation on that, Mike. Thank you. And I think the other, I don't know, maybe it's a wrapping for all of it that I have found whenever I get stuck in a crossroads, whatever, how you wanna describe it, to do some of those things, but it really helps to just get on someone else's radar. And I found whether it was from other brand consultants or those sketchnoters in other parts of the world, get on other people's radar, they get on your radar, and all of a sudden, I find myself not stuck as much because because of that happening to me. So I think there's something about that. And I think we live in a time now where it's much easier to get on other people's radars because we have such access now, whether it's Instagram or LinkedIn is very big from a business standpoint. So use it. MR: Yeah. Those are great tips. Thanks. So to wrap the show up, I just ask where people can find you and your work so they can connect with you, so they can see what you do, they can check out your comic strip, see your work that you do. GK: Yeah, no, that's great. I think I'm most active on LinkedIn. That's where I do a lot of posting and it does have a bit of a business centered approach to it. But I put a lot of things there 'cause So many of my things tie to business. So LinkedIn is one. Facebook is a little more some fun stuff there as well. And at Kopious Notes on Instagram. I've been not pushing that as much. And maybe when this does get out and is live, I will have gotten back on that. But Kopious Notes is where I'm at in Instagram. And same idea is work in progress on garykopervas.com is a site that I've neglected, but there's a lot of my early cartoons there. And that's a either last quarter or first quarter of this year where that's gonna get reinvigorated perhaps. MR: Revamped. GK: Yeah. MR: Nice. Well, that's great. We'll either find those links and put 'em in the show notes, or as we follow up after this interview, maybe you can send me things you wanna make sure we include. So for those that are listening, check out the show notes. We try to make our show notes pretty extensive, and we include transcription of the discussion so if you're a reader, you can read while you listen. So we've got lots of options for you. And we're really happy to have you on, Gary. This has been a long time coming and I'm so glad that you came on the show and you just fit right into our community, just so well. GK: Yeah. Thanks so much. It was a real pleasure. And as you say, I was really waiting for this for some time, and it was awesome. So thanks for having me and have a great weekend. MR: Yeah. Well, thanks for all that you do, and for anybody listening or watching, it's another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Until next time, talk to you soon. | |||
| 22 Feb 2021 | Ania Staskiewicz on becoming a full time sketchnoter - SE09 / EP04 | 00:37:11 | |
In this episode hear from Ania Staskiewicz, a sketchnoter, graphic recorder, and visual thinking teacher in Poland. Learn how she made the leap from manager in a government office to full-time visual practitioner, fulfilling her childhood passion of drawing brought a huge energy boost that keeps her going. SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Neuland, the innovative maker of visual thinking tools. Every Neuland product is designed with passion to be durable and sustainable. Now you can get your own custom printed Neuland Markers! Neuland prints your company’s logo, slogan, URL, or an individual message on markers – even in small batches. These markers are the ideal gift for workshop participants and customers. Save 15% with code neuland@sketchnotearmy-2021 at Neuland.com until May 30th, 2021 RUNNING ORDER
LINKSAmazon affiliate links below support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. TOOLSAmazon affiliate links below support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 18 Oct 2021 | Matt Ragland visualizes his productivity - SE10/EP07 | 00:48:16 | |
In this episode, Matt Ragland, a productivity guide, creator coach, and sketchnoter, talks about how he integrates sketchnoting elements into his productivity practice. Learn how your abilities as a creative person can enhance your productivity practice, and why your bullet journal pages don’t need to be Instagram-worthy to be valuable to you. Time to get productive! Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Draw and take notes with liquid pens, markers and brushes in your favorite Copic designer colors. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. Drag and drop images onto the canvas, and use layers and grids to organize your creative space. When you’re ready to share, export straight to your friends or team. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 26 Nov 2024 | Javier Navarro applies fashion experience to make his visual practice unique - S16/E04 | 00:49:06 | |
In this episode, Javier Navarro, a former fashion designer, shares how his fashion experience adds a unique style to his visuals. Sponsored by ConceptsThe Concepts Sketchnote Workshop video — a unique, FREE, hands-on workshop video where I show you how I use the Concepts app to create sketchnotes on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. In this one-hour, eighteen-minute video, I cover:
The workshop video includes answers to common questions about Concepts. Watch the workshop video for FREE at: https://rohdesign.com/concepts Be sure to download the Concepts app at concepts.app and follow along with me during the workshop! Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
Tips
Credits
Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike, and I'm here with my friend Javier Navarro. How are you doing, Javier? It's good to have you here. Javier Navarro: Hi, Mike. I'm very happy to be here. Thanks for the invite. MR: Yeah, no problem. We crossed paths—I'm trying to think where we did it. Was it through some workshop that I did? I can't remember which one 'cause I did a couple really close together. Was it the bullet journal one or was it something else? JN: It was the lettering one. MR: The lettering one. JN: I remember the lettering one very well because I was really looking forward to that one. So yeah, it was the lettering one. I know your work from before, and I've been admiring your work for a long time, but that is where we started contact. Yeah. MR: Yeah. That was sponsored by Sketch Effect, which I don't think they have—they didn't record it, but there are some tidbits online. I think if you go to Javier's social LinkedIn and such, you can find it, which we'll talk about later. But anyway, that's how we came across each other, and I started looking at your work and thought your stuff is really cool. I need to talk to this guy and bring him into the community, so people can find him and be inspired and maybe chat with him and be aware. That's the fun thing for me, is discovering new people. Just when I think that I've talked to everybody, I just know that there's another person, 10 other people that I haven't talked to yet. So it's a never ending quest in the podcast to get new people and try and fit as many as I can in a season. So, welcome. JN: Thank you. MR: Why don't you jump right into, tell us who you are and what you do, and then you can go right into your origin story. Tell us how did you get to the place where you are from when you were a little boy. JN: Yeah. Like you said, my name is Javier Navarro. I'm a London-based visual storyteller, and I've been working in—visual storytelling is an umbrella term that I feel comfortable with. It's encompassing, like graphic recordings, sketchnoting, digital visualization, you know, there are many names to what we do. I've been doing this for the last four years. My journey is quite a long one. I'm a former fashion designer. I've been working for 10 years in fashion, 10 years in homewears, and basically drawing since I'm four years old. Illustration has been part of my professional journey all the time in different shapes and forms, but I came to graphic recording quite later, and I will get deeper into that. The thing is that during the time that I work in product design, I fulfill the whole process. I've been working with all kinds of companies, like corporate, startups, design strategy, creative strategy, training in research. So I fulfill the whole creative process and I think that informs and helps pretty much my practice as a graphic recorder as well because having been on the other side for so many years, I can understand team dynamics, team's struggles, and things like that. Even as a kid, I've always felt really, really comfortable drawing all the time surrounded by people. By that, I don't mean that I was doing graphic recording as a kid, but I never felt like—you know, there's people who felt kind of ashamed or tense around people looking at them over the shoulder, like, "What are you doing?" So actually, it was quite calming to me. Having people talking around on me when drawing, not necessarily about what was happening around me, but drawing all the time. Then what happened is that after this very long journey in product design, fashion, homewears, et cetera, around 2020, and that is a really relevant date for everyone as we all know. But maybe a year before that, I started realizing that I was done with product design. I didn't feel like it was contemporary. it was not contributing with anything in particular to the world, and there was no point in making more products. I was a bit of disappointed with the sector. I didn't feel it anymore. Then I started working for a nonprofit organization, and I was part of the branding department. Here in the UK, nonprofits are really powerhouses. They really take social responsibility, they make a difference, and they're very big. They pride themselves as big companies so they're really big structures. I was part of the branding department for the London branch for this particular nonprofit. Then, when we put the strategy for the whole year, the communication strategy, at some point, my manager at that time, she knew that I knew illustration, that I have done some visuals. She asked me, "Can you put together visually our strategy for the team because we need to share from the London branch to the national branches, to all the branches from this organization." And then I put, what, now I know is my first rich picture. The thing is that prior to that, I sometimes tried to work as an illustrator, but I always found that my ego was not in the right place. I was judging myself too much, or I felt judged by others, or maybe I was petrified of the blank page. I don't know. But the thing is that drawing with a purpose brings something different for me. When I realized that that was a thing, and there was a format where illustration, innovation, and service meet, for me, there was not turning back. It's like, "Okay, guys, I found my thing. This is what I wanna do for the rest of my life." I didn't know there was such a container. I did illustration before. I used illustration to develop product, but it was not the same thing. This was January 2020. Then we know that March 2020, the lockdown. Fantastic year to start a new job, new product, intersect or mail it. So proud. I say this with a lot of respect because I know that it was a really hard time for everyone. It was terrible to be at home. I know many people suffer, many people passed. I know it was very hard, but for me, it was an opportunity to train because after that I realized, "Okay, this is what I love. I need to learn about this." I got myself an iPad. I read a lot of books, yours being one of them. I mean, your books I read as well. So I got myself informed about what was this? Because I have to pull a lot of stress to find out what is this about? The great thing is that at that time, there were many, many talented people, very skilled, very experienced, bored at home with lots of time on their hands, very generous, extremely generous. Making lots of workshops, very open to meet other people, to make connections. Then in parallel, I was training myself in graphic recording as a craft, but also planting those little seeds of contacts and here and there, making some connections. When the world reopened, eventually those connections blossom, and they converted in actual projects and things that I could actually work with. MR: Wow. JN: That was a bit of the journey and this is where I am now. MR: Wow. JN: Very grateful by the way. MR: I'm kind of curious, going back to your fashion part. You talk about, it's really important for you to think—you talked about visual storytelling. Do you feel like that stories are told in fashion design? Is that something that we maybe miss? We just see, you know, the new seasons clothes are out, and the new color is burgundy. I dunno. And we just assume that there's like this machine that runs and just produces clothes, but would you say that in fashion there's a little bit more to it that we don't see that's more story oriented or maybe that isn't there, and it's frustrating. What's frustrating for you? JN: The thing is that I know, I understand, and I've been there that fashion from the outside looks like a very superficial and vain thing to do. But if you think about it, each and every one of us have cloths at home. We choose them from a very conscious place, whatever we want to be in fashion or not. But these are all anthropologically, it's a lot of information. If you walk on the street, you'll see people around wearing clothes, and in a very quick brain synapses, you understand who that person is. And it's something very unconscious happening. For me, that was the most important and interesting part of fashion because anthropologically, you can tell a lot, there's a lot of industries involved, the economy is always looking ahead in a way, is not casual at all. There are many layers, interesting layers about it. There's a lot of storytelling because we tell unconsciously stories through fashion. Even if you choose not to follow fashion, that is another— MR: That is a story. Yeah. JN: - statement. There's a statement, but there's still a story there. You are editing that story, you're casting the elements that you need to work around it. So there's definitely a visual narrative that at any level, all of us do. That said, at a personal level, I didn't find a way to monetize that point of view and that interest. It was the capitalist side of it that I was struggling with, because at some point it's like, it's overproducing. That was my personal experience. From a visual storytelling perspective, I know that we do. From one place or the other, we all have clothes at home we pick up and there's a inner narrative and there's a very unconscious choice. I mean, we pick up what we wear from very significant places without even knowing. You're attracted to certain colors, certain textures, certain shapes, and there's a reason why. To me, that's storytelling as well. MR: It's down to almost the instinct level in a way, right? It just feels right. I know that I'm fascinated by clothing. I don't know that I'm very fashionable necessarily, but I'm very picky about—when I go to the store, I have to touch the fabric and feel it, like there's something tactile about it. The shirt that I'm wearing now is actually a service—it's a shirt for people that work on cars, but there's some really nice details about it, because it's nice, heavy cotton. The buttons are actually hidden behind a panel here. The idea is when you're working on a car, if you have buttons exposed, you're gonna tear them off, sliding under the car, catching on something, so it covers it. Then on the shoulder, I think one of these shoulders, has a pen thing so you can put, I dunno, some kind of tool in there. For me, you know, I thought, "Hey, this is a perfect artist shirt." I can put a pen in my pocket. You know, it's free and floating, so I never feel constrained. It's really interesting that I accidentally stumbled on these red cap shirts that were intended for guys working on cars, but they actually fit really well for what I liked about clothing. I mean, it was a little bit more conscious, but it felt like, you know, it made some sense to me. JN: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. There's a choice. I mean, there you have your own criteria, and then you start building your own. Those are the building blocks for your own narrative, so. MR: Interesting. Yeah, I just thought that was a fascinating. I think the other thing I think about is we've tried to do this at the International Sketchnote Camps in years past, where we've had people that are really into urban sketching. Where we've gone off and done sketching of buildings. I would imagine there must be fashion people who are finders, I dunno what the word is, but people who find the next fashion. Because I suspect that there's people that build a fashion profile that are on the street, right? Like you think maybe walking around Milan, and they're making these choices, telling these stories with their clothes, and someone is probably going out there and seeing like, “Well, what's going on in the street that could be the next thing that we could make more available?” There's probably people that look at that. It's a little bit like urban sketching in a way, except you're sketching people and seeing how does their overcoat flow, or what's the color choices, or all these little details. You could probably fall into a hole trying to discover all that stuff. JN: Actually, I used to work for one of the companies that are trend forecasting those kinds of things. It's very interesting because the sources where you—it is almost like really—not really in the future, but obviously you don't have a crystal ball, but the sign, little signs and the cycles as well. Fashion is really cycling. When one thing is full, then you go to the other extreme. One of the really interesting things that movies are a really, really guiding line to understand what is next because there's so much budget and money put behind blockbusters that you understand, okay, in a room of people thought that in two years’ time, this might be the content that people want, these are the themes, this is the angle, the perspective that you want to throw at them, and this is execution level. And they pick up that direction, not that one. There are more women. You know, things like that also inform all those trends. I think that's more like something that could be applied to any craft, to keep an eye on those things and see where those people are thinking ahead, where are they heading to, and then that informs backwards. MR: Kind of awareness and noticing. Being a noticer, right? Noticing the details and keeping your awareness antennas up so that you see what's happening, whatever your space is. JN: Yeah. MR: The other question I'm curious about with fashion is how did your fashion experience both in education and in work, how does that apply to the work you do now when you do these graphic recordings or the graphic storytelling that you're doing. How did that inform it? Was that important? Do you see fashion related ideas coming up in the work you do that sets you apart from other people? JN: Definitely, yes. Because there's a couple of things. One is very practical and one is more like a downside, but also downside story but that is also informing. I think that one of the things you need to do when you work in fashion is analyze visually a lot. Again, I'm very much aware that fashion has a reputation for being superficial. I agree it is, but at the same time there's a working process behind. So you have to constantly be very observant and also read a lot, read images, and judge a lot. Judge in a way that sometimes it's judgy, and sometimes it's just tagging things and moving things along. Maybe you go for a retro '70s with a bit of futuristic, and you put it together with a regular '90s look. Those little tags and observations, [clears throat] sorry, they really helped me when I have to do personas in graphic recording. For instance, if a client says, okay, this is our meeting, this is what we're discussing, and this is the audience we are targeting. I had a UX process that I have to visualize for a company, and I understood by what they were telling me, okay, these guys want the cast of Euphoria. You know the TV show? MR: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. JN: I understood, okay, this is Gen Z, this is the profile. They were people with this kind of hair, this kind—I think that my fashion background really helped in profiling visually and creating those personas accurately. MR: I see. JN: You say, "I would like a middle age, central European man living in Zurich." I mean, I've been in Zurich, but I don't know exactly those people, but I can roughly picture those things. That really helps put the persona together very accurately. Sometimes it's maybe not so much for graphic recording because everything happens so quick, but for rich pictures, something that is more strategic, that really helps because in this case, with a client with Euphoria thing, he said, “You nailed that.” Because my final client, he really was targeting those people, and they can see it now. So it's very evident for them. MR: That's really fascinating. JN: Yeah, the downside, and I will wrap this one up, is that because I'm very used to judging, I have to do a really thorough work on myself to stop judging when I'm at event because I'm very used to be opinionated. Also, that having strong opinions is a value. You know, what we do, we are channel, we are just channeling information, reflecting on a board. What I hear on the back is not for me to judge. For me, it's been a bit of a journey because I had to make a very conscious choice, a genuine effort to say like, "Okay, no judgment." MR: Bring yourself back a little bit. Yeah. JN: Exactly. I mean, it's not about me, it's about them. This is a service, and I'm very loyal to that principle. So yeah. MR: You're probably always thinking of, who will be the people who see and understand this and is my strong opinion going to get in the way of them understanding, right. That's what you're probably, I sense you're concerned about is if I have a very strong opinion when I capture this and the people who are intended to see it think of things in a certain way because of my opinion, am I pushing them in a direction when maybe the goal of this is to just present the information and let them make that choice. I think that's a real challenge for graphic recording or sketchnoting for a client because you're always concerned about how much of my personality should I put into it? If it's just sketchnoting or something for me, I can question things or make fun of things or whatever, have my strong opinion 'cause that's really my personal approach. But when you're doing it for a client, things get a little more tricky. JN: I feel that responsibility a lot. Actually, that's one of the things I love more about what we do, the service side of it. In order to provide that service, you need to take one step back, have no judgment, even if you're invited to the conversation with some clients, very kindly, do not reframe yourself, but put it on a context. Like, okay, my opinion is not so much—I don't need to be that indicative of that opinion. It is something. And to be very mindful that your lens shouldn't be informing the result. It's more about their lens. What is useful for the brand, what is useful for the session, what they need to reflect. That it's a very abstract thing to do. Yeah. MR: Interesting. That's gotta be a challenge. You have to constantly remind yourself as you put things down, which is hard, right? Because you've spent so long building it as a almost a reaction, you know, the way that you think that you have to really be on your toes. JN: Yeah, exactly that. Sometimes you understand that people are buying your personal—I mean, the way you draw. I mean, the way you process things and then sometimes makes you wonder, okay, how much of these will be buying? I mean, if they're coming to me because they love what I do, and they like my style, and they love my drawing, but how much will that determine the content? That's a balance that you need to keep very—try to keep it balanced and everything. MR: Yeah. Really fascinating. Really interesting. I don't think we've ever had a fashion designer who's been on the show. So, you're a first there, Javier, which is great. JN: Pioneering. MR: Let's shift into, I would love to hear the kind of tools that you like. First, we'll talk about analog tools because honestly, when you talk about digital tools, it usually is very boring which is Procreate and iPad Pro is like everybody's answer. Now, sometimes you get some variation, but let's start with analog. What are the pens and paper and markers and whatever, you like to use in your work? JN: I'm afraid that I'm very cheap, but actually because I've been drawing forever, since I was a kid. I'm very used to drawing with literally everything. I would say for anyone who's willing to start drawing, I wouldn't obsess with having expensive tools around you, because I find that—I mean, I don't want to be determined by the fact that I don't have my fancy things with me. So if I'm in the middle of nowhere and I could grab like a tissue paper and a big pen, I would like to be able to communicate something with that. But if you want to elevate that, and I understand I wanna do it as well. For the analog thing, for the paper, I'm not too fussy. I use Moleskines in all the variations, and probably I'm losing a potential sponsoring team, but even the copies, the phony ones is everywhere. There's a chain here in the UK named Tiger, and they have very affordable stationary. I buy them bulk like 10 of them because I like to carry with me the small ones all the time, so I can draw, but Moleskines. The only paper I'm [unintelligible 21:12] is with Windsor & Newton. They have really, really nice notebooks. Slightly thicker texture paper, similar to [unintelligible 21:17] sometimes more so texture. They have really sturdy paper, so you can really throw any kind of wings, watermark, watercolor, anything you want to throw at it. Those are the papers. For the pen, I distinguish. I mean, for the graphing recording thing, when I work for clients is one thing. When I do my own sketching in my part-time, or when I'm sketching for a project, but it's not a final product. I love the Muji range, any Muji thing. They're again, very affordable. From the brush pens to the ball pens, all of them. They're all really good. They're quite durable and I would highly recommend. The one that I'm in love with that might be a bit more expensive is the Pentel brush fine pen, that's the name. I highly recommend. I don't know if you know that one. MR: I do. I think I just bought some recently in a box. Yeah. JN: I discovered them quite recently, and I'm crazy about them because it's such a flexible tip that you can have a proper lettering, but then also you have a more artistic nuance so that you can do more. MR: I'll show the— JN: Amazing. MR: Yeah, for those who are listening, I'm showing the tip. I don't think I'm getting it focused, but it's a little bit like a flare, but it's got a flexible tip, so. JN: Exactly that. MR: You could push it and make thin and thick lines almost like a brush pen. Not quite, but almost. JN: The thing with those is that they do color transparently, so you can overlay colors. I mean, they respond very well to having like all pens on top. I highly recommend. They slightly more expensive, but at the same time for what you get in terms of flexibility and how much can you use them, I mean, I would totally go for it. That is all. I mean, I'm crazy about that one. Then for the actual project, I realized that for drawing people, faces, shadows, the Neuland is of course the number one art version, that will be my one to go. Because again, it's quite similar to—it's like a more professional, not serious, but bigger scale version of the pencil brush, because you have that kind of ductility, you can still do some loose brush things and some effect and some shadowing. You can be also more specific. You have a very fine pointed thing and you can do some details. It's quite very flexible as well. Then my lettering was not great. Was much better on Pantone Tria. Pantone Tria the usual ones are very—those are the ones—I say, Pantone could be like copy colors, all that range of Sharpies that have been around forever. Those for me, they look very well for the lettering because it's very dry, and they are very thick, and you can do angles. You are a master lettering. I'm not that good at lettering. Lettering is not one of my trends. Then I found a tool that I feel confident enough to play a bit to elevate things, but it is still very simple and keeps me very much on track. I tried to swap places and use the Neuland where the Pantone is, doesn't work. MR: Yeah, that does have a certain style to it. I think I'm old school enough that when I was in school, I learned how to do marker rendering, which we used I think Letraset markers, which are similar. It's an alcohol-based marker. It has a certain look to it. Like when you see it, you know it right away. It has a feel to it. I think what you're saying is just this real crisp stroke, I guess. JN: Yeah, yeah. Also, for clarity, it really helps me because I can be like really very, not specific, but I can be really bold. Like, okay, this is a letter, this is what it's done, and then I can add some bits. But with something more like a brush, some more artistic, some people are really good at creating lettering with that. I feel that things are shaking, and I don't like the end result. With this little system, I realized that I have the quick side for the lettering, and then the more organic, the more fluid thing for the figures and the persona. MR: I see. Yeah. JN: The metaphors. Yeah. MR: Interesting. JN: It's just a good Combo for me. MR: Yeah. I think everyone has to find the right combination of things, which is why we talk about tools because, you know, I think you said you recently found out about the Art Marker. I learned about it from Austin Cleon, and he just learned about it too. Like they've been around for a while, and he stumbled onto them and bought a box like I did. You never know where the next tool that might be helpful would be coming from. JN: Yeah. Exactly that. Again, I try to not—I rather experiment and work on a budget and then try cheap stuff around me and some more expensive one, and have a wide range, rather than really be obsessed with getting the fancier box of, I'm not gonna name brands, but really expensive ones because it always feels like you need some validation to feel like a professional while the skill is somewhere else, for me. I mean, the tools help, that's for sure, but having a wide range of more affordable things that I can buy almost anywhere. Muji stores are everywhere. If I lost my luggage on the flight, I can go somewhere and get them, and I'm not panicking, finding the proper store, so, yeah. MR: Yeah. I think even in a pinch like eBay or Amazon probably sell Fuji stuff or Fuji's website, you can get it there too, so. Yeah. JN: Yep. MR: Very interesting. What about digital? I'm assuming you can have the answer like everybody else. JN: Oh yeah. Yeah, of course, Procreate. I would say, and I would like to know your opinion on that one, because I started my craft during the pandemic, so everything was online and digital. That's when I joined myself with Procreate and everything was very much digital. But right when things start opening, now the ratio of digital versus analog is like 60:40, I would say. People are really enjoying analog and Sharpies and boards. Is it the same for you? MR: Yeah. I've noticed a swing back. I think in the pandemic just because you had to go digital because you were calling in or something, right. And everybody was on Zoom, you had to turn it into something. That was a shift to, you know, iPads and Procreate being that tool of choice. Some of the places that I talked to during the pandemic said that they were fortunate that they had been experimenting, had bought some iPads and got Procreate and pencils and were ready. So when things hit, they were in a better position. Like Sketch Effect was one of those places. Said that they had been experimenting. Other people that I talked to, you can go back to the podcast episodes, were surprised, and they had to kind of scramble a little bit and get an iPad and or get the old iPad and see if they could make something work. And so, I think the experience is different, but it was definitely a forcing function. I think there are some places where that makes sense, but now that we're meeting in person, I think there is a desire to see the thing. There's a little bit of almost like a comedy or jazz like improvisation happening in front of you, right? Where you can see this thing emerging in front of you, you know, where if it's online, I mean, you're probably looking at speaker and not at the thing that's being drawn unless they're putting it in a little window. But there's something fascinating I think for people to see these things happen in real time. JN: Yeah, yeah. MR: ‘Cause You might think like, oh yeah, they just listened to the recording, which is another approach, right. Is get a recording and convert it. But to see it happening live, there's something fascinating about that. So I do think there is kind of a balanced back, but I think digital is probably here to stay. For certain projects, it just makes more sense, so. JN: Absolutely. Yeah. I embrace both, but the reaction from the audience is so different. The level of engagement and the way they engage is so different because with the boards and Sharpie, people, I can feel they can get closer, and they can talk to you and interact. And they don't feel like sticking a post is wrong. I mean, this is like what I thought, I'm not in this bit. And there's more like, I think that is a more like, of an ownership, whereas with digital, you have a very pristine, clean finish, but there's a distance to it. I think people see you like, wow, this is, this is great. But they get closer to a screen, they say, "I wanna take a picture." And they leave. So there's a different interaction, different engagement. So yeah, it depends MR: In a way, with the digital, you become the operator with full access, and they become the observer, and all they can do is request. I think the same is true with physical things. But I think the cool thing is with physical things, like you said, depending on how you structure it and how you open the floor, it might come more like if they see you putting sticky notes on there with notes, then they might feel more open to it, or they come and talk to you and say, "Yeah, please, write something and put it on there." Like, "Oh, I have permission?" Like, yeah, they just don't feel like there's any way to do that with digital other than, "Javier, can you write this thing?" Well, now it's like in position on you to translate for them. Where if you're in more of a facilitating environment where, you know, you've got a group of people. I've been in those situations, the zone is a little closer, and you can sort of set the tone for the environment to say, “Hey, this board is for us and we're doing it together, and we're making something together.” The other place I see that happening is in whenever I do any kind of work, I like to include sketches with clients rather than going right to finish, because I think a lot of times when a client sees finish, they just see, "Well, I can't say anything. He's already at the end.” And they might feel bad. And so, by including them in the process with sketches, it makes it a lot more interactive. So, maybe that's what you're feeling as well. JN: Yeah. And the thing is that one of the things—my favorite project is one where there’s a co-creation with a client. So maybe it's more of a draft state, but there are a few projects where I've been working so close with a team, and it was literally like erasing things and drawing and erasing. “And no, that's not what I meant. It should be a different sports card. No, not this one. Different building.” But I love that one because there's only, there's not just an ownership, but there's a richness to the process. MR: Yeah. JN: Otherwise it's me interpreting, us interpreting our own thing. I want to think that most of the time it's very accurate interpretation, but might not be the case. And then if you're working hand in hand with them, I mean, that for me is my favorite thing. Being slightly more on the strategic side with them, draft early stages, and then I can polish and go back to my corner, my studio, I polish the thing and I send it back. But working with them closer to me, the co-creation process, to me, is the best one. MR: Yeah. They can identify themselves in the work. I think what that means is that long term if it's a means to an end. Let's say what you're doing is a means to doing something, which might be something else. The thing you're doing is not the final result. It's just a way to kind of get everybody aligned. That the likelihood of that project being what you captured on the board is higher because you had that interaction, and you're capturing the real voices and correcting. So that's what I've seen is when, you know, I did work like that for software, I had developers come up and draw on the board their ideas, right? So then I knew their voice was there and then we correct it. Then we were more likely to have produced something that worked, so. JN: And very interestingly, I think in my experience as an arc, so people at the beginning, this conversation, they say, “I'm not a visual person. I cannot draw. I have no idea what I'm doing. You're the artist.” But then as the conversation evolved, they realize how visual they are. And the most shy people—it is like karaoke of it. I mean, you know, when you're in a karaoke, nobody wants to grab the microphone. MR: Yeah. JN: But after a couple of songs, they were like, “No, no, this is my turn.” So there's a narrative and that informs how even people who think they're not visual, they can come with the most amazing visual metaphors. It is almost like a train, it's like you can heat up and you can train that muscle. And during the session that's growing, and you can see the growth in the same session, and they're way more confident at the end. So yeah. I thought that was an amazing process. MR: That can be an opportunity if someone's listening with a group that continuously meets. So as the example, I cited before I was with the software team, and Mondays was our whiteboard. We had a giant whiteboard, and we would go through features adding to the software and all the developers would sit at the table, and they would talk, and I would draw, and they would see the things, and sometimes they would say, “How are you reading my mind?” “Well, you're talking. I'm just listening.” But they would often come to the board and draw their own thing. And so, there was like, you know, our team, this is what we do. we draw on whiteboards, and we have discussions, and if we want to add something, we're welcome to come up. So you sort of build this a little micro culture of how things work. So over the period of four or five, six weeks, at some point, they just feel confident, “I'm gonna come up and draw something.” And it just— JN: That's great. MR: So I think— JN: That's great because also I bet that they made them more receptive to visuals eventually. Like part of them down the line, they were more receptive, and it felt like this is something that you stick to the world would never look at it again. They start thinking visually, which is a great, yeah. MR: You know, originally when I did this, it was because I was one designer and there were 50 developers and product managers, so, I was clearly a bottleneck however I wanted to slice it. So I thought, well, how can I reduce that pressure? My solution was this whiteboarding. When we would get done after every session, we would take a photo and put it in a SharePoint, so everybody had access to it. Very often the developers would be faster than me. I couldn't do a mockup as fast as they could start building just because of 50 of them and one of me. So they would grab, pull up the image, they could read through all the notes that I was taking, see the imagery. And you know, usually at the end when we would get done with a session, I would finish with—I would star things like, “We think this is the winner and here's why.” And I'd write little notes so they could go in and see this, and then just start building. And then they would call me over and say, “Hey Mike, what do you think about this?” I started building this thing we talked about last week. Does this make sense? Is there any UX stuff that doesn't make sense? And we would sort of work through that. So they felt confident to even move ahead simply with a sketch, right. It was enough. We didn't have to have a prototype of anything or a mockup. So that was pretty cool. JN: Wow. That's amazing. Yeah, sounds like a great process. I'm envious openly. MR: Well, it only lasted a few years. I was a contractor, so eventually that time ended, but they all remember that time that we worked together. And I think it gave them appreciation for visualization as a way of solving problems. JN: Exactly, yeah. MR: So, yeah. I think it was pretty cool. JN: Agreed. MR: Well, let's move to our practical tips. This is the fun part of the show, where we get practical. And Javier has indicated that he had may have more than three. I usually suggest three just to make it reasonable for my guests, but we always are welcoming more than three. If you have more. So, Javier, let us know what your tips are for someone who's listening, and they're a visual thinker, but they just need a little encouragement. JN: So I'll be quick. Some of them are more practical than others, so. MR: Sure. That's fine. JN: Yeah. I wanna say, first of all, please do not get obsessed with illustrations to be perfect and to be like the next renaissance artist because I was also a lecturer for fashion and fashion illustration, and I said so many times people get so tense, so rigid around drawing even the hands and the fingers were tense, and they were obsessing with the little tiny thing. And this is like, “No, this is not the way you should be doing.” I mean, my point is that this is about communicating. So this is about communication and service rather than the perfection illustration. Of course, illustration helps. But for me, for instance, and I'm not arrogant or cocky, I'm confident that I'm a fairly good illustrator because it's one of the skills I have, but still, I have to retrain myself to transfer that into a service because the mean is to make it work for someone else. So don't get obsessed about the illustration. Especially don't get pulled off by it. it's all about communicating. And some people, if you play charades or Pictionary, you know, where you have to throw a movie, people have the skill with three lines that they draw three lines and say, “oh, Star Wars, I know that.” So that is the kind of skill that you require, rather than have a very nice illustration perfectly done. That helps. That's helping. But to be honest, I've seen like really good illustrators doing like very poor graphic recording sessions because it's not so much about how intricate the design is, how accurate the faces are. It's not so much about that. It's about communicating what people in the room wanna talk about. MR: Yep. JN: That will be my first. Also, I would recommend that someone who has fairly recently started, build around your own strengths. I mean, for instance, in my case, I am not great at lettering. So instead of investing like six years and trying to get the level of the lettering people I admire, I work on making the lettering work for me. So it's clear, it's clean. I have some level of creativity where it can elevate and integrate. It'll be integrated in the piece. But I work around the other strength, which is the persona who we're talking about getting more the visual metaphors. That's something I feel is one of my strengths. So I would say if you are blocked, or you feel a bit anxious about things in graphic recording, find your strength. Say, okay, I'm really good at font lettering. This is my thing. So I can prioritize that over drawing. And then I could go with simple drawing or the other way around. My layouts are brilliant and super clear. I'm very structural focus on that. Of course, there's always room for improvement. Improve your thing one step at a time, but don't wait until everything is at the top level to crack on it. I mean, building blocks, and instead do your strongest thing at the core and build around it. MR: I love that. Yeah. I love that. JN: Thanks. Then another one, this is a practical one. When you get to the stage, when you have a client with a brief, ask millions of questions. So even things like size of the room, lighting, is there a stool for me? Is there a table? Is there a desk for me. What is my space? What do you expect from me? Ask about the brief, the audience. What do they need? What is the aim of the meeting? What is the tone? Is it gonna be a difficult conversation, you reckon? Do you want people to come to solutions? Do you want just to draft intentions? So try to be as granular as possible with the client at that stage. And another one is, and kind of tuning into that one is prep a lot. I mean, for me, prepping is key because it is very strange because what works for me is like prepping like a maniac because that gives me the freedom once I enter the room to be ready to teach everything that I prepared. I didn't be present, but I have the confidence of teaching everything that I prepared because I prepare it. MR: Yeah. JN: So I don't know if that makes sense, but for me, prepping, mind being clear about everything, and try to get familiar with the company craft, what they do, how they do it, acronym, their own lingo, how they talk, that really helps me to be focused on the meeting. Even if I'm ready to get—and it happens more time than many. I dunno if that is your experience as well, but more than many have to get rid of. Like, everything I prepare, it doesn't work here and that’s where [crosstalk 41:19]. MR: You gotta adapt. JN: Yeah, but I feel more ready to adapt when I'm already more prepped. I mean, I don't know how this works, but. MR: I wonder if it's because you're internalizing it, right? By processing it, you're sort of putting it in a memory bank someplace and then if it can call on it. you can use it if you need it, but you can also feel free to go in a different direction knowing that you've done your prep. Yeah. JN: Exactly that and it's almost like even if you haven't met the whole team, everyone in the room, you are already familiar. So it feels comfortable. There's almost like a soft tense one. You get in there, you have an idea what is going on, you have a feel for it. And then that at least allows me to be in a much open space. That's my thing. MR: That's interesting. It's interesting you can observe that for yourself and maybe other people can try it and see if that works for them too. JN: Yeah. I mean, I will be curious to know how that portfolio—because also it's a very strange thing to share. I understand that is a bit like, “What do you mean? Prep or not prep?” I would say prep a lot. Get rid of it. That will be my tip. Then just a couple more. I mean, one thing that is not about you, it's not about me, it's about them. MR: Yeah. JN: So for me, I mean, it made the difference when I realized that, and I get asked by friends and family, and colleagues like, “Don't you panic when you’re drawing in front of all those people? Are you terrified?” But it's not like they're looking at you at the time, and it's not about you. It's about what they're talking. It's about them. Most of the time they don't look at me. I'm just a channel. I'm channeling information. I'm not so much in the center. So if anyone out there is panicking about that, it's not about you. We are not so important. What we do I think it's very important, but it's important for what it is for them, for the group, for the session. MR: What can we provide? Yeah. JN: Yeah. It's exactly that, what we provide, what we share, and how we contribute rather than us as individuals. So it's not about us. I embrace that a lot. That's a relief for me. MR: Yeah. That's a good thing. Yeah. JN: The last one is, I would suggest train your mind to be visual 24 hours. I would say, I mean, looking at a thing is free, you don't even have to have a notebook with you or a pen. Even if you're on the tube and then somebody has your hand very close to you, try to imagine how would you draw it and try to be visual on your everyday life in a way that start training your eyes on seeing things visually and how would you draw in your mind, everything surrounding you, so. MR: That's a good one. JN: I dunno, I mean, that's something that worked for me even before graphic recording. I love drawing. And I was thinking that angle, that food, that hand, that dog, and that's something that you don't need to switch it on only when you have a paper with you. It’s something that all they can travel with you, and you can be in that mindset. MR: The question I ask myself is what are the most interesting things I'm seeing? So that can benefit you as a photographer, right? Like, what's the most interesting shot I could take? Just not moving anywhere, just sitting where I'm sitting or standing where I'm standing. And what's most— JN: That's a really good one. MR: Yeah, so that could be a good one too. JN: Again, it's for free, so hey, you are just seeing things anyway, now that you're there, do something with it. MR: Turn it on. Yeah, exactly. JN: Yeah. MR: That's great. Thank you for all the tips. This has been wonderful. JN: You're welcome. MR: Of course, they will appear in the tips’ episode at the end of the season, so people can enjoy them twice, which is great. JN: Perfect. Fantastic. Thank you. Glad to help. Happy to help. Also, my experience is quite recent, so I've been in the shoes of people if they're trying to get into working visually. MR: Yeah, that's great. JN: It's quite recent, so I can empathize with the struggle. The struggle is real. MR: Yeah, yeah. So Javier, what's the best place for people to find you, websites, social media, so they can connect with you and see your work and such? JN: Yeah. Thanks for that. I mean my website is drawingyourmind.com, like drawing your mind, very clear. I got the.com because it's not such a common name, so I'm proud of that one. MR: Good move. JN: So, www.drawingyourmind.com and the same tag handle for Instagram, LinkedIn, and whatever platforms are coming our way with AI and everything going on. Yeah, both on Insta, LinkedIn, and Twitter threads everywhere, drawingyourmind.com. That will be me. MR: Got it. That's great. Well, Javier, thanks so much for being on the show. It's been great to have you and to hear your experience. I love the fashion angle. At some point in the future, you can guide me being a more fashionable guy. I used to get GQ Magazine just to see what was happening. I don't know why. I didn't have the money to buy anything they showed me, but I stole ideas the best I could, so. JN: I'm very happy to do that, but just bear in mind that I moved from fashion for a reason. I feel like it's best that we stay where we are. We need cloths, hat's fine. There are many options out there. I wouldn't go there. But yeah, let's embrace where we are now. MR: Sounds good. Sounds good. Well, thank you, Javier. It's been good to have you here, and I look forward to you being involved in the community. You're already involved in the community, so we're happy to have you. And for anyone who's watching or listening, this is another episode of the podcast. Until next time, talk to you soon. JN: Thank you very much. Bye-bye. | |||
| 13 Apr 2020 | Yuri Malishenko - SE07 / EP06 | 01:14:26 | |
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| 14 Nov 2023 | Jono Hey is explaining the world one sketch at a time- S14/E03 | 00:54:47 | |
In this episode, Jono Hey shares how he visually represents complex ideas in simple ways that are sticky, memorable, and quick to get to grips with. He also talks about building a platform that connects schools with substitute teachers. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with Jono Hey. Jono, welcome to the show. It's so good to have you. Jono Hey: Well, thanks, Mike. It's so good to finally meet you after all these years. MR: Yeah, it's great. We've connected years and years ago, specifically for a sample or I guess one of your pieces that we included in one of the sketchnote handbooks, sketchnote workbooks because I thought your stuff was really cool, and the way you thought about visualization was really interesting. So that's, I think, how we crossed paths initially, probably 10 years ago, almost. JH: Yeah, I think it was probably about 10 years ago. MR: Isn't that crazy? JH: Yeah. And I came across your work from originally when you did the re-work book. That's for-- MR: That's right. JH: -- which was also a long time ago. MR: Yeah. That was more like 15 years ago almost that now. So crazy how time flies. Anyway, so that's how we crossed paths. I've always loved your work, and I'm amazed at your prolific nature and your ability to continuously produce these sketchplanations. And if you are watching or listening, and you've not heard of, or seen Jono's sketchplanations, they're amazing. He basically visually represents often very complex ideas in simple ways. So you can sort of get the concept of the idea with some notes and such to help, you know, describe it. Is that a fair way to describe what your sketchplanations are? JH: Yeah, definitely. It's about taking a concept and trying to just represent it in a picture in a way that's sort of sticky and memorable and quick to get to grips with. I think over the years I've definitely started adding a bit more layer of description, which you can take optionally, but you don't have to have it. That's the idea is that you have that surface level. If it's interesting, you can dive in, and if not, carry on, you know. MR: Yeah. And I'd love to hear sort of the origin story of that and what is driving you to continue, but first, tell us a little bit about what you do and who you are, and then you can jump right into your -- I always love to have people do their own origin story. So how did you end up doing what you're doing? Did you draw as a kid? Did somehow you snuck through school without it being shaken out of you? Or how did that all begin? So start with who you are, what you do, and then where you came from. JH: Cool. Yeah, as you said, I'm Jono, and I'm mostly here because of my work for Sketchplanations, which is a weekly newsletter working towards explaining the world one sketch at a time. With the illustration side, I was lucky enough to do some illustrations for Bill Gates's book recently, the -- MR: Oh, good. JH: -- "How to Prevent the Next Pandemic," which was really cool. The illustrations, Sketchplanations has all been sort of a side project, which I've been doing now for the 10 years or so, that we've crossed paths. In my day job, I run product development. So I've been a UX designer and I run product delivery. I'm now on my second startup, which has been a really cool and really interesting parallel journey, and it feeds a lot of content and the sorts of things that come into Sketchplanations. You ask the origin story so I will go right back. MR: Okay, good. JH: Because I think it makes sense as to why I am doing what I'm doing. And I think if I go back far enough, I always used to quite like drawing, but I was never particularly good at art in the sense that they were always better artists than me, but I was always quite good at the maths and the science side of things. And so, if I think back to, what's high school in the U.S. or A-levels in the UK, I did a bunch of science and maths-based ones, and then I did art. Art was always the one, which I was very happy to go spend my lunchtime working on my art homework, but of course, I didn't do as well in my art as all the other stuff. And so, what I ended up doing was design engineering, which is a lovely way to blend the two things together really. So you're trying to draw for a purpose and you're trying to communicate things, come up with ideas, but then express them on paper. But they have to work as well, so you have to have the math and the science bit right. I don't know who your heroes were growing up, but DaVinci was always one of mine. And it's quite difficult to, you know, get the breadth of what evidently Leonardo da Vinci was able to do, but that for me, when I was growing up, was always ideal, beautifully using his art to express like scientific or engineering concepts, which was cool. So in many ways, I think that's sort of lives on in what I was still been trying to do. Way back, I was good at science and maths, but I always enjoyed the art and I was always interested also in like creative thinking, and so, when I came out of university, I spent a lot of time working on creativity, really, like design, creativity, how do you come up with new, cool ideas? And I was really interested in how we think I got really into mind maps. So I use mind maps all the time. When pre preparing for this, and mind maps are brilliant for like visual recording and sketchnoting. I was so interested in it that I went over to UC Berkeley, where I did a Ph.D. studying new product development. MR: Oh, wow. JH: That was a really nice combination. So they had a great program there where you have the engineering side, but then you have the business side from the business school there. And then you have sort of industrial design, which was a collaboration with the California College of the Arts. And so, you bring all of that together and then you want to come up with new products. But again, it's really about communicating ideas, but in a ways that the ideas have to work. Like new products, they have to be feasible and they have to be buildable, you know. MR: Mm-hmm. JH: UC Berkeley, I think was such an interesting place because I was also able to go explore, you know, like sociology and research methods. I did some really interesting classes in the language school there with George Lakoff on Metaphor. I was in the Berkeley Institute of Design, and they had a big focus on HCI, which is human-computer interaction. And so, there was lots of psychology concepts that people were bringing in and were going around the place. And of course, I was involved with software. So it was lots of different influences. And I think you probably see pieces of all of those in the topics that I choose for Sketchplanations MR: Yeah. JH: After UC Berkeley, I found a fantastic company called Jump Associates who was actually -- I did a class at Stanford and the professor there works at Jump Associates. They're a growth strategy firm, which was all about helping companies figure out what they should do next, particularly when it came to new products. But they had some really brilliant ways of working which still influenced me to this day. And what they were really good at, one of the things they were really good at was visual recording 'cause that's what we called it there, but in many ways, it was sketchnoting. And so, we do a lot of working with clients where you do a workshop, you bring all the right people in the room, and you put provocative questions about, like, the nature of the project. We're trying to track what are the biggest challenges and so on. And then somebody on our team would be up there with a big whiteboard capturing the conversation and trying to get down the key ideas, and so, they didn't get lost. And I've always had an interest in this, like, the ideas don't get lost in this sort of ether. You know, you had a conversation, some really good ideas, they floated away. Somebody wrote down something, but it wasn't necessarily the good things. And I just saw the power of like, you take a conversation and you put it up real time on the board, and it steers the conversation because it helps people come back to previous concepts that have been raised. If somebody says, "Oh, the way I think of it is like this and this and this," and you put them up, and then later in the conversation people can see that on the board and they come back to that. And because that was like a core skill there, they really helped people develop with how to capture ideas in real-time on a board. And even down to really basic things like how to properly hold a whiteboard pen so that you don't end up with like a thin line and then a thick line when you didn't mean to, and the color is even as you go, and what size letters should you be so that people all around the room can always read it wherever they are. How do you keep your handwriting straight so that it doesn't end up looking like a mess? And we'd often like, take pictures of these at the end and present them and use them as a record of the discussion that we had. And they were really valuable, I think artifacts, it was from the design process, but really for a purpose. And I think the other thing I think that Jump Associate was really interesting with was, it wasn't just physical things, but a lot of it was like frameworks or models. You are like visualizing abstract things as well. So like, yeah, the three challenges in this. And then you try and visualize three challenges. You know, it is sort of an abstract way of thinking of things, or like business two by twos and things like that. So I kept those skills going since Jump Associates. I worked in user experience in design at my first startup, and I was always like sketching user interfaces and like what it be, you know, user journeys, mapping out, and how people are going through your product, that kind of thing. And then back in 2012, I got a Christmas present from my sister, which was a -- they still sell it, it's a lovely book. It's a sketch-a-day journal. A little green book about that size. If you open it up, there's two spaces for two sketches on each side of the page. So that's four days' worth, and it's literally just draw something a day. And so, I did that, and it was really lovely 'cause, you know, I'd always enjoy drawing, remember being on holidays as a kid and taking a little sketchbook postcards and stuff like that, and sitting outside in the evening and drawing them. But I didn't find I was doing that art as much during the day anymore. And so, it was really nice just to draw something every day. And I found when I got to the end of that, I was like, "Ah, kind of miss, it seems a bit of a waste to not be drawing anymore." And then I was like, "Okay, well it would be nice also if it helped me in some way." And so, I had this idea, well, I'll try and explain something because that's what I'm trying to do all day, is like, communicate an idea, communicate a concept. So, I'll explain something every day in a sketch. And I did that for a year, one a day. Halfway through I started posting some, 'cause they look quite nice. And I had little Moleskine what are they called? There was storyboard. MR: Storyboard, yeah. I was guessing that that was what that you're using. JH: Yeah. And then they really, they're really lovely. And so it was, it's a very similar format. You know, they're small sketchbooks, you open 'em up, there's four frames every now and then there's a one with three frames on one page. And just using that as like, these are my guides. I had to stay within that and, and do something. And so I did that. And so, I started posting them and somebody said at one point, "Hey, you should put these online somewhere." And so, I started a little Tumblr page and started putting some on, on Twitter and, and people liked them. And so, I definitely found that I couldn't easily sustain one a day. But when I finished that, I went to one a week -- actually, it went to two a week first. And I found that just didn't work at all because when there's two a week, you can always pick tomorrow to do one as opposed to today. But when there's one a week, you gotta make it happen. And now I've been doing that for 10 years. Maybe I've learned something. MR: Wow. Sounds to me like a book opportunity to me, where you could gather, if not all, maybe the best of those sketchplanations and bound those into some kind of a book that people would buy. I would buy that book. I don't know about anybody else, but I think it would be quite nice. JH: Thank you. Well, you know what? I am actually working on it at the moment. MR: Oh, good. I'm glad to hear that. JH: Yeah. After a long time, a publisher got in touch with me, somebody who've been following the newsletter and with a similar idea. And I've been, yeah, a few days a week over the last year trying to assemble everything together and I've been redoing things and checking things and it's coming together hopefully for next April, is the idea. MR: Oh, great. That would be great. You have to let us know so we can share it with the Sketchnote Army community, so we can definitely get some pre-orders and purchases going for you. JH: Definitely do that. Thank you. MR: I know in the publishing business these days, pre-orders are a huge deal. Often publishers give away special tidbits to get you to pre-order. It looks very good on the sales charts. So if we can help in that way, I think the people here would be really your ideal customer for buying that for themselves and others. JH: Well, I'll definitely take your tips on this. This would be book number one for me. So yeah, all your advice is welcome, and all your help. That'd be brilliant. Thank you. MR: Yeah. You're so welcome. Well, this is pretty fascinating. It's interesting, our paths in some ways are parallel. Not exactly, but I was never the best artist either. I just was more practical in the work that I did. So I sort of took what art skill I had and sort of applied it to practical things. And so, that just kind of led me on my path. I'm also a user experience designer as well. And I had a period of time for about three years where we did very similar things to what you talked about with the whiteboard with developers. So we would queue up software features that needed to be added to our software we were building. And we would sit down on Mondays and queue it up, look at what existed in the old software, do we like it? How could we improve it? Okay, let's have a discussion, and I would go to the board and document most of it. Occasionally, a developer would ask to come up and draw, which always was my highlight of my day. And they would draw concepts, we would annotate it, take a photo, throw it on a SharePoint space, and sometimes the developers would just take the sketches we did and build right off of that. And other times I'd do mockups to kind of move things forward. So, when you talked about that, I remembered how enjoyable that was for everybody. Really, everybody in that group. Developers, product owners, business analysts, all seemed to really enjoy it because as you say, there were these great ideas floating around in the ether if no one was attending to that to try and -- I had this idea of like, someone catching butterflies with a net. Like if you didn't catch those butterflies and pin them, you know, to the wall they would be lost because, you know, that person themselves maybe didn't even realize how valuable that idea was. You really needed someone to spot it and then capture it. So I think that's a really valuable way to work. **JH:**Yeah. It's interesting that I have two real contrasting experiences there. Which one was this engineering world. And if you think of like, oh, you know, you want to see how fast this is gonna go when it knocks into that, it's like you draw the diagram, it's all established what the principles are. You don't just explain it with words, you draw it out exactly as it's gonna happen, right? And then I did some classes in the education department at UC Berkeley, and we were talking about all sorts of really fascinating and difficult topics like reliability and validity and some concepts from sociology and things like that. And we'd sit in these rooms and do the reading beforehand, come in, and then you talk for an hour and lots of interesting points will come up, and everybody would just sort of absorb it, I guess, and scribble the odd word down and then walk off. And I remember thinking as I left those classes, there was some really good stuff there, but I think everybody's gonna come out with a different view of it, and people are gonna forget some parts and remember others. And it's just a shame you can't get some middle ground a bit where you can talk about them things which are a bit more abstract, but actually help give them shape, give them a form that we can all be sure we're talking about the same thing. And that happens in product development so often. You talked about software where we all talk about an idea and we all assume that we've got the same idea, but in fact, we don't. And part of what drawing it on the board is, and even just sometimes it's words, right? Trying to put it concretely into words is realizing, "Oh, when you said that, I was thinking of something different." And it just puts this sort of shared space where you can all look at it and go, "Oh, yeah, now we're all on the same page here. And it was fascinating these discussions in the educator's department, but I'm sure we came across -- we left it with all sorts of different ideas, you know, afterwards. MR: I used to call that -- I don't know if I got this term from somewhere or what, but I called it the illusion of agreement. So we all thought we agreed, but we all had different ideas in our heads. And if you didn't do something to sort of establish. Often, I would joke around with people like, okay, what we're doing here is we're just, I'm putting things on the board so we have something to argue about, right? To disagree about. Because if you start with something to disagree about, it least you have some starting point, and then you can work toward agreement from there. So, you know, often it wasn't necessarily disagreement, but it was not uncommon for one person to talk about something and I would draw it on the board and they'd say, "No, no, that's not exactly what I was thinking." And then I'd hand the marker to them and they would come up and draw it and make it clear from their perspective. And it sort of gave some solidity or some physicality or something to that idea. But then we could say, "Oh, okay, now I see what you're saying, and now let's have the discussion around that." We would build on it. And, you know, often that would be the solution that would work for us. So that was quite enjoyable. JH: Yeah. The illusion of agreement is a great term. My thesis in the end was about reframing in the design process and how you settle as a design team on the framing of the design problem. And a lot of -- well, you wrote a paper about the how does teams establish a shared frame of things. And some of it is like when you put something out there, the conflicts and the differences become salient, whereas they weren't before. And exactly that you all leave the meeting thinking that, "Great, we all know what to do", and you all think you've all actually got different ideas in mind about what that is. And when you come back later and you've built the wrong thing, everybody's like, "No, no, that's not what I meant." And so how do you head that off as early as possible? And some of it's making it concrete, and that's what the visuals are useful for. MR: Yeah. Maybe the biggest risk in that illusion of agreement walking away is you actually build five new things. Well, then which of the five will we choose, right? Or is there overlap enough that they could be merged into one thing so that we're not spending energy in five directions, we redirect toward one direction, and kind of come to an agreement together? JH: Yeah. Love that. And the sort of thing I still come across in my day job on a regular basis. MR: Something else that struck me, and this is just something that struck me and relates to my education, is it sounded like Berkeley did lots of cross-training. So there was lots of overlap of departments, or at least for you as a student, you were kind of stepping into a variety of what would seem like unrelated spaces, but yet they are very related. In my education and history, I went to a technical school and they were really, really adamant at that time about this cross-training. So if you were a designer, and this is like old school print designer, that's when I went to school, you were required to take photography classes because in those days you would work with photographers all the time to, you know, describe to them what you're looking for as a designer, and they would inform you. So you had to understand like, what are the materials that they work with so you could really understand it. And also, printers. And I found myself working in the printing room and because I was so practical, I would often become almost like a teaching assistant down there because I had some history taking printing classes prior. So I would be in the design classes, sort of being the assistant to the teacher who often wasn't in the darkroom showing how to shoot films or whatever the thing was we were doing. And so, I became sort of this teacher, but I always loved the cross-training 'cause I felt like I understood more of the holistic job that we were all doing together, even though my part was just one piece of it gave me a better appreciation of those and how they fit together. And it sounds like maybe you're doing something like that at Berkeley. JH: Yeah. One of the things it is interesting is a difference I think in general between like doing a doctorate in the UK versus often I think in the U.S. Whereas in the UK typically, you might find a research advisor who's got a project idea and you are interested in it too, and it's all sort of settled and you go off and you do that research, it takes three years and then you present it. In Berkeley, which I really appreciated, it wasn't expected that you come in knowing what it is exactly you wanna do. You're like, "I had an idea of what I was interested in." But essentially you spent the first two years taking classes to basically get you to be, I'd say like getting on for a world expert in each of these areas, really build your knowledge. But that, I guess, gave you a huge amount of flexibility. And so, yeah, it was brilliant to be able to take classes in the language school. And I remember doing ones on game design and I took some in the information school and the education department and just that sort of breadth of knowledge and you never know which ideas are gonna be the ones coming in to be useful. And I definitely really appreciated that. Whereas if I, you know, a traditional way, I was like, "Oh, I was in design engineering, I stay in the engineering school." That's where I do all my classes. But actually, I think it broadened my outlook and probably improved the end product is great deal by being able to do all that. And hopefully, one of the things I think is interesting about sketchplanations is it's, I think, you know, none of us, just because you work in one area doesn't mean that's the only thing you're good at or the only thing you're interested in. And so, it's nice to be able to go, you know, well here's the thing on wellbeing or healthcare, and then here's the thing about design and here's the thing about, you know, a business tool. And any of us can appreciate all of those. So yeah, I love the idea of being able to take ideas from lots of different places. It was definitely valuable to me. MR: Well, we have lots of educators who I think listen to the podcast, so at the very least this can be an encouragement to teachers, teachers, if you're listening that doing cross-training with your students is really valuable, even if the students don't realize it in the moment. You know, I certainly had plenty of colleagues in my university, in my technical school who grumbled that they had to go do photography class or had to do drawing. You know, "I'm a printer, why do I need to do these things?" But ultimately, it gave them a better-rounded experience. So if you're an educator, if you can find ways to sneak in cross-training, Jono and I are big fans of the idea. JH: Hundred percent. MR: Well, you sort of led us to what you're doing these days. What are you currently up to now? Are you working on software? Are you working on hardware? And how does you know, your visualization skills sort of fit into the work you're doing today? JH: Yeah, I mean, I split my time at the moment. So a few days a week, I'm working, say right now on pulling together a book for sketchplanations and still continuing that. In the day-to-day, I lead product development team and -- well, four product development teams. The company I'm working at is called Zen Educate. And we built a platform that connects schools with substitute teachers. So, oh, you can think about a bit like an Uber or an Airbnb, but for teachers to find work at schools and vice versa. It is just such a really nice area where you're bringing in different skill sets and you're forced to do that. So you have to have people who know about education, and then you have to have software developers and you have a product manager and you have a designer, and you try and bring all of that expertise together to create something that is gonna provide value for teachers and for schools. I do less of this specific day-to-day design and things than I used to. But you know, both the companies I've worked on the last 10 years started when they were very small. And I really like that phase 'cause just have to do everything otherwise nothing happens. But it's really nice. So, you know, you're going out and doing research interviews, but you're also sketching interfaces, you're testing things as before they're delivered, you're writing product releases, you're communicating with, you know, stakeholders internally or the board members, you know, and all sorts of things. And so, yeah, my job is a mix of all of that at the moment. I think we provide a great service for schools and we actually save. It's more efficient so we save schools money and we can pay teachers more. And we started in the UK, but we've since launched in the U.S. which is really exciting. So yeah, lots to keep me busy on that front too. MR: That's pretty cool having those two clients, right? You know, schools needing on-demand teachers and then teachers being out there on a bench looking for an opportunity that you're just sort of putting those two things together in a great way. That's pretty cool. JH: Yeah. And just as an example about where I think of visualization helping in that kind of thing, there's some really -- so it's a marketplace. You've got two sides of a marketplace and you have to balance supply and demand. And, you know, in some ways that's very concrete because you take a specific job that's available, let's say, and a teacher who wants to do it, and you wanna have to connect them properly. But there's also, just how do you think about a marketplace and making this successful? And so, there's a nice concept called the Amazon flywheel, and there's another one called, I think it was Uber's virtuous cycle. I did sketches of both of those. And they just help you sort of -- you'll see like it is a little cycle like, you know, the more teachers you have on the marketplace, the better the matches are with the jobs, let's say, so the better the experience for schools, which means they put more of jobs available, which means that tracks more teachers. And so, you end up with like a flywheel. And so, the same is true for Amazon's marketplace. The same is true for the density of drivers on Uber or journeys that you can do. And I just think like, it's interesting how it's easy, it's fine to talk about that, but it's so different when you put like a visualization or something like that, people just get it. You're like, "Oh, yeah, I see how it works." Whereas day to day there's like million little bits of data points, but trying to communicate abstract ways of thinking about these things, is sometimes super valuable. And so, I still like it at that sort of level. MR: Yeah. And I imagine some people, like a developer, let's say, they're looking at this one little piece, like, I need to deliver this feature, or, but there is this whole flywheel or thing happening and they could see their position within it and why it's important what they're doing, right? So it gives meaning in a lot of ways. Where if you just were heads down, pounding away on this feature, it wouldn't maybe have the same meaning to you, right? Like, "Hey, I'm part of this flywheel, or our goal is to really get this moving forward and let it have its own momentum." JH: Yeah. Everybody's a connection to what's the point of what you're doing? There's dude, you should come across Dan Pink has really nice framework autonomy, mastery, purpose about motivation. And so, I did a sketch of that and I think the purpose side of it is just so like, why am I doing what I'm doing? It's not exciting for me to be just creating this button, but if this button's gonna do this and that's gonna enable this bigger picture thing, then yeah, keeps you getting up every day. MR: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, this has been really, really interesting and fascinating. We'll have to look around a little bit and if you've got those particular concepts and sketchplanations, maybe we can have some direct links to those so those who are listening or watching can pop 'em up on the screen and take a peek. So we'll work on that for the show notes later. Let's shift now to your tools. I'm always really fascinated by the tools people use. Sometimes they're pretty common and sometimes I'm surprised. Let's start with analog first. It seems like you do do analog drawing, or at least you used to when I first encountered you. Have you made a shift to digital, or you still feel really good about the pen-on-paper feel, and what pens and paper do you like? JH: Yeah, I'm always a bit conflicted because, you know, this digital just has these massive advantages. But it still, there's nothing that quite is come close to the feeling of just writing in a notebook. So anyway, I do have it alongside me here. So I have this kind of daily notebook that I'll always take, and so that's got like my, you know, mixes of to-do lists or here's a UI idea or yeah, here's me sketching out this framework, or here's a mind map for content for this talk. For the analog stuff, so I still do carry around a physical notebook, but my preference are dotted notebooks. MR: Yes. Yeah. JH: Yeah, I say I was always interested in credit problem-solving. I just think dotted just solves the problem. Like it basically looks like it's a blank page, which is lovely, but it allows you to structure data and actually like, do things in straight lines. And it helps guide your drawings without getting in the way of the content. It was, Edward Tufte has this idea of a ghost grid, so there's a grid behind the whole thing which doesn't get in the way, you don't really notice at the end. So anyway, I really like the dotted notebooks. This one is a leach term. I never know how to pronounce it. MR: Yeah, German company, group they call it. JH: Good quality journal. But probably most of my ones I've had are the Moleskine. They're about, I don't know, bit bigger than A5. The large ones with a sort of flexible leather cover, and they do some really nice dotted ones as well. I've tried plain, and plain looks lovely if you're just drawing, but if you're also making lists or structuring stuff and you want things to be in straight lines, the dotted is just so much better. Usually, I like ones with bright colors, that one's black, but you know. MR: Yeah. I've got my bright-colored LEUCHTTURM is here as well. JH: Yeah, absolutely. MR: And I think LEUCHTTURM has done a really great job of finding that right gray level. So as an old printer, I know how tricky it is. They must use some kind of a special color, but it's just dark enough that you see it, but light enough that it fades in the background. Some dotted notebooks don't do as good a job of this, and the dots are too dark and you know, they become noise. And so, you know, you don't appreciate it until you come across a notebook where they don't pay attention to those details and it just constantly gets in your way. So I think LEUCHTTURM has done a good job with that. JH: Yeah. If people are giving out free notebooks, normally they're lined ones, I just can't get on with the lined ones. MR: Yeah. It's not for me either. Not unless I'm writing a journal, but even in a journal I would just use dotted as well because it's got just enough structure. What about pens? It sounds like using Moleskine and LEUCHTTURM primarily. JH: Yeah. For pens, I'm heavily influenced by what we had at Jump Associates, which I just think works beautifully. I actually can't find them very easily now. But there are some Uniball Vision Elite pens which is my preferred just everyday pens and they do nice sets of colors now, but I honestly just quite like the blacks and the blues. That's just something about they have just like the right they beautiful clean lines and they're dark and they're bold and they're smooth to write with, and they don't bleed through too much. Yeah, you get the right-thickness ones, but yeah Uniball Vision Elites are the ones I like. And then I always used to carry -- I sort of have -- I usually have two pens in my pocket, in any one time. But a black and then a highlight color, like a green or a red, and then I would have a Copic marker with me. I was used to carry around like usually a gray or sort of beige Copic marker, just to allow you to give a little background, a little shape to things. And I just think that just made a huge difference. I think when I was doing a lot of paper stuff, I'd have also have like a bright color Copic marker as well for highlighting stuff, but not so much anymore. But I mean they've strongly influenced because I started analog, all the sketchplanations, they're basically, I keep to a simple color palette and often a bit of just gray in the background and that's, that's the influence of those pens. MR: Yeah. And I can just imagine, I'm not looking at one of your sketchplanations, but all those things you just said, you know, black with a highlight color and a shadow is sort of like, you know, the recipe for a sketchplanation, and a square, right? Sort of those basic elements, I guess. JH: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I don't know if a square necessarily, I'm looking around 'cause I have a bunch on my wall. MR: I see some behind you now. Yeah. JH: Yeah, yeah. I have a few of my favorite ones. But there is something about just like I think back to the storyboard notebooks, which I do really still really like, they just give you this frame to work in and sometimes the constraint is just really helpful. You like, okay, it's gotta work in here. MR: And what about digital? Are you using some kind of digital tool? You sound like you were conflicted when you first began, so I suspect that's true. JH: Yeah, I did. So I don't know when it was like five or six years ago, I moved to an iPad Pro when the iPad Pro and the pencil first came out. I think I still have the sort of initial large iPad Pro, the sort of a three size -- A3, A4 size one. **MR: ** The big one. Yeah. JH: Yeah. Which I really -- I mean, they're probably much better now, but it still works. It still works really nicely and I think the pencil's still pretty good. MR: Yeah. JH: Yeah, all of the sketchplanations I do now with that, but I know if I'm still just doing it, if I'm sketching a user interface quickly or something, I'll do that in my notebook and take a quick photo and sending Slack or something. And then you said that most people use Procreate. I have Procreate installed. I don't use Procreate. MR: Interesting. JH: Yeah. I use something called SketchBook Pro, if you've come across MR: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, of course. JH: It's Autodesk one, but you know, the free versions really good and they added a little thing that you can pay for that allows you to do a few extra bits, which is just super useful. I usually think like, you know, that phrase that "The best camera is the one you have with you." MR: Yeah. JH: It's kind of like, it doesn't really matter. Like what's more important is that you're able to write stuff down or make a note when you're inspired and that you just get to know your tools. MR: Yes. JH: Like, I'm sure I could get really good at Procreate, but I've kind of got the SketchBook Pro does what I want now, and so, you know, maybe one day I'll try something different, but it does what I want. And that's more important, is knowing your tools, I think than which tool you are using. MR: Yeah, I agree. It's simple and effective and, you know, your fluid, so you know, if you want get yourself out of the way if you're fiddling with tools, that's not a good thing when you're trying to get a concept out because like you say that whatever's floating around in your head and the ether could get lost just as well, right, so you wanna move quick and catch it before it disappears, so. JH: Yeah. Exactly. MR: Autodesk's app is a classic. It's been around, I think since the beginning of the iPad. I think they ported it pretty early, so it's been around for quite a long time. And I've run into a few other people that use it. I use Paper by WeTransfer in that way. I just know the tool really deeply and if I need to get a concept out, I just pop it up and it's there and I go with it. So in a similar way, but I do use Procreate for illustration work. If I know that my work will be scaled or I need modifications, Concepts is great for that 'cause it's vector-based, so gives me that additional level of control. So it really, I've been starting to try and be more specific around what is the task that I want to do, and then I choose the tool to fit it, but Paper is sort of my default. If I don't have to choose, I'll go there first. And then if I have a specific need, I go to these other tools. And like you, I have to force myself because I would just be comfortable using this one tool. But, you know, illustrations have to be a certain resolution. Paper it's not set up that way. It's not that kind of a tool. So I needed to move into Procreate and it's been a great tool for that. And same thing with Concepts, when those illustrations need to be scalable it's been a great tool for that. So I feel fortunate. But it's hard, like when you invest a lot of time in a tool, you know, it's an intentional move to do spend time on another tool because you have to learn all that new stuff and you almost need like a project. You can't just do it fiddling around because there's not enough motivation. You really need a project, I think, to make you motivated to see results. So that's really interesting. JH: Yeah. I think because sketchplanations is weekly, I never feel like I quite have enough time in a week to transition to something new. So I've never made the switch to try out new things. I was just like, "Right. Well, let's keep going with this one because I know it's gonna work right now." MR: So that seems like a good fit for that purpose then. JH: Yeah. I doubt, I mean, you know, any of these tools you see, people can draw beautiful, unbelievable things in all of them. So, you know, if they can do that, surely, surely this one's good enough for me, so. MR: Yeah. I'm kind of curious, do you ever -- I'm assuming you must have a huge backlog of potential topics that you could draw, or do you struggle every week like, "Oh man, what am I gonna draw? It's Thursday, I better hurry up and pick a topic." And, "Okay. Got it done, Friday, whew. Okay. I hope I have something next week." Does it tend to be one side or the other, or do you have like a huge stack of like, logs waiting for you to pick and burn the fire? JH: Yeah. Have you ever read the book, I think there was one about Bill Watterson and Calvin and Hobbs and how he drew Calvin and Hobbs. MR: I haven't read that one. That would be fun. JH: I forget exactly what it's called, but there's one, it was an extended interview with him about his process from the museum where they have his work. And I think I do it a little bit like he did it which is what he often would do is like, come up with a number of ideas for strips, sometimes draw 'em out just really roughly. And then sometimes he would go through and ink them, and then later on he would come through and color them, let's say, and say at any one point, he might have three or five of them on the go and like do a day where he's like inking a day when he's coloring them all. And so, I'm a little bit more like that so I have ones in various stages of being done. So I do, I do have a giant backlog of like, "Oh, that would be a cool sketch one day I should do that." That keeps coming up. But I also have lots of draft sketches where I've started something or I'm like, oh, actually, you know, one day I put down three ideas or three different sketches and how I might do it. And then one week I might come across and do two of those and then post one of them, you know, that kind of thing. So I always have this multi-stream approach. And also, I think for me, sometimes I guess it's kind of like this with any art, like you get to the end and it looks totally straightforward, but often I had to get through a lot of thinking in order to get there. And so, sometimes just like putting an -- even if I pick, I'm gonna do this one this week, and I put that down the Friday before, and my brain can be turning that over through the days, over the next week. And so, I've actually by Wednesday, I've come up with a great example for it, and then I'll draw it on Thursday, you know, that kind of thing. So yeah, that's kind of my process. But I do have a giant list and people send me great ideas all the time. So, the ideas come in faster than I can draw in for sure. MR: If you think about it in the plant term, it's like you've got a big bucket of seeds and then you're planting these plants and you're watering them through, you know, constantly. And then when it seems like that one's ready, you pull it forward and finish it up and push it out and another seed comes and gets planted and you keep on watering. And it's sort of like the gardener of sketchplanations. JH: That's a nice metaphor. Yeah, I like it. That's exactly how I meant to describe it. MR: There you go. You can have that for free, Jono. JH: Thank you. MR: So Jono, tell us some tips you have for us. I like to frame it as someone's listening, they're a visual thinker of some kind, but they maybe feel like they're on hit a plateau. And I like to ask guests to give them encouragement. What would be three tips that you would tell someone like that to encourage them? Could be anything, can be mental tips, it can be practical tips, bring an extra pencil, something like that. So I'll leave it to you, but just three tips would be great. JH: Yeah, so I gave a little bit of thought to this, and I came up with some of which I think are maybe disarmingly simple, perhaps. So the first one is, I have a concept -- I actually have a mouse mat of it right here, which is, the first draft is always perfect. And I really like this framing because it basically says, your first draft is probably gonna be rubbish, but that's okay 'cause that's the job of the first draft, and that's what makes it perfect. And so, I guess my experience is there was when I'm stuck, or I'm not sure what to do, I just have to make myself do anything. And actually, I find just doing something is enough to like unblock it. And getting away from this idea that whatever you're gonna do is gonna be great, is just very liberating. And so, this idea of the first draft is always perfect, is a nice way to come to me. I have another sketch, actually, it's up on my wall, which is called the Doorstep Mile, which is this really nice Scandinavian concept, I think, which is like, getting started can be the hardest part, which is like stepping out of your door. Like it's easy to go for a run once you've got your trainers on and you're outta your door. So you just have to get started. So first draft is always perfect. I strongly believe like this idea that great ideas come during the hard work and not before it. So like, you don't have to have your great idea and then start work. Usually, all the best ideas I've had of while I'm doing the work. So get started. The second tip I would have is to keep it simple. And the reason I say that is because I think it's easy to have really high expectations about, you know, what things are gonna turn out like, but actually in many ways, simple stuff is just as helpful as complex stuff. And sometimes it's even more useful. I'm reminded of some diagrams which have been super helpful at work and in discussions where people literally just boxes and lines with texting. Like anybody can do boxes and lines. Sometimes I find just laying out words, like, if there's a process, I like lay out the words in an order, and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, this one becomes for that one." And I find that is valuable and clarifying to me. And it doesn't have to be like a complex visual in any ways. And I think the other aspect to keep it simple, I think definitely for me it was, it's easy to get thrown by drawing people. And you'll see obviously, like in sketchplanations, my people are super, super simple, just a little bit more than a stick man. But there are lots of ways actually to draw really simple people, which just allow you to put a person in there but not get hung up on the drawing of the person. And, you know, like drawing a star, it kind of looks like a person. You can do somebody jumping and that's fine, and that gets the idea across, and it doesn't have to be perfect. So keeping it simple is my second tip. And my third tip is, keep going. My experience again is that I've done so many drawings where about halfway through they looked pretty rubbish. And I think often, you know, people ask me about, "Oh yeah, how can I learn to draw?" And I very much believe it's easy to start drawing something and it looked rubbish and then just stop and then assume that you couldn't do it or you weren't getting there. And so often, I mean, partly the nice thing about sketchplanations is it's like clockwork. It's gonna make me do it, so I just keep going. And there's very often times where halfway through it felt like it wasn't working, the drawing wasn't right. You know, like if you saw all the sketches along the way, sometimes, you know, they're awful, but you keep going at it and you refine this bit and you change this bit and you switch the direction, and then after a while, you get to a point where it looks really good. And it's so easy to assume that people just come across and do the good thing straight away, but. So my tip is just even when you look at it is to keep going. In my research, there was a guy called Donald Shan who's an architect, and he did a lot of research about how do you teach and learn architecture. He talked about drawing as a reflexive conversation with the situation, which takes a while to get your head around, but the idea is that you put a line on the page and then you see that line and that line informs your next line. And so, there's this constant like back and forth and like, "Oh, I put this down and it doesn't quite fit so I moved it over there and I erased this bit and I moved it over there." And you're doing these hundreds of iterations just while you're just still working on it. But you don't get that if you just stop on your first bit when it didn't come out like you want to. So those are my, my three ideas. So yeah, first draft is always perfect. Keep it really simple. You keep going. MR: Those are three great tips. And I wholeheartedly believe in each one, and was imagining moments in my experience where I felt the same way. Especially number two, like getting partway into something and thinking, "Oh, this is not going the way I want." I'll just say, well, I'll just keep going a little bit more. Let's tweak that a little bit. And a lot of times I found that the thing that I thought was going nowhere was a problem halfway through. By the time I get done with it, it's like one of my favorite things because, you know, there was really potential there that I had to unearth that potential to keep working it, working it, working it, until it developed into the thing, like you kind of fell in love with it, which is kind of a fun experience. So definitely believe in that. JH: I always love the making of things, and like I went to see, it was a random gallery in Washington State where they had a Dr. Zeus exhibition and it had like his sketches before the final books. And it's just always fascinating seeing people's process and realizing it's probably just as messy and confused as yours is. And it's quite liberating. Whenever we watch films, I'm always more interested in the making of the film than the film itself, not -- you know, I love that stuff. MR: Yeah. If you happen to be a "Star Wars" fan and watch "Mandalorian," there was really great series. In addition to the show where it talks about how they made it and some of the crazy stuff they went through to achieve these, what at the outset seemed like impossible, "How are we going to do that?" They had some crazy idea and they, through process and everybody being creative, they were able to solve it. And you get to see how they achieved it. And when you watch the episode, you know, you wouldn't even think of all the hoops that they're jumping through to make that happen, but yet they pulled it off. So, yeah, in the same way, I love that. JH: Absolutely. I love it. MR: Yeah. Well, thanks so much for those tips, Jono. Well, this has been really enjoyable chatting with you and getting inside of the way you think and your process, and so forth. Tell us, if someone's listening, how do they find sketch explanations? How do they find you? What's the best place to find you? JH: Yeah, I mean, it's always a bit of a curse. Sketchplanations is not the easiest word to say or spell, but it does make sense when you think of that sketch explanation. So yeah, I mean, sketchplanations.com, I think I have, you know, pretty much monopoly on if you type that into any search engine, and it should probably correct and point you in the right direction. If you're struggling with that, you can always put in Joho Hey, and that'll help get you there pretty quick. That's H-E-Y. And then we also started a podcast this year, which was quite fun. MR: Oh, great. JH: Yeah. Interesting. Like different angles, obviously, it's all visual, so in some ways, it's mad to do a podcast about something that's visual, but -- MR: Well, that's what you're on now is the podcast about sketchnoting. JH: Yeah, exactly. But actually, it's been a lot of fun. You like taking a topic and like I say, going a bit deeper into than I can, just in a little quick sketch. And chatting about that, that's been fun. So that's sketchplanations.com/podcast. MR: Great. JH: But everything's pretty much there on the sketchplanation site. MR: Can find you there. Great. Well, we'll definitely link it up. And in the meantime, between us recording now and this is getting published we'll see if we can get links to the things you've mentioned, the visuals that you mentioned in our discussion, and we'll link those up too, so that way if someone's listening and they wanna see what the Amazon flywheel or whatever, I think I've mixed that up, but yeah, the concept, they can pick it up to have peek, which would be great. JH: Perfect. MR: Well, thanks Jono. I'm really impressed with your reliability and your ability to continue going after 10 years. Some people would very easily be bored or would drive them mad, and it seems like you just keep on leaning into it and enjoying it. That's really an encouraging thing to see, and I appreciate it. I think it's a great thing for the world, and I speak for all the other fans of your work. Thank you for the work you're doing. It's really valuable. JH: Thank you, Mike. Yeah, I mean, I always consider it -- honestly, it's like the attention economy, right? People look at lots of places they can spend their attention, and it's a privilege to have a place where you can send something out and people will pay attention to it. So that's one of the things that keeps me going is that take that opportunity seriously. And, you know, I also think a bit like you -- with this podcast, it's helped me out a huge deal as well. Like, it's not completely like selfless. I'm not just doing this for everybody else. Like I've got better a whole host of things as a result of doing this project. The people I really had to thank is my wife and family for allowing me to go off on Saturdays from time to time and finish some sketches when I should be helping out around the house or, you know, having fun, but there you go. Yeah. MR: There you go. Well, thanks so much, Jono. It's been a pleasure. And for those who are listening or watching, this is another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Until the next episode, talk to you soon. JH: Thanks, Mike. | |||
| 12 Apr 2021 | Guillaume Wiatr uses visuals to solve problems - SE09 / EP11 | 00:59:53 | |
In this episode, I talk with Guillaume Wiatr, a strategy consultant who uses visual thinking, sketchnoting and graphic recording to help his clients visualize solutions. Hear how Guillaume got his start in this space and how he has become a guide to the companies he works with using visuals as his secret weapon. You’re going to love this one! SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Paperlike, a screen protector for the iPad that makes drawing with the Apple Pencil feel like paper. Paperlike’s Nanodot technology offers the paper-like friction you want with the clearer screen visibility you need. This new surface even improves drawing precision — and reduces arm fatigue. It’s the closest you’ll get to paper on a digital screen. Buy yours today! https://paperlike.com/sketchnotearmy RUNNING ORDER
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 22 Mar 2022 | Franziska Schwarz - SE11/EP06 | 01:03:49 | |
In this episode we’ll hear from Franziska Schwarz, a science communicator, PhD in nutritional medicine, and graphic recorder who visualizes science ideas. Franziska shares how falling asleep in university classes led her to explore visuals as a way to communicate scientific ideas in a new, refreshing way. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 15 Mar 2021 | Benjamin Felis: graffiti artist and punk rocker turned visualizer - SE09 / EP07 | 00:57:56 | |
In this episode, hear from Benjamin Felis, a former graffiti artist and punk rocker turned graphic recorder, facilitator, sketchnoter and visual teacher. Hear how Ben’s early life as a graffiti artist led him into visual thinking and working large canvases, and how his time as a punk rocker helps him go for it every single day. This is a discussion you’re just going to love! SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by: Neuland, the innovative maker of visual thinking tools. Every Neuland product is designed with passion to be durable and sustainable. Check out their new GraphicWally!
Save 15% with code neuland@sketchnotearmy-2021 at Neuland.com until May 30th, 2021 RUNNING ORDER
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 20 Apr 2020 | Self-Care - SE07 / EP07 | 01:17:09 | |
Need a break from COVID-19 news? Check out our collection of 50+ Sketchnote Army Podcast interviews from 6 seasons at: https://sketchnotearmy.com/podcast Feeling isolated? Join our Sketchnote Army Slack community to chat with other visual thinkers about sketchnotes, visual thinking, or whatever is on your mind. Join the Sketchnote Army Slack for free at: https://sketchnotearmy.com/slack RUNNING ORDER
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SUPPORT THE PODCASTBrought to you by The Sketchnote Ideabook — the sketchbook designed for sketchnoters. Equipped with a no-bleed, no show-through paper, it can take almost any pen or marker you can throw at it. SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes | |||
| 07 May 2024 | All The Tips - S15/E10 | 00:55:53 | |
In this final episode of The Sketchnote Army Podcast season 15, we have compiled the tips from nine great visual thinkers into a single episode. We hope these tips will inspire and encourage you on your visual thinking journey. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings — any time you like. You can nudge the curve of a line, swap out one brush for another, or change stroke thickness and color at any stage of your drawing — saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need — large or small. Never worry about fuzzy sketchnotes again. Concepts is a powerful, flexible tool that’s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
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1. Maggie Appleton’s Tips
2. Alejo Porras’ Tips
3. Alina Gutierrez’s Tips
4. Pierpaolo Barresi’s Tips
5. Claire Ohlenshlager’s Tips
6. Jimi Holstebro’s Tips
7. Deb Aoki’s Tips
8. Alan Chen’s Tips
9. Julian Raul Kücklich’s Tips
Credits
Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 02 May 2023 | Ty Hatch loves the joy of creating random doodles - S13/E07 | 00:45:14 | |
In this episode, Ty Hatch, who started sketchnoting as a practice to pay attention and stay awake shares why he still loves the art and his work on creating headshot illustrations and creating sketchnotes for meetings and conferences. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings — any time you like. You can nudge the curve of a line, swap out one brush for another, or change stroke thickness and color at any stage of your drawing — saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need — large or small. Never worry about fuzzy sketchnotes again. Concepts is a powerful, flexible tool that’s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
Tips
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, this is Mike, and I'm here with Ty Hatch. Ty, welcome to the show. It's so good to have you. Ty Hatch: Thanks, Mike. It's great to be here. MR: Ty, we've known each other for years and years. We were talking about when we thought we connected, you had a pretty pinpoint accurate time-point. TH: Yeah. It's funny. Back in 2008, I went to a UX Week, which was a conference put on by, for those that remember Adaptive Path, I think they got purchased and became the in-house UX department for Capital One a few years ago. I was there and I was like, "I need to pay attention." Did some sketch notes, or just did notes, I wasn't thinking about it. Got an email from you after I posted them up on the OG photo-sharing Flickr, and you're like, "Hey, can I put these into my Sketch Note Army?" And so, we just stayed in touch throughout the years since then, so. MR: Yep. Well, that leads right into telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do. TH: You bet. I am a UX manager for O.C. Tanner, which is an employee recognition company. I help create the space for employee recognition. I Work with a team. I have three people on my team. We're part of a larger experience group, and we focus on how can people feel appreciated at work by the employers. It's a really fun thing to do. I also, as you know, do sketch notes at times and random doodles and whatnot when the time allows. That's me. I enjoy UX design. It's a fun problem space to be in. MR: Well, I can relate to that as a UX principle, UX designer. I find it fascinating as well. I focus on software, but there are tons of opportunities to make things better, always, seems like. It's good to hear you're focusing on that, and that's such a critical space, especially now with all the challenges of hiring people and maintaining employees, and having them not leave by recognition. Huge, huge opportunities there, I would think. TH: Yeah. It's huge. You, like me, it's hard to feel sometimes like you're moving the needle and you're making a difference for people. One of the things that really gets me going is knowing that the work that I'm doing is actually helping people feel that appreciation, that they get that recognition from not only their peers, but from their leaders and whatnot. MR: Yep. Super important. It's something that often goes under the radar and managers might not think much about it, but is so critical. Often it doesn't cost you much other than time and a little bit of thoughtfulness. So, that's really cool. I would love to hear a little bit more about how you ended up in the space where you are both professionally, but also as a sketchnoter. Had you always drawn since you were a little kid? What's been your history? Let's start from when you're just a little guy. TH: I spent a lot of time outdoors growing up. I grew up in Southern Idaho and southeastern Washington. Miles outside of my small town. There wasn't much to do there. We were too far out to get TV reception. We often joked we got matching ants on our TV screen because this was back in the days before cable. We had terrible TV reception on our black and white TV. We did have indoor plumbing, and electricity, so that was always good. My brother and I, we would leave the house, go out in the backyard. We didn't have neighbors at the time, and so, we would just go out sometime after breakfast and typically we'd come back around dinnertime 'cause we were hungry. We would always have some sort of adventure and whatnot. I think at some point, a friend of ours introduced us to Dungeons and Dragons and I became a really big fantasy nut. This was the early days of D&D. I used to have a first edition, Monster Manual and Player CanBall and DMS Guide and all that. We colored them, I coloring books 'cause they were all just black and white illustrations. I loved it. Got into reading books and whatnot. Wanted to play football, but didn't seem to get enough interest for college people. We were in a small town, nobody really knows what's going on with a small town. I served a mission for my church for a couple years and then returned home. I was visiting my grandparent's house, and this is probably my favorite story about what got me into what I do today is there was this really awesome a couple of these burly looking pirates on it. I was like, "Well, this is cool, visual stimuli to get someone board at grandma and grandpa's house, right? It said the white family, I said, "Oh, that's a Piratey name." I was like, "Oh, let's read about these pirates." It wasn't pirates. It was a story about the artistic legacy of NC Wyatt and his son Andrew, and his grandson Jamie. I just got hooked and in fact, I have a self-portrait from that issue that I took out of the magazine. I think I found a couple copies over the years. But there was a really little self-portrait that he did that I have hanging on my wall. There was some painters tape. And I was like, "Oh, you get paid doing art? What? Completely radical concept for me. I'd always loved comic books. My brother and I collected comics over the years. I figured, I was like, "Oh, what can I do with art?" I started exploring the different art-related careers and I stumbled upon graphic design because as I learned about illustration as a career, I was like, "That's really competitive. I don't know that I'm good enough to compete there, but I can definitely think visually and solve problems." So, I tended toward that. That was about the time I was a junior at state school in Washington State where I'd met my wife and I applied for an art school in Portland and I'm like, "There's no way they'll let me in." But surprisingly, they did. I finished a BFA in graphic design. My senior capstone project there at the time was a website, this is what? 1998 I wanna say. Right about the time my oldest was born. And my senior project was an informational website on typography, which is still out there. I did a really quick redesign of it the next year 'cause it was a hideous thing when I got looking at it in reality. But it's still fitting there, 20-some-odd years later. It was an informational website about typography. Cause actually, I fell in love with typography in school. That's one of the things I absolutely loved. I was like, "Oh, could I make money doing typography?" I was like, "No, I can't." Type is another one of those professions, it's a very niche specialty. MR: Yeah. You can do it, but you have to really work at it. TH: Yeah. But I love design. I love the visual solving of problems and communicating clearly with design. For several years, I did that and slowly over time morphed into more of an interaction UX designer. Just as the industry changed, I'm like, "This is a good thing. This can provide for me and my family and I enjoy doing it." You slowly over the years gravitated into technology and doing UX. That was the thing that got me where I'm at. Particularly doing sketchnotes, like the sketch note that I did at UX Week was the first time that I actually shared anything that I'd done like that. I would do 'em in my sketchbooks 'cause it helped me process what was being communicated, presentations that I would go to. I really took off though, I wanna say about 2014, 2015 when I got my first iPad. There's this little app that was really cool. I'm like, "This is cool." I was trying to use it with my finger, but the company that made the app, which is Paper. The company at the time was called, FiftyThree. MR: FiftyThree. Yep. TH: I think I got one of their styluses, which looked like a carpenter's pencil. I was like, "This is cool." But I didn't like the drag of the rubber on it, but it made my finger drawings not as crappy. I'd used that stylus. I tried to play around with it a bit more. Then Apple introduced the pencil and it was a game changer for me. I've dabbled a bit with other applications, but the Paper is still my go-to when it comes to sketchiness because of how it works. I still maintain sketchbooks. I have one now. It's more random skulls and patterns and headshots. Like you see I participate in October each year, which is a drawing challenge. If you go over into my Instagram, you'll see that I have a few. I think I actually made it through all 31 days this year. MR: You did. TH: Which is like maybe the second or third time that I've done it. I've completed Inktober. But that's just fun. It's a good challenge to just do random headshots. I enjoy the personalities that come out of those headshots. That's a bit of how I got into it, what I've been doing. MR: Wow. And now, do you still do sketchnoting from time to time? TH: I do. I haven't had as much with the pandemic. Right before the pandemic, I was actually doing a fair amount of it. I was getting contacted by conferences to help with that. I did a Mind the Product conference and did a plural site live as well. They were a lot of fun. Did the thing with—what I like about—my particular process with sketchnotes is I prefer being in person at any one event 'cause processing that real-time is the thing that I did. I've tried to do it with different random, YouTube presentations and stuff like that, but I don't get quite the energy and the vibe off of a live event. MR: Interesting. When I look at your style, I see you have a very unique ink style, I dunno how to describe it, but it looks like you're using a brush pen or something. There is some single-line work, right, but there's some that looks like it's kind of thick and thin. What is the tool that you're using to achieve that? I assume you're still on Paper, right? TH: Yeah. Looking at the ink over stuff, I typically, I'll pencil it out, I'll sketch out in pencil and then I just use fine liners. I use a fine linear and then like a 0.8. Sometimes I'll go in with the smaller one. One little tool that I saw, a Kaweco. MR: Oh, yeah. TH: I was like, I put it in my cart and it's really hard to justify that experience. Not a cheap thing, hey. But it got low enough and I'm like, okay, it was my birthday. And I was like, I told my wife, "I'm gonna splurge and get this." And like, okay. I love it. I haven't done much drawing with it. I got an extra broad nib and it's a little too thick for me. My pen addiction, my writing instrument addiction is breathing and well, and I collect art supplies when I'm trying to figure out something I wanna do. I ordered a broad nib off of Jet pens, which is not a good site if you like ready instruments. It's not good for your wallet. It's a great size. MR: Great site, and yeah, you spend a lot of money there pretty easily. TH: Oh yeah. MR: Paper now is owned by, WeTransfer the file transfer company, and still is maintained and has had some updates. Like you, I use Procreate for illustration work, but if I'm doing sketch notes, I go right to Paper. At this point, it feels really natural, the tools, I'm very aware of them. When you do sketchnoting in Paper, what are the tools that you like to use there? I'm just curious about that. Looking at, just have one of your samples up here on my screen. Looks like you're— TH: I have an iPad Pro that I use with an Apple pencil. Typically, when I do it, I'll—what I love about Paper is the intuitiveness of the tools. They have a paintbrush, they have a ink pen or fountain pen. They have a couple different types of markers and a pencil. Typically, I like to do a little sketch of the presenter. And so, if you look at it, you'll see that most frequently. Then notes around the topics they're talking about. Often, I'll get the sketch of the presenter. I do that in the quiet moments of their presentation. I'll either use the ink pen, the fountain pen version, a medium nib. It's relatively inexpensive to pay for the pro version for Procreate or for the Paper. MR: Right. It's $12 a year, I think. TH: Yeah. I'm more than happy to pay that 'cause it's given me a lot of opportunities. The thing that I love is the color mixing. They've nailed color mixing like nobody else has, and I think it's one of the best things that they've done in software. I'll use that or I'll use a one the fine liner to do the block letters and whatnot. Every now and then, I have little people pop up that are just a head body and arms, legs to sometimes self-characters and concepts that the designers are doing. Because the thing that I found really interesting with sketch notes is that it's that real-time synthesizing of the concepts that they're presenting that I get the most out of 'em. Largely, it started as a selfish practice to pay attention and stay awake, but I found that I still love doing that because it really helps me to get something outta these presentations as well. But yeah, Paper is hands down the most intuitive tool, I think, for just sketching out in general. I love it. MR: I agree. Well, we're talking a little bit about Sketchnoting specifically. We've done who you are and what you do. We got your story of your origin. Tell us a little bit about something you're working on now, whether it's work or personal that you're excited about that you can share with us. TH: Well, let's see. One of the things I'm really excited about, I have no clue how to do it, is I want to try and figure out how I can work a little bit more in conversational device. Conversational device seem to be taken a lot. There's the ChatGPT bot that everybody's talking about. All these AI-based tools, which have their place, I think. But how can I build a conversational way to present my work or to present myself? I've done some really terrible things. Experiments that will never see the light of day. One of the things I love about design is that's experimentation is part of trying to figure out a solution. You and I both know as designers, it's like, you can't really come up with a good solution unless you know what the problem is. And so, trying to figure that out from my perspective, like, okay, how can I make something like this happen and in a way that I can somehow manage, right? I will fully admit to being an old school. It's like my personal psych is there. I think I got a redesign out last year that I'm really happy with. That was the seven-year cycle of refreshing a personal site. It seems like seven to eight years is about the time it takes for me to get around to saying, "I should probably redesign my personal site." And actually, finding the time to do it. I want to, being able to maintain that in a way because with all the different social media things, it's really hard to improvise where your content is in a good way. 'Cause if you post on social media, you don't have a real centralized location for any of the content that you can put out. You have to say, "I'm gonna focus on this platform." That's really the dangerous thing, I think. How do you position yourself not only as a working professional, a design professional like we're as an artist you know, and give yourself a home where people know, "Oh, if I go here, I'll be able to find and go look at all the other things." 'Cause as much as I love social media and Instagram, I'm tired of seeing an ad every third post in Instagram as I scroll through my feed. Then you have other social media services that kinda self-destruct. I want to have a good centralized location, and I haven't been able to get that fully done yet. 'Cause as much as everybody loves WordPress and it powers so many sites, you have to really want to put in that time and effort to make WordPress work. There's other platforms and stuff too, but it's like, how can you make your content your own and have it in a place that everybody can know, "Okay, if I go here, I'll find their stuff." I'm trying to figure that out for myself. MR: That's something that challenged me as well. Years ago, I decided to go to Squarespace just because I could build what I wanted and not think too much about it, and constrained me a lot. Paper does provide, and it's grown to meet my needs over time. That's been really good to secure as well. I had an instance where I ran websites on WordPress and didn't update, and someone was running a legal pharmaceutical site buried in my website, and I was like, "All right. Not doing that anymore." I was out on WordPress self-hosting and switched to Squarespace, and it's been a good experience. But yeah, I felt the same way you talk about, you know, scrolling through Instagram, it feels like more and more of its ads and less and less of its actual content. I have to really fight through the ads to actually get to my friends for interesting things, and that's frustrating. Someone's going to hopefully solve that problem soon. TH: There's a lot of different platforms out there, you know, Mastodon is taking off, but it's like, in my mind, it's a little too complex for the normal person. Just about everything, you have to feed the algorithm. You have to continually be putting stuff out there to maintain any audience. People have lives outside of posting on social media. One thing I think in general that people don't think about too much is I have a life that is very important to me with my family, and it's like, I'm not gonna be posting all the time for these different platforms. It's great. I love doing it, but it's like, that's not my primary, one of my key focuses. MR: That's the question everybody has to ask, right, to what am I gonna feed this thing? What are its expectations of me? 'Cause sometimes you come to realize that these platforms have expectations for what they want you to do that doesn't align with what you wanna do. You have to make that decision because you only get so much time. It keeps going away. That's really fascinating. Well, I hope that redesigning your website goes well. I know what that feels like. I haven't done it for a while, so I know what a challenge it is. TH: I appreciate that. One thing I'm really interested in trying out, and maybe I'll be doing it a little bit this week a bit if I can, is AWS has this thing called Amplify Studio where they've pre-built some components and whatnot, in React powered by a Figma template. And so, you change your components in the Figma template, connect your account, and you should be able to launch out some app or whatever. I have the template, it's been taunting and mocking me for several months since I discovered it. An inanimate software can't do that. AI might be able to do that, but inanimate software doesn't necessarily do that as you're constant saying, "Hey, you got this, are you gonna do something at some point?" MR: For those who don't know, Figma is a design tool, vector-based design tool where many designers build often their prototypes and their mockups with. What Ty's talking about is he would build a mockup of his site and then use React, which is kind of a backend technology, I think is a fair way to describe it populated by— TH: It's a JavaScript framework— MR: Framework, that's the word I was looking for. TH: Yeah. Just help build out components. AWS is Amazon Web Services, which is the—basically simple way of looking at it is they provide a lot of the Cloud hosting services for a lot of providers. When your services aren't working, there might be an AWS outage somewhere causing some of that stuff. When the internet services go down, sometimes there's outage with some of these cloud providers— MR: Well later in the show, we'll definitely have a link to your website. Maybe by the time this episode launches, you'll have a new site up there that people can look at. TH: It gives me a goal to work on. MR: There you go. There you go. Let's take a little shift now and talk about tools. We've hinted at some, you talked about Paper by WeTransfer as a digital tool. Let's jump back into analog, and more specifically, are there brands of pens that you like, brands of paper, notebooks, pencils, so that people who are listening can dig them up and maybe experiment a little bit? TH: Absolutely. Right now, if I look at my desk, I have a mechanical pencil, and I'll send you some links so you can put these in show notes. It's a mechanical pencil, 0.51 with a metal coral is by Uni. The nice thing is, when you have a metal pencil, you'll often have this little nib that kinda gets bent and breaks. But what's nice about this pencil is that it retracts. It's fairly affordable. I think it's like maybe about 15 bucks. It's not a polymer is on the back of it. I also love fine liners. I've gotten the rounds with a whole bunch, I have some, Copics. The current one that I'm using is a Uni pen fine liner. I've found that I really like these really good waterproof so I can lay down watercolor washes or alcohol on so on. I got this one earlier this year. We did a team offsite. We got a rotating 600. MR: Those beautiful pens. TH: It was a Ballpoint. I'm not such a huge fan of ballpoint pens. But I discovered that Kaweco makes a gel pin insert refill, and so, I got a Kaweco gel pen insert in there. Then have a Kaweco fountain little porch fountain pen. The thing that amazes me-- yeah, it's tinier than I thought it was, but the thing I love about it is that the ink just flows and it's beautiful. It's really great. As far as what do I draw on, in the day, it's often post notes, making lists, and whatnot. I have sketchbooks. Right now, I'm using one. I've been experimenting a little bit with what I want to use for sketchbooks and stuff. This one's by a company, Global Art materials. It's just a generic kinda sketchbook. For years and years, I've used Moleskin's Art sketchbooks, which are great. I love that size. I got a eight by eight, or seven and a half by seven and a half watercolor sketchbook. I found that that was a little too precious. I was like, "Oh, I gotta do art in this stuff." I got the Kickstarter for "The Sketchnote Idea Book." MR: Thank you. TH: I love it, Mike. It's fantastic. The pages are bright white, which I absolutely love and they held all sorts of things. I got some watercolor in my old one. I have one somewhere, an Emergency Kit in case I have to go somewhere. I have another one somewhere that I'm like, lemme experiment with this stuff, and then maybe I'll get back to the Idea book. I found that that notebook that you guys put together was really one of my favorites in recent years. MR: Great. TH: The quality of the paper and the whiteness and the thickness made it really, really flexible. The only thing for me is maybe it was a hair too big, a little too wide. I like a little bit smaller, but I absolutely love the paper quality you guys did on that. Then like sketch notes or not sketch notes, but on the Ink Tobra drawings, I found a five by seven Strathmore 400 pad of paper that's really thick that I absolutely love. All of the years, and 2021s, I only did like 16 of them. I have all those originals hanging out on a piece of paper somewhere. One my goals with my personal site is to be able to set up a way to sell some of these 'cause that's fun or good if this is just sitting and collecting dust in your house. If you do it, I think that one of the real choices of making art is sharing it with people and helping them appreciate it. One of the things I wanna get going as well. MR: That sounds good. As far as digital, you talked about, of course, Paper. We got into that a little bit already. Are there any other tools that you like to play with? Or is that your go-to for pretty much everything? TH: I do have Procreate on my iPad. My kids use it a lot more than I do. One thing I found is I don't like the glossy slide of the Apple pencil on just a make a screen so I have a textured screen protector on it to give it that textural fill of paper. I found that that makes a huge difference for making marks on iPad. That's really it. I've toyed with, Adobe Fresco, Concepts app. There's one that the Icon Factory does, I can't remember it's Ben's go-to tool. MR: I think Ben Crothers likes that—Ben Norris likes that one. TH: Norris, yeah. I dabbled that a little bit. What I like about Paper is the ability to go from pencil to ink to watercolor. The brush that they have in Paper is fantastic. How you can lay your color, make it deeper and rich if you want. I haven't been able to get Procreate to do that. Procreate's a fantastic tool. I love it. But for Sketch notes, to me, it feels like it's a little too powerful. What I love about Paper is Paper's really good at just capturing your flow of thinking, whereas you have to be a lot more deliberate in your usage of Procreate. Although, if you're a Concept artist or somebody that's doing stuff like that, then absolutely that's a great place. My son does a lot of—he loves Pokemon, he loves Mario. He's been doing it. He's gonna be turning 25 this next year. And I'm like, "Dude, you could do commissions of people’s Pokemon on teams." He does this fantastic stuff. I'll send you a link to his Pokemon stuff. He'll do characters and whatnot. He's drawn so many Mario things. He's drawn hundreds of Pokemon and he gets them scaled. I just absolutely love looking at his stuff. I'm like, "Dude, you could probably do something with this. "But he's like, "Yeah, I know Dad, but I do this for fun." Which is great. MR: That sounds like a great variety of tools. You had quite a span. Some that I hadn't thought about, especially the Kaweco. I think it was the Kaweco insert that goes into the Rotring, I think you talked about. 'Cause I'm not a ballpoint fan either. There's a Schaffer insert that I use in my Retro 51s that I really like too. Probably a similar insert, I suppose. TH: I really like the Kaweco one. There's another one that seems to get pretty good reviews that I've seen on, I wanna call it Otto. MR: Oh yeah. Otto. I've had otto. Yeah, those are great. That's Japanese, I think. TH: Mark-making on a budget is a big deal for me. It's not necessarily the tools that make the person, it's what you do with the tools that you have. I think having a widely available set of tools is really important, but also making sure that they're budget-friendly, right? MR: Mm-hmm. TH: Is an important thing too. MR: Yep. I totally agree. Let's make one last shift into tips. The way I frame this is to imagine someone's listening. Maybe they're kind of at a plateau, or they just need some inspiration, little inspiration, little boost. What'd be three tips you would give that person to encourage them in their sketchnoting or visual thinking or just thinking, doing visual work experience. TH: The first tip, and I think this is a pretty important one. I've had a lot of people, when they find out I'm a designer, they throw, "Oh, I'm not artistic." And to me, it's not about being artistic. It's about being creative. I like to tell people everyone's creative in their own way. How you express your creativity is going to be different than how I express my creativity. My creativity comes out in the form of sketch notes and these random headshot illustrations that I do. Your creativity may be that you are a fantastic accountant and you can come up with really great ways to make things better and more efficient. Other people may just be fantastic books or bakers. Everybody expresses their creativity differently. It's not about being artistic, it's about expressing yourself in the work that you do. I think it's perfectly okay to admire for somebody's work and say, "Oh, that's fantastic," and be a fan of it, but also not beat yourself up like, "Oh, I'm not that good at because I can't draw like my sorority and illustrate all these school books." I can draw my own thing and I can be happy with it. And so, I think my first one would be, everybody is creative in their own way, and that's okay. With that, it goes to what I would say is my second tip is enjoy what you do. That it's really hard, I think, especially today for people to feel like, oh, I can enjoy this. I think you need to give yourself permission to enjoy those things that you find pleasing. There's so many things out there today, it's easy to get overwhelmed with them. I think it's okay to be nerdy and geeky or really into sports or, you can like a range of different things. If my kids were tell you what I like, they'd rattle off a list of dozens of things 'cause I don't think it's good to limit yourself to liking just one thing. You can like a range of different things, and that's okay. That would be my second one. The third one is, there's a script quote from Iron Glass. You've probably heard this. You can find a YouTube video on it somewhere, but he's talking about the work that you want to do when you—everybody has a particular taste and style in their head that they imagine. But then when you try and do it, it doesn't meet those mental expectations, but you can get there by working at it. I really think that everybody's capable of doing really great stuff, but you need to work to get to that point. Don't give up, but that's the whole—and I think follow your passion is really bad advice, but I think do what you enjoy because it may be that you may not enjoy your job which is providing for you and maybe your family. But if there's something outside of that that brings you joy and that you enjoy doing, do that in a way that helps you be happy. Over time, what you do with that will match what you see in your head. There may be opportunities that come up as a result of doing that because you never know. Opportunity—I forget who said this quote. Opportunity is often masked as hard work. If you're not doing the work to prepare for the thing that you want to do when that opportunity comes, you're gonna be ill-prepared to do that, that you want to do. And so, it's important to do the things that you feel are important that you love and you'll have an opportunity at some point. Timing is really important. I'll do a fourth one because this one I feel—and I've mentioned a little bit. You need set boundaries for yourself on what you do. You need to be able to say, this is what's important to me, and these other things aren't so important. And so, when it comes down to it, you know, I won't be doing this, this, or this because it conflicts with my more important thing. For me, personally, my most important thing is my family, and everything that I do, I do—I love design. I find that an extremely fulfilling, rewarding career, but it's a means to be able to provide for the family and make sure that they're taken care of. I think that a lot of people are like, this is my hustle. This is my thing. If you put so much of yourself into that, that you identify that with that, and if that thing goes away, where are you left? Set the boundaries for the things that are really important to you in your life that are not work-related. Because I can guarantee you everybody has something that's very important to them, that it's not work-related. Set those boundaries, talk about those boundaries, and live your life in a way that reflects your priorities because as you do that, people will see that, they'll understand that, they'll respect that. And as you do those things and you express yourself through whatever creative means you have, you'll gain those opportunities to be able to do those things and then lead a more fulfilling life and that you're you're happy with. You won't be living with regrets if you do those things. MR: I love the fourth tip. That's really great. Really encouraging. Well, thank you for all those tips and we appreciate your wisdom for all of us here. It seems like just minutes and suddenly we're near the end of the show. I'd love to hear where's the best place for people to find you? Websites, social media, whatever you think would be the best place to start and connect. TH: You bet. I do have a personal site as we were talking about. It's at tyhatch.com. That's gonna be where you can find me. I have links off to all my socials. I'm on Twitter for however long that's still up. I'm on Instagram. You can find me at both of those. Most social media, you can find me at Ty Hatch. Instagram, Twitter, those have been my mainstays. I do have a profile on Mastodon as well. You can find me there tyhatch@mastodon.online. And then also most of my schedule archive of at this point in time lives over on Pinterest. You go to pinterest.com/tyhatch.com/sketchnotes. I think I have a collection of about 300 different sketch notes that I've done. MR: Oh, that's great. TH: You can find me there. I'm always happy to field any questions. If you see something you like, send me a note. Say, "Hey Ty, I really like this sketch. Do you have it?" And if it's something from October, happy to do that. I did a thing years ago, oh gosh, it's been almost 10 years. Really, Mike, I'm getting old. I did this thing about 10 years ago called Artist Trading Cards, or ATC. I think it might still be up if you go to apcs.tyhatch. I did a bunch of Artist Trading Cards. It started off ostensibly as like, "I'm gonna do a little Christmas present for coworkers." And it turned into a four-month project that I had a daily post of thumb little sketch that I did. I'm happy to sell these or trade with you if you want to trade physical objects. There's a whole range of those out there as well. It's fun. I enjoy doing random doodles and I think some point, there will be an opportunity for 'em, but until then I get to enjoy them. TH: Yep. MR: Cool. Well, we'll definitely get show notes put into the episode. So if you're anything in or any of these things pique your interest, you can go check it out. We have links to it. And thanks so much, Ty for being on the show. I'm so appreciate the work you do and the representation you put into the world and your leadership really need people like you doing that. And I'm so glad that you do it. TH: Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure. It's been fantastic talking with you today. MR: You too. Well, and for everyone listening, that'll wrap another episode of "The Sketchnote Army Podcast." Till the next episode, this is Mike. Talk to you soon. All right. I'm gonna stop my recording. | |||
| 28 Nov 2023 | Luke Kelvington uses visual practice to help command the USS Pennsylvania - S14/E05 | 00:30:58 | |
In this episode, we dive into Luke Kelvington’s fascinating world as the commander of a submarine. Luke takes leadership to a whole new level by mixing in visual thinking and sketchnotes to shape how he and his crew make better decisions. If you're curious about how creativity plays a role in leadership, especially on a submarine, this podcast is a fun journey into Luke's underwater world. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with Luke Kelvington. Luke, it's so good to have you on the show. Thanks for coming. Luke Kelvington: Oh, thank you for the invite, Mike. Appreciate it. MR: So we got connected through the Cleveland Guardians. We both have a connection through that. And learned about your sketchnoting skills, and you sent me samples and I was like, "Oh, this is cool. We should have you on the show to talk a little bit about your experience and the way you look at it with the people who listen." So I'm just gonna jump right into, why don't you tell us who you are and what you do, and then go right into how did you end up in this place? Even go back to when you were a little kid, were you drawing for your whole life? You know, was it a late development? I'm really curious to hear how it all fit into what you're doing now. LK: Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah. I'm from Akron, Ohio, son of a third-generation mechanic. I'm pretty sure had my name been Earl Risk Kelvington IV, that's what I'd probably be doing. But I got into the Naval Academy in '19 — or 2000 and joined in 2001. And I've been in the Navy ever since. So I'm a career naval officer, submariner. I'm on my fourth submarine. MR: Wow. LK: I'm the Captain of the USS Pennsylvania Gold, which is a ballistic missile submarine out here in Banger Washington MR: Hmm. LK: Yeah. So as far as, you know, as a kid, I always liked, you know, drawing fonts. I would decorate the upper right-hand corner of, you know, my math homework, and you know, just different designs. And so, I've always just enjoyed just doodling. You know, I was a rugby player, art was not always at the forefront of what I was doing. But I will say that I had a math teacher in 7th grade, and he would give us certificates if you get a hundred on a test, and he would write out your name in calligraphy. And in 7th grade, you know, I was like, "I'm gonna learn how to do this." So, you know, I learned calligraphy in middle school. And so, you know, that and fonts has always been just something I've really enjoyed doing. And I'll say that I've been challenged in the past by my mentors to make sure that I'm always doing something professionally with respect to journaling. And when you know, COVID happened, and I got into this space with the Cleveland Guardians, and then I watched your presentation, and I was like, "Wow, it's just something I didn't even know I needed." And the simplicity of you the messaging and how you were able to show, "Hey, as long as you can do these shapes, you know, the idea's not art mantra. As long as you can do these simple shapes, you could really convey a message. And even if it's just with yourself and your own journal, trying to figure out how to better yourself or your people," I found that, you know, I got really excited about it and started doing it. And what I found was, I was listening to my leaders speak. So I was on an admiral staff, and so, I started Sketchnoting when he was giving his speeches. What I found was by sharing that with him after the fact, and proving to him that his message was simple enough to be able to capture an imagery and not really, you know, hard things to convey, that he was being very effective in his communication style. So my job as a leader on a submarine is to design people's decision space. And if I can clearly communicate that in different manners, and one of which is through art. So for instance, last week I have these giant post-it notes, and I have my — we'll talk about nuance of pens later. But I have my Neuland pens, and I'll draw quotes and just simple designs. This week was, the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack. I found on the noun project this, you know, this very simple drawing of a wolf. And it's just the imagery as they come in. It's not just words on a page. It's got a little bit more to it and a little bit of depth. You know, just a little bit of shading makes it look and makes it pop and makes it something that I think really resonates. That Cleveland Guardian series, you know, we've been exposed to a lot of amazing leaders. You know, Dan Coyle, James Kerr, you know, Jay Hennessy's just done a fantastic job of bringing these people together. And James Kerr, in his book "Legacy," you know, he says, "Shrewd leaders invent a unique vocabulary of shorthand for communicating new cultural norms and standards using specific words, phrases, mottos, and mantras." And I would argue art is part of that. Then using metaphor, the leader brings the story to visceral life across as many channels as possible. And in that way, the language becomes the oxygen that sustains belief. And in this way, leaders rewrite the future. You know, so using that metaphor and using the imagery, I think is a way to be very effective as a leader. With my crew, my message is very, I think, simple. It's to build trust, and then, you know, I break it into character and competency, there's something that can resonate with them. Choose growth, and then to use your best punch. And I've used that, "use your best punch" in this boxing analogy now and using some of the imagery from that to I think — you know, I've only been in command for about three months, but I think starting to build a culture where that can that resonate. And then you can use other things, like, you know, "what does it mean to be in someone's corner?" As a coach, as a mentor, as someone that you know, is able to throw in the towel for you, when you see that they're struggling and they don't even know that they need the help. So, you know, being able to just effectively use imagery in order to either help you figure out how you wanna convey it. So like, I don't share all of my notes, you know, with my guys and girls, but you know, making sure that it's a way for me to help frame again, how do I give them the left and right boundaries and then create that imagery to make sure that we're heading in the right direction. MR: That's really cool. I'm really curious. You made a statement earlier, you said something about decision space. I would really like you to expand a little on what is a decision space, and then secondarily, how are you — it sounds like you're using this imagery as a way to frame or put boundaries on that decision space. LK: Yeah. So decision space, I talk about the fact that, life is a choose your own adventure. And so as I get you know, 18 to 20-somethings trying to make sure that we teach them what right looks like. So some of that is in either words or pictures. Other instances is actually showing them on the job training of what that really looks like. So the idea is, as they're more junior, the constraining space is the left and right boundaries. MR: Smaller. LK: Yeah, are smaller. So again, if you can either use imagery or figure out how you are gonna frame your discussion with them and you can work that out, you know, what are the left and right boundaries that I want to convey so that you can then, and after the fact, "Hey, did I clearly communicate that?" Because honestly, when someone messes up -- I'm a huge proponent of human error. I think that, we are going to make mistakes. And it happens all the time. You know, I give 'em the example. I say, "Hey, on your phone, how often do you hit the wrong button and you have to back or auto correct." And that stuff happens in real life. And just your normal day-to-day processes. So, if we can accept that human error — 'cause I think, again, our tendency is to run, hide, cover, and blame. That's kind of where we go. But how do we change that so that they feel safe enough to come in, tell you that they messed up? And then making sure that there's enough of environment that's safe where they can go ahead and admit those mistakes. So that's kind of what I'm talking about there with the decision space. And again, sometimes it's with words, sometimes, again, in your journal, it's a way to, how do I best convey this message to my people? MR: It almost seems like what you're trying to do, the way I read it is, they can't see inside your mind and what you're thinking, but you can use words and images and things to basically help each one of those individuals build that decision space in their mind to know where the edges are. And know, like, okay, I'm at the edge of, "I need to talk to somebody before I proceed with this." Or, "This doesn't feel right. I need to talk to someone and make sure something feels hinky about this, I better check." Like, I'm imagining you're helping them to build it for themselves so they can — 'cause then that makes themselves sufficient. And then I guess the second thing is by making that safe environment where they can say, "Hey, captain, I screwed up. I did this." They're more likely to learn from it, right? If they feel like they're gonna get beat up over it, then that encourages people not to tell you. And then you can ask something that can be a runaway problem that could build into some huge problem, right? You wanna catch it early before it becomes out of control, I would think. LK: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I think being able to look at yourself first, "Hey, did I give you the time, the tools, the training to do it right." And when they see you with the humility to say, "Hey, I'm going to look at myself first before I go and try to put any kind of blame on you." I think that that helps us build that psychologically safe space to make sure that they do come forward. 'Cause In my world, troubleshooting a human error and a very technical problem is, you know, if you put the wrong number in, we need to know that, so. MR: Yeah. That's pretty cool. That's really interesting the way you're using it in that. Now you mentioned too that you do journaling. Can you tell a little bit of detail about how you've integrated, I guess, visualization of some kind? Maybe it's rises to the level of sketchnoting in your own journaling practice, and how has that helped you? LK: Yeah, so I will, a lot of times when maybe in, even in social media, I'll see something like, Adam Grant puts out a quote, you know, so I'll snap that, and then later on I'll take that quote, and then go into my notes and try to make it something that sticks, right? I mean, you wanna make it so that it's something that's sticky. And then, you know, once you kind of have that confidence, sharing that with others. I'm a SEC football fan, and I was watching SEC Media Day a couple weeks ago, and Kirby Smart was talking and then Nick Saban, and I was like, "Holy smokes, this is a leadership 101. I need to capture some of this stuff." So, you know, capturing it quickly. You know, we can go into some of the advice stuff later, but make sure that you're able to make some shorthand notes off to the side, and then you can figure out how do I want to present this, you know, in a clear manner that I want to capture and then share in the future. So, you know, I've got my journals, they're chronological, but, you know, I'll put in the front of those journals like a page number with something I wanna make sure I go back to. Yeah, and it's something that now it's sticky, it's there, it's an image. I can tell you, I do not have a photographic memory, but I can see, you know, an image on a page, and then I can go back to it and say, "Okay, this is —" It's gonna be something I can go back and say, "Hey, this is gonna be something I wanna apply to this situation. Because, you know, as Mark Twain says, right, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." And so being able to go back to those and say, "Hey, this is an effective message that I now can then share with my people." So, you know, I've been collecting quotes and reading books and putting those things together for really the last 18 years of my career. And for this moment to be able to pour the stuff out on my people. MR: That's cool. So it does seem like — the things I take away from that are knowledge and insight can come from any place, right? You're watching SEC Media Day, you're getting stuff from, you know, head coaches to these football teams who are leaders, right? They have to deal with leadership. So even like kids and other people can bring you that. So being aware that knowledge can come from any place and to be ready. So that was one message. And then the second message was, is when you place it in your journals that you have created in an index, so you can find it again quickly because you have a feeling like, you know, "This might be valuable for my team in the future, I need to be able to quick reference that thing and pull it back." And then the third thing was interesting too, is you said you can see it in your mind. Like that's the way — the challenge for me is I could see it in my mind, and I know I did that thing and then, you know, I probably need to work on my organization of my books so that I can find stuff more easily. Maybe they need to be digitized, I don't know. But I can definitely like, "0h yeah, I can close my eyes and imagine that sketchnote that I did." And a lot of times the where and when and details all around it. Now finding it in the book is the challenge. So that's my thing that I gotta deal with, but. LK: Right. Yeah. MR: Interesting. LK: And you know, when we talk about tools, because of the nature of my job, I typically don't have my a cell phone, I don't have much when it comes to digital, so a lot of what I have to do is just on pen and paper. You know, so I have not gotten into — I recently did buy the surface pen to try to try the stuff out the digital world, but a lot of times it's just not something that I can take with me. MR: Yeah, exactly. I think that feels like a real natural place to shift into the tools you do use. Are there specific pens that you like when you do journaling, are there certain books that you like? You talked about big sketch or big sticky notes and Neuland markers. So talk a little bit about kind of the tools you use and why you like 'em. LK: Yeah. For the most part the journaling, I'll just use the normal, just regular you know, notebook. I do have your the Sketchnote Ideabook as well. MR: Oh, cool. Nice. LK: So, you know, I have one that I'm usually in a chronological order going through. And then I have a couple others that where I'm practicing. So, you know, I got the Bikablo Icons from Neuland, so you can kind of go through and practice the different emotions. I even have a little book that was by — it's my daughter's book. It's how to draw, you know, and it's just simple little things. So, you know, working on that inventory of icons is really, I think one of the things that's helpful to have kind of a separate journal that I build that inventory and that muscle memory of what those — just like you say those simple shapes, but then you just add a little bit of depth and it just really it pops. I don't know how to better describe it. But yeah, I love the Neuland pens. And I like the fact that I can reload 'em and and the fact they don't bleed through the paper, I think that's the other piece's of it. MR: Yeah. That's the best. LK: On a day-to-day, I just have like a ballpoint tool as one of my go-tos, you know, in my uniform. 'cause the Neuland’s don't have an easy way to, you know, kind of stuff it in my uniform there. MR: Yeah. LK: Like I said when it comes to — I do it for sermons too, so every Sunday I've got a little sketch note of whatever that sermon was, but off to the side as, you know, saying his outline, I'm putting that on a separate piece of paper just to kind of sketch out, "Okay, this is what it was." And then, you know, I've done a couple of your workshops, talking about different layouts, like what's gonna fit best for this particular sermon and making sure that I — and you're gonna make mistakes especially if you're just using pen and paper, but figuring out inventive ways to hide those mistakes is always a fun challenge as well. And then a lot of times, I'll snap a picture of it and share it with my mom or you know, just — again, just being willing to share that stuff and get some feedback, and it seems to resonate pretty well with others. Yeah, when it comes to simple icons the Noun Project is definitely an easy one. MR: Great resource. Yeah. LK: And honestly, I'm also not shy about tracing an outline of it, you know? I'll put the phone behind it and trace the outline, and — MR: That's a good idea. LK: — you know, as I'm working on trying to, you know, build the repertoire of icons, but you know, sometimes I just can't get the proportions right so I'll just draw it behind there and trace it through, and it still looks pretty good. And then when I was in my job, in my previous job on that Admiral staff, I just had 5 by 8 note cards, and that would be my method of capturing those things, especially if I wanted to share 'em with them. MR: Yeah. It's interesting, like 5 by 8 note cards, I've got a big stack of them. Well, I got smaller ones right here. I took to a conference years ago. Basically, we said, "Well, here's what we need." And I wanted 5 by 8 card stock, so they got eight and a half by 11, cut it in half, and handed it out to all the students in that workshop. In person, I was in Philly, and they had all these leftover cards. So I took them and I was like, I really like these are really nice. You know, it's kind of a nice, you know, you don't feel too precious about it. If you screw it up, you just recycle it, start with another one, you know, it's independent so you can kind of move it around. And so that's kind of cool that you use that. So when you're on the boat, are you able to take — it sounds like you don't take technology, so you take paper and pen or something, or do you take anything when you go on the boat, or is it pretty much get left behind? LK: I'll take my pen and paper, you know. MR: Oh, nice. LK: And my journal. Yeah. So, again, I use it as a leadership journal, you know, capture things you know, obviously nothing classified, but — MR: Sure. Yeah. LK: But yeah, just building on those lessons and making sure that again, as I'm trying to visualize how I want to present information, one of the easy ways to do that is if I can — I'm convinced that if I can make it a simple image, then if I can communicate that image with words, then I think I'm winning there to be able to build what that — bringing that story to visceral life like James Kerr says. MR: There's been a lot of talk about story too. Like we as people, if we see or hear story, if it's well done, it can be almost as though we experienced it personally. So that visceral life is actually like a real thing. Like, you can almost imagine, like in movies you've seen, if you really resonate with it, it could feel as though you experienced that yourself. And you can learn lessons from those experiences. Like, "Yeah, don't do that. Probably, this doesn't feel right. " You know, you're building knowledge from that. So when you take your journals on the boat, do your do your crew see that? What do they think? 'Cause I saw, you know, you put it up on the screen, it's got stickers all over it and, you know, looks kind of cool. They're like, "Oh man, he is carrying a notebook." Does that seem unusual to them? Do they say anything to you about it? Or how do they react to that, if at all? Maybe they don't. LK: I think that when I do show 'em the images, I think they do enjoy it, but it is pretty typical for, you know, senior officers to carry around at least some level of a notebook, but to me it's teaching them that, you know, that professional journal that you're learning and making sure you're capturing these lessons. 'Cause people learn lessons from good leaders, and they also learn them from poor leaders too. So making sure that even, you know, you capture both the good and the bad. 'Cause You can say, "Well, I really don't want to do it that way." You know, so when they get in charge, and making sure that they're taking things with them. The Navy is not something that is always a career for everyone, but making sure that those lessons that you learn and you've got something to be able to after the fact digest. My engineer tour was a very a challenging tour. It was, over three yearS, but the notes that I took during that tour, I was able to then really digest. I ended up writing an article and getting it published in the Naval Institute Proceedings. I would've not been able to really digest that tour and clean all those lessons if I hadn't captured those throughout the tour. Just those little nuggets things I wanted to do better, things I learned. Yeah. MR: It seems to me too, the other lesson I take away from what you're just talking about is, and this probably from the beginning too, is this idea of you can't just, you know, at the end of three years, like go back and reflect on everything and take every learning because you're gonna forget a lot of it. So it's really important that you are documenting this stuff as it's happening in little micro chunks and letting it build over time. So you're building this experience, and it's a way of capturing like your lessons, because you know, as much as you'd love to think, you can go back after three years and reflect, and you could do dress and meaning, but having that reference would be huge. So that would be an encouragement for those listening or watching to maybe start carrying a, carrying a book around that they document stuff in the way that you do as a valuable professional tool. LK: And sometimes it can just either be a small image or just a few words, and that'll trigger, you know, that event so that you can make sure, yeah, You can capture it and use it in the future. MR: So we've covered your life story. We've covered tools. We're at the point where I would love to hear your encouragement in tips. So the way I frame it is someone's listening, watching their visualization person of some kind, and maybe they feel like they're in a rut or they just need some encouragement. What would you tell that person In three tips? Or you can go beyond three if you want to. LK: Yeah, I think the first is you know, the practice, you know, building those icons so that later when you're stuck you can open up that other journal and take a look at those items. Or I would encourage 'em to, you know, take courses kind of like what you've offered, just to give 'em a little bit more courage or a little bit more just tools. MR: Confidence maybe. LK: Yeah, Confidence. Yeah, Confidence is the word I'm looking for there. That it is just simple images that could really resonate with just a little bit of practice. But then I think also you know, using those tools like the Noun Project and not being afraid to, every once in a while trace it out if it's, you know, to make it look good. I think sharing it with friends has been something that I've really enjoyed and letting them give you a little bit of feedback. I think that that will give them some more encouragement that it's something that people enjoy. And then it's okay to wait, I think, to be inspired. You know, my journals are not full. Every page doesn't have images on it, right? So making sure that you, you keep the practice of journaling, and even if it's just the story and things that happened, and then as the inspiration comes and that you say, "Hey, this is something I really want to capture with an image." You know, making sure that you keep that muscle memory of carrying that notebook around. And then that way when — like I said the other day, watching that SEC Media Day was like, "Wow, I need to capture this. And I think this would be something that I could then share with friends and we could get a conversation going." I move a lot, so connecting with others, if you send 'em an image and say, "Hey, let's talk about this. This is really exciting. This is something I just heard." It can help build that conversation. And so, it's not just, "Well, how you doing? Oh, I'm doing fine." so it's not just the family stuff, but it's also — MR: Go deeper. Yeah. LK: Yeah. MR: Cool. That's really cool. I love those tips. Thanks for sharing those. Well, you know, you're probably on a boat some part of the time, and maybe you don't really have social media stuff. Is there anywhere you would send people to learn more about you? Or is there anything online that they can even find? Is there anything that we can send people to? LK: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn. That's the easiest way professionally to reach out to me. MR: Cool. LK: I do have a couple articles that I've written in the U.S. Naval Institute proceedings so they can find a couple pretty, you know lessons there that I've captured. But yeah, other than that, my bio is on the submarine Pacific Fleet website, if they really wanna see that, but. MR: Go dip. LK: Yeah. MR: Cool. Well, we'll make sure and get a link to your LinkedIn. We'll put that in the show notes and maybe we can have you find links to your article. So if people wanna read those, we can include those in the show notes too. But hey, Luke, this has been great. It's really been fun to hear — you know, when I started this podcast and never thought that I'd have a commander of a submarine talking about sketchnoting. You know, just the world is crazy. You just never know where it's gonna lead, you know. LK: Yes, sir. Absolutely. It's been an absolute pleasure. I'm blessed to have been part of that Cleveland Guardian speaker series to get to know some of the awesome people like you, Mike, and yeah, it's been a pleasure. MR: Well, thanks, Luke. We appreciate you. Thanks for your service. And for everyone who's watching and listening, this will be another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Until the next episode, talk to you soon. LK: You could make it Navy, you know, just for this episode. MR: That's true. Yeah, the Sketchnote Navy. Never thought about that. Yeah. That's funny. | |||
| 05 Nov 2024 | Joran Oppelt believes graphic consulting is a powerful tool for building community connections - S16/E02 | 00:45:45 | |
Joran Oppelt reflects on his journey through music, marketing, spiritual community-building, and visual consulting and how they’ve shaped his unique perspective. He offers an inside look at the latest developments at The Grove and thoughts on emerging AI trends. Sponsored by ConceptsThe Concepts Sketchnote Workshop video — a unique, FREE, hands-on workshop video where I show you how I use the Concepts app to create sketchnotes on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. In this one-hour, eighteen-minute video, I cover:
The workshop video includes answers to common questions about Concepts. Watch the workshop video for FREE at: rohdesign.com/concepts Be sure to download the Concepts app at concepts.app and follow along with me during the workshop! Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Tips
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with Joran Oppelt. Joran, so good to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on. Joran Oppelt: Yeah. Joran. MR: Joran. Joran. JO: Yeah. MR: I need to practice it, Joran. JO: Yeah. MR: Well, it's good to have you on the show. It's interesting because we crossed paths, I think on LinkedIn. I saw we've been following each other for a while, and I saw that you joined The Grove, which immediately ticked off flags in my head, like, The Grove, you mean, David Sibbet, The Grove? And sure enough, it is. For those who don't know The Grove and David Sibbet are legendary, I guess in the work that they've done in the visual thinking field. Probably a lot of what you count on as normal and routine was pioneered by David and his company back in the '70s, maybe even earlier. Welcome to the show. I would love to hear more about what you're doing there, and you can jump right into your origin story if you like as well. JO: Sure. Yeah, I'm now a senior consultant at The Grove, and I began this career in this field as a graphic recorder, so starting analog on Phone Core, you know, at an innovation consultancy in Florida 10 years ago. That's where I first discovered The Grove. My boss pulled out a Vision Journey template, and I was like, "Wow, really? We're just gonna draw a picture of an arrow going into the sun, and it can be that simple," you know? Of course, it's not that simple. There's a lot more that goes into visual consulting, but now, after having spent five years there and three years leading a consultancy of my own and now landing at The Grove, it does feel a little bit like `coming full circle. Yeah, it's just an honor and a privilege to be able to work alongside the team there at The Grove, so yeah. I'm thrilled. MR: I bet. That's really great. That's great. I think it's really exciting to see that they're continuing to invest in young talent to come in and lead the organization so they can continue to be relevant in business and in the world. That's cool. JO: Yeah. If you could consider of 48 to be young, then they continue to invest in young talent. Yeah, absolutely. MR: Well, I mean, you know, David is getting up there now. I think he's close to or is maybe is retired now. I'm not sure. JO: He is retired. Yeah, he just turned 80 and he's retiring. Gisela Wendling, his partner is now the new CEO of The Grove, and yeah, she is my boss. David's not my boss, so. MR: Wow. Wow. JO: Yeah. MR: Wow. That's pretty cool. Well, I'd love to— JO: We're definitely leading into like Grove 2.0 territory. MR: That's really cool. JO: You know, it's definitely, this is what the Grove looks like post David Sibbet, so it's an exciting time. And, you know, Gisela's got a real bent toward organizational development and that level of strategic consulting, so it's gonna be really fun to see what the organization can do and deliver in the future. MR: I think it's really important to reinvent yourself regularly. I know that that's been the case in my career, and I suspect individually it's important, but also organizationally important to reinvent. Which is speaks to what Gisela's thoughts around probably reinvention of the organization that you provide a different perspective in the company that you work with. That's pretty cool. JO: Yeah. MR: Well, I would love to hear how you got to this place. Maybe going back even to when you were a little kid, did you always draw, was that something that was part of you, or like, how did all that work? JO: I always drew, yeah, like sharks and dragons, sharks and dragons over and over and over. I drew comic books and I would staple them together, you know? MR: Me too. JO: I mean, that was my happy place. You know, I was at the dining table with a big stack of blank paper and pens and a stapler, and that was where I would draw books. It's funny, flashback to, what was it five years ago? When I discovered a Mural as a visual whiteboarding tool. It had been in our tech stack at Ridge for so long that we were like, "Well, we have these things like Proposify and whatever, and this thing called Mural, but we never used it." But then the pandemic hit and we were like, "Let's take this Mural thing off the shelf and see what it does 'cause we've gotta convert everything we do in person to virtual." When I opened up my first Mural and discovered it was just a blank, basically a big limitless sheet of paper, I was like, "What can I do with this?" Then I had the light bulb, "Oh, what can't I do with this?" Right? I started kind of gamifying our workshops and my background in graphic design and art direction kinda came back online. I was like, "Okay, this is like being able to design the room and decide where the furniture is and what's on the walls all at the same time." Creating those virtual experiences with whiteboarding tools, it took me right back to my happy place at the dining table with the blank paper and pens. So, Mural's been a real godsend and a real area that I specialize into. I'd say the origin story though, for me, feels more like there is this moment that I feel defines me as a facilitator, and that is trying to bring two sides together all the time. Bring different perspectives in alignment. That was my birthday party, I was probably eight or nine, and I had just moved to yet another small town in Midwest, Wisconsin, and thought, you know, I got these four or five good friends of mine, guys I used to hang out with. And now these new four or five guys that I'm hanging out with, and man, I'd love to hang out with 'em together on my birthday. I thought this would be a brilliant idea. I thought it'd be great. I thought they'd get along like Gangbusters. We get a Holiday Inn and got all these kids in one or two rooms, and it didn't go as planned, you know? I don't know if they were vying for my attention or loyalty, or if it was the competitor cities or schools that was at play, and people were acting out. I remember getting outta the elevator and one of my friends went like this and smacked my grandmother in the face. There was just stuff happening. It was like making the whole experience was going sour. Then we got in the pool, there was a swimming pool inside, and we'd ordered Domino's Pizza, and we had two liters of Pepsi and there were arcade games along the side, just behind like a little half wall centipede with a little track ball. I would jump in the pool and swim for a while, and I'd hop out and I'd grab a piece of pizza and I'd drink some Pepsi, and then I'd run over to the arcade game and I'd play Centipede, and it would electrocute me, I'd get these electric shocks from playing the game, and then I'd jump back in the pool, and then I'd hop back out and I played the video game, get electrocuted again. It was just this happy moment that I remember when all the guys were happy and finally getting along. I think that kind of defines the first time I successfully facilitated a group experience was this. Maybe it was the electricity powering me up in that moment from the video game, but I feel like that's the superhero origin story for me. MR: Was there something you did to bridge that gap between those two groups of friends? Was there some moment where you gave them an ultimatum or did you just work it? JO: No, I stopped trying and I started swimming. That's all it. MR: This is what we do in our group. We swim and we play games, and we eat pizza and drink Pepsi. JO: Yeah, and get electrocuted. MR: That's what we do, so if you wanna do that, you do what I do. JO: Yeah. MR: Interesting. Interesting. That could be a really interesting modern party for adults, right? Where you recreate that moment, maybe on your 50th birthday or something like that, with all those same friends. JO: Oh, that'd be a trip. Yeah. **MR: Interesting. Where did it go from there? You're now 8, 9, 10-years -old. What are the threads that you saw going through grade school and high school and college? Did you see those threads? Did you go in different directions? JO: Well, yeah, there are eras. There are these defining eras of my life. The first one was musical. I started a band, was writing my own songs for years and finally in high school, got people that would agree to play music with me. We'd play at the cool bars and clubs in Tampa Bay at the time, Brass Mug and Gasoline Alley. Green Day had just played at the Brass Mug, and we were freaking out like, "We're playing at the Brass Mug." That first era of songwriter, producer, band leader, front person, that whole thing, that skillset of writing songs, assembling them into an album, recording them in a studio, packaging them, presenting them, designing an experience, performing that experience, that whole thing was the first era. Then the second one was marketing. The first job that I had that then lasted over a decade was a marketing director at an alternative news weekly in the southeast, so this creative loafing, we were in Atlanta, Charlotte Tampa, Sarasota. I was a Marketing Director for the Tampa Paper for 10 years. That was where I learned to really get innovative and throw things at the wall to see if they would stick. This is right at the time in journalism, when journalism was being changed by things like Craigslist that was gutting the classified section and citizen journalists and blogging, which was changing the way stories were reported on and all kinds of things. Disruption was happening in journalism at the time. Being from the music scene, I was allowed to engage a local music store as a sponsor and build out our archive room with all the back catalog in there as a recording studio. We would bring artists in, and people to perform, and do interviews in this really cool room, free NPRs tiny desk. This was way before—I mean, the sales team didn't know how to sell or position this thing at all. They were like, "What's Jordan doing playing In the Closet again? You know, like, they didn't have any idea what we were doing, but we were able to innovate content in a way that yeah, really set everybody up for the future and where journalism ended up going. That was a fun time to be in that as a career, but then when I got out of that, marketing had changed. Marketing was all sales and ClickFunnels, and I didn't wanna do marketing anymore. That's when I found graphic recording and began my visual consulting journey. MR: What was it like early in those days? Was it hard to convince people or your firm to do that or was the firm pretty well established and knew how to sell, I guess, the services and the solutions that you're really offering? Was it tougher at the beginning? JO: You mean the first consultancy I landed? MR: Yeah. Yeah. JO: No, we didn't have any trouble in the beginning. I mean, my CEO who was doing most of the sales. She was just a compelling personality and magnetic and was really charismatic and really plugged in socially and a great networker and a great attractor, you know? Just did a great job of selling the work. We had a niche, we focused on innovation training. We were setting up internal innovation teams to do large scale change work in their organizations, but also write their internal innovation playbook along the way. We focused on one thing and got clear on what we were doing, and that made it easier. MR: That's interesting. What kind of things did you learn as you shifted? Were there, I suspect that both the music and marketing experiences probably bled or fed the work you did as a graphic recorder and graphic facilitator. Can you make any of those connections? Are there threads there that you could connect? JO: Yeah. I mean, I think it really is art as a community builder, that's been the thread, the common theme throughout all of it. The other big era in my life that I haven't mentioned was that of spiritual community. I was a prayer chaplain for a few years at a Unity church, which is like a new age, new thought, metaphysical spiritual community. It was too metaphysical Christianity for me and I wanted something that was more pluralistic and interfaith so I left the path of ordination through Unity and started my own just completely independent thing called the Integral Church, which was based on integral spirituality and integral philosophy. Carl Young and Joseph Campbell, and Alan Watson, you name it, like, "Where can we pull spiritual wisdom from?" And we really did a lot of creativity in that group, community as well. Like making art, mask making, music making, dance movement, you name it. That was a real central part. It was also really inspired by Matthew Fox's work around creation and spirituality which is really creativity centric. So, I would say art as community builder is the theme that runs through all of this. Whether it's graphic facilitation or spiritual community or marketing or music and performance. All of it is building a community of people who speak a common language and are leaning in the same direction towards some dream or vision, you know. MR: I suppose that's important too, if you're doing any kind of creative work, artistic work, ideally you want people to experience it, right. The reason you're doing it partially is for you. You do it 'cause you wanna do it, but you do like having someone experience it and the idea that someone else could have something turned on in them because of what you experience is really cool. As an example, I just wrote an article, I dunno, a couple weeks ago, where I talk about what it was like—I came up in the days when everything was analog, there were no computers, and I talked about what it was like to do graphic design in those days, the yield days, right? JO: Yeah. MR: In doing paste-ups and all this kind of stuff. Ultimately, I wrote it for myself 'cause it felt like it had to come out, it wouldn't let me let go of it until I finished, even though it was frustrating through much of the process, but I ultimately got there. The discussions I've had with other people of my generation who remember that, for them it brought to life, "Oh, that's right. I forgot about all that. What kind of markers did you use?" There's all this discussion that happened because we could connect at some level, and additionally it probably shares with other people who didn't experience that, like, "Wow, that's what it was. There was some cool things about that." You appreciated when that gave you context for when the desktop design revolution came, you could see why it took off because if you knew how it used to be done, the shift, it is sort of like, we're talking about AI now, right? What does that mean? It's real early, we can't imagine where it's gonna go. Just like we couldn't graphic-design in the desktop publishing. Ultimately, I did it for myself, but there was also, I wanted an audience to appreciate it, whoever that audience was. That seems like a thread that I sense in the work that you do. JO: Oh, yeah. I mean, you're speaking my language now, man. It's like my very first job in media was at Black and White Arts and entertainment—Arts and Fashion tabloid in Florida. It was like offset, we modeled it after Women's Wear Daily, which was a fashion magazine. And so, it was this really clean designed social paper. And I used Aldus PageMaker. MR: Oh yeah. JO: I had a wax roller, and I would wax the flats and I would print the pages out or sections of the pages out, wax them down, wax on the ads separately, and lay the page out on a cardboard flat, and then stack those flats in a cardboard box, drive that box to the printer 30 miles south where they would shoot 'em with a big camera. Nowadays, I tell my kids this is what I did, and they're like—part of 'em is like, "Why the hell did you do that?" Then the other part they're like, yeah, it's like a zine, you know? And I'm like, well, I guess. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's like, if you still do collage or any kind of mixed media work, that hasn't changed at all. MR: Right. You could still do that work. Yeah. JO: But it's like the transition from like VHS and DVDs to all the content being in the cloud. Gone was the file cabinet full of 8 by 10 glossies that we had to scan and cut every time. Now, it was just a folder on the computer full of JPEGs, you know? So it was just a matter of storage and access and that was the big paradigm shift. MR: Yeah. It's funny how you look back and you see, like, you think AI is an example. I mean, there's all kinds of things you could point to. Oh, it's this radical disruptive thing and it's gonna be so different. I'm not sure that it is. It's just like if you look back in time, all these disruptions kind of follow a similar pattern. Now some had more influence than others based on the context they come into. I think there's gonna be probably a—the optimistic version of AI is probably not gonna be quite as great as we thought it was, but it's not gonna be as bad either. Probably it's gonna settle in at some middle point where we just—like now it's this big deal, but at some point, we're gonna like, oh yeah, of course, yeah, there's AI someplace in here. I think it does this thing for me. It's just the way I work and AI just does this, I guess. That's probably what it's gonna be like in 10 years. We won't even know where the AI is. Where now it’s like AI's getting slapped on everything because it's the new thing, right? JO: Yeah, and I feel like we're the Lars Ulrich of the Napser, you know, like, "You're gonna take my job away. You're taking money outta my pocket." It's like, yeah, we're gonna get to a point where we're we have other revenue streams that are feeding the artists in a different way. Granted, I get it that the modern 360 deal and the modern music scene is a mess. It's not what it was, but it's like, it's what it is now. There's more kids playing music now and it's like, that's how are you gonna measure success? A millionaire cash and a check or the amount of kids making music, you know? MR: Right. Or the influence you have. I've stumbled on this guy, his name is TribalNeed. It's a guy in Berlin. He goes into squares in Berlin, and he is got this old analog, I don't even know what it is, it's keyboard and he's got all these things hooked up to it. He's got a microphone and a keyboard and speakers. I guess he plugs in, it has a battery. He goes to these squares in Berlin and all over the world, and he just sits down on a blanket and he starts doing analog techno. He starts playing something and he's got looping and he does stuff with his voice and he taps a drum. You got these Germans, within half an hour, dancing and in this trance state, right. Is that successful? I think so, because he's influencing all those people in that square. All their kids are there, their awareness and they're watching this guy make this, right. We think about even the work we do, if it's digital, there can be a danger where our customers don't realize like, yeah, we worked really hard to do that, but they don't see it. They just see the output. So to see someone sitting in a square with this analog equipment, like, okay, he's a musician and he is producing something for me that will probably never be exactly repeated the same way. It moves in this direction of experience, which I think we, as coming back to visual thinking, I think there's opportunities where we can do the same thing with the skills we have. Even maybe integrating in the AI in some way. I don't know how that's gonna fit in for us. Maybe it will help us in our research phase that nobody sees that is annoying to do and takes time and maybe that gets compressed. I dunno. JO: Yeah. Even if it was just—I mean, I've done graphic recording in Tandem before, and that just means somebody's doing the capture and somebody's maybe coming behind and doing color fill or doing like little call outs or whatever or just doing capture on stickies and then slapping it up and then the person captures that. You know, you're just working as a tag team. Even if there was an AI version of the capture of that, spit me, you know, generate highlights from the last two minutes of the discussion. And then I'm gonna translate those visually, right? MR: Yes. JO: I'm gonna do the thing the robot can't do but leverage the strength of what the robot can do to make what I'm doing stronger, faster, more efficient. What'll take the stress and the cortisol levels down in my body so I can be more present with the iconography, whatever it is. Right. How do you partner with that bot to be stronger and better together? MR: Yeah. Because I mean, the bot might show you five things. It's like, oh, based on what I'm hearing of those five things, that one thing is most important. JO: There's the one Yeah, exactly. MR: Grab it and stick it in or recreate it based on that reference. So I think there's opportunities. Where that's gonna go, I dunno. Now we've completely veered off your origin story, but I think, it seems like we're at the place where you are, right? You're talking about The Grove, which is this, institution, I guess if you could even call it that in the visual thinking space, thinking about reimagining what kind of service you provide, maybe even the customers that you're gonna reach out to in a different way. Maybe talk a little bit about that, what you see now that you've been here while you haven't been there very long, what do you think the vision is, or at least that you can share? JO: Well, I can tell you what I've been brought on to help with, and that's to really help deliver and train around the team performance system. That is the Drexler Sibbet model of team performance, which is a seven-stage model of team development that's based on Arthur Young's theory of process. It's a beautiful, elegant, yet simple model. That's a system that's been used at Mars and Wells Fargo and Humana and Nike and Apple everywhere. Part of what I'm doing in my role is to continue to certify people in that model, whether you're a workshop graduate or a enterprise practitioner or a survey administrator. There's just a lot in the team performance ecosystem, and so, I've been brought in to help with that. Then there's another product called strategic visioning, which is basically the Grove's Visual strategic planning system. That instead of a V it's a figure eight, but it's also based on past, present, future and the four flows and going back before you can go forward and moving that kind of vertical continuum of ultimate freedom to ultimate constraint, from vision and strategy down to implementation and operations. That's another product that has a lot of offerings around, again, training, certifications, workshops, things like that. There's also just kind of one-off consulting work that may or may not be based on either of those models. There's also the fundamentals of how to be a graphic facilitator. Then there's the one-off of, you know, we need somebody to come and help us facilitate a session. We're working on some kind of org change or goal setting or, you know, sometimes it's just like a customer experience journey, whatever they need. So it's real similar to the work I was already doing, but at the heart of it is the products offerings and services that the legacy offerings that the Grove already has in place. MR: That's really fascinating. I hadn't realized how extensive, how broad the offerings were. I see what's going on. I'm on the mailing list, so I see things, but it was pretty interesting to hear it in that concise way. The idea of team dynamics is really fascinating because I think there is a real challenge, right? With we see the pandemic and how that's caused both hybrid teams and remote work. That has to be a challenge that companies are facing, right? They have to deal with these things. And how do we make our teams work regardless of the medium, right? Whether you're in person or not, or maybe it's a mix, right? That's gotta be a challenge that they face. So it seems well timed in that regard. JO: Yeah. Yeah, hybrid is the bane of my existence right now. MR: I think it's challenging for a lot of people. I know I've gone to my office usually once a week on a Wednesday. I used to go on a Monday, and I bailed on that because in Milwaukee, in the downtown area, nobody's there on Monday because of hybrid. They hit the middle of the week, so Mondays and Fridays are tougher. Actually, if you want to go Monday and Friday, that might be the day to get work done 'cause nobody will bother you and there's nobody around, right? So you could strategically use that. But it's an interesting dynamic that we— JO: For me as a facilitator, it's just easier if we just pick one, you know? I don't care if you're a hybrid team, but spend the money to bring everybody into a room and let's be there and feel the chemistry and the energy together and read the body language and feel the intention of each other or let's do it remotely and we'll use Zoom and we'll use Mural or we'll use Teams or whatever. This attempt to include everyone, even if we're half there and half out, it's never been successful to me, you know? And it's never felt like those people are really there with us. The most successful we've had has had a co-facilitator facilitate with those virtual participants. You've got some stuff going secondhand to them, and then maybe they're in a breakout of their own, and then that person will report out for them, but that then they're not in the room and it's like, you're still only hearing from one person, and it's not an elegant solution. So there's just no replacement for getting people in the room and being able to lean back in your chair and whisper behind somebody, which that's the speed of life, that's the speed of business, that's the speed at which these meetings need to happen. To me, it's still important to get people in the room for the important ones. MR: That feels ideal, yeah. I think like you do all remote if for some reason you're spread across the world. JO: Yeah. Sure. MR: Maybe in that case you just bite the bullet and bring everybody to one place that's central, right, and take that opportunity to connect people together. That's ultimately the, the point of much of this either teams or a strategic visioning, right? JO: Yeah. MR: You want people in the room represented so you get the full picture 'cause otherwise you could produce something that doesn't include somebody, and then you end up having to tear it up and do something else in the future if you don't get it right the first time as much as you can, right. Interesting. Well, this is feels like a good time to shift to tools. We haven't talked a lot about your specific practice, but I suspect you still do analog work as well as digital. You mentioned Mural. I would love to hear— JO: I don't, surprisingly. MR: Really. JO: I mean, sometimes, if I'm in the room and we're doing some graphic facilitation, I mean, you can see behind me, I'm still testing big Neuland markers. I mean, I still use markers on posters or boards. But I'm not myself doing the analog graphic recording or sketchnoting you might say, that I was doing at Ridge. At Ridge we had a team of like six graphic recorders that were doing this work. I would train them and work alongside them, but I eventually just kind of got out of that work and did more of the facilitation and the consulting and the coaching. MR: Got it. JO: I do in a pinch when it's just me in the room and somebody makes a joke about the organization is a sleeping giant or whatever, the membership of the organization is a sleeping giant, I might run to the wall with a marker and draw a giant laying down with Zs coming outta his mouth. It's just in me. I cannot do it, you know? MR: Yeah, exactly. What about you personally? Is there, when you process information, like you're thinking and brainstorming and things, is there anything you do there that might be analog? Are you pretty much focused on—using tools you're like Mural to do that work? Where do you do that work now? JO: Yeah. Mural, I mean, it's just my comfort zone. It's where I have a little like design shop if I'm working on concepts or process maps. I've got a project board that's just like task to-do list kind of things. If I'm taking notes in a meeting, I'm usually the one to say, "Hold on one second, let me create a Mural real quick." And starting to put stickies on and sharing my screen or inviting people into it. It's just become the place I lean to work visually. MR: Sort of a good center place. JO: Yeah. MR: Do you make use of any of the—I believe it's Mural, the one or Miro, the one that has the iPad app. I think it's Miro. Have you used any of the drawing capabilities of a tool with an iPad Pro? Is that something that's possible? JO: Yeah, yeah. The Mural has an okay—and I love Mural, but it has an okay drawing, you know, it has like maybe two or three different pen tips and that's about it, you know but you can draw on the mural and then that drawing becomes an object that you can move around. We've had graphic recorders in the Mural with us, drawing directly on the Mural and annotating if you would, but iconizing stuff and visually commenting on what's happening during the workshop. But for the most part, if there's a graphic record that needs to exist as a document, that is a takeaway, we just have them sharing their screen and doing a graphic recording in Procreate on Zoom, so you gotta look at Zoom to see the graphic recording and look at the Mural to do the work. MR: I see. Switch a little bit. Okay. JO: Yeah. MR: It sounds like maybe I'll just open it up to whatever tools you find interesting right now. You talked about Mural, so obviously that would be one. What are some other tools that you like? They don't have to necessarily be pens or pencils or notebooks. Sounds like you're not using that anyway or maybe you are, I don't know, but. JO: Yeah, I don't know. God, that's a good question. Mural virtually. I mean, the Neuland markers are still the go-to. I've got these cuddies I carry them, you know, everywhere I go. I will tell you a hack I found recently. This is a little case for electronic devices. You're supposed to put your cables and your chargers and your whatever, your iPad or whatever in it, but really this thing is great for—is to hold markers and tools. And then in the bottom is all my tape and my tennis ball that I usually use as a teaching tool. Like all that stuff is in the bottom half of it. The device tote is my latest favorite tool 'cause it's carrying stuff. I used to carry it around in a little like cardboard box, and now it's like in a nice little thing with a handle on it. MR: We'll have to hit you up for a link to the one that you like and share it for those who are curious about those objects and then they can filter what makes sense for them. It's kind of nice to have a go-bag, right. You can just have it all ready to go and grab and go. JO: Yeah, and I've seen people use travel shower totes too, where you would hang it on your shower head. You know, those things that kind of fold down vertically. MR: Yeah. JO: That same thing. MR: You can be creative in the tool that you're using to carry your tools. JO: Yeah. MR: I suspect you might take that to a meeting and maybe you don't touch it all. Maybe you spend your whole time in Mural, but maybe that's the meeting where the sleeping giant isn't announced. You can grab your marker outta your go-bag and go over and visualize it on a wall, right? JO: I have a chime like a bell in there too, with a little mallet that if people need to stop the breakouts or become present again, I hit it and it cuts through all the noise, you know, yeah. MR: Wow. That'd be interesting to hear what you use for that. We'll follow up in the show notes for any of these tools. JO: Yeah, cool. MR: We'll share 'cause they could be useful. I never thought about having a little bell like that. JO: Yeah. MR: That'd be nice. JO: Yeah, and there's these too, which are the, you like the fries are up kind of bell. MR: Oh, yeah. Yeah. JO: But the one I have is long and cylindrical. It's like, you can get it at any like Sam Ash guitar center or music store kind of thing, and it's only about five inches long and it's really just cuts through and has a nice sustain and everybody just quiets down. MR: Gets to their attention. Is there a certain note that seems to work best or is it just [crosstalk 33:55]. JO: No, I don't even know what. Well, and the thing with chimes is like, they're not really tonal instruments. Same with like symbols on a drum set. They're kind of like all tones and frequencies at once. They're not really keyed in that way, so I wouldn't be able to tell you what key it's in. MR: Okay. Nor does it matter, right. It's just that object. Interesting. Any other tools that you can think of as you're starting to scratch through the corners of your mind here? JO: Well, SessionLab. I mean, shout out to SessionLab. MR: What do they do? JO: They're a website or an app I guess you would call it nowadays where you plan your agenda. For those of us who have had to like do them by hand or in a table or spreadsheet, every time a chunk in your agenda, a block in your agenda goes from 20 minutes to 45 minutes, you've gotta redo the fricking math from that point down, all kinds of things fall through the cracks and sometimes you make mistakes. This is an app that's block-based and you just tell it what block you wanna bring in. It's a report out, it's a Q & A, we're having break here, it's lunch here, we're doing this activity here. You set the times and then it adds up your total. You can export or print different views or versions of the agenda detailed or abbreviated. It's just a really great tool. They've got a little community. I say little, it's huge community around the tool that is always sharing best practices as well. That'd be a good tool for people to know about. MR: Yeah. That's even if, let's say you're a graphical recorder, sketchnoter, and you're responsible, you could build your own schedule to know, like for different reasons. Like, where can I sneak outta this thing if I have to go to the bathroom or whatever. There's ways to use it in multiple ways. JO: Yeah. I always call that meeting with the client, the content mapping where it's like, okay, you have these panels or these whatever pieces of content or right on top of each other. When is the graphic recorder going to the bathroom? When are they eating? You know, is this the time where we maybe talk about having a second graphic recorder on site if you want all of these things captured, you know? MR: Yep. JO: But that content mapping meeting in my mind is where yeah, you would pull up an agenda and say, okay, this is happening at such and such a time. And they usually provide something to you as the client does, but it's usually, yeah, again, a table in Word and it's cumbersome and it's, you know. MR: That could be nice too, even if you worked with that customer as an interactive tool where you're actually building it with them and say, "Okay, well, if we do this, like, okay, if they were to go the bathroom? Oh, okay, we can steal some from the next session. You can come in 'cause we're gonna do introductions, so you got five minutes." That gives you this way of working together to kind of nail down how things will go. And then they get a copy, right, so they know too. JO: Yep. MR: That's pretty fascinating. We'll definitely get some links for you all so you can check these things out and as much as we can. Joran, can we talk a little bit about tips now? I'd love to hear at least three. You can go beyond three if you like. And I frame it as someone, as a visual thinker that are listening to the show, watching the show and maybe they feel like they're in a rut, they just need a little bit of encouragement or a different way of looking at things. What would be some tips you might share with that person? JO: Lemme step away for just one second. I'll be right back. MR: Okay. All right. JO: Okay. The tips I will share, the three tips that come to mind first are from this book that I wrote with my wife and it's called Visionary Leadership. It's three steps for any leader who feels like they are stuck or at a crossroads or experiencing pushback or conflict or just something's happening with them. Based on all the interviews we'd done and all the consulting work we'd done, it felt to us like there were these three things that if leaders did this, they could break through those crossroads’ moments. The first step was to own the problem. Whatever is happening around you, it's sometimes easy to point your finger and deflect and blame and do all these things that aren't really taking responsibility for the things you can control, you know? Owning the problem is step one. Step two is to then break the big thing 'cause It always feels like a big thing. It always feels like a big rock, a boulder, an impasse. Break that big thing into smaller things. We compare that to, if you had an organizing project or you were cleaning out a closet, you'd basically pull everything out and you'd start to chunk it. Like, here's certain types of things, here's categories of things. I'm gonna get rid of these, and these are maybes, whatever, right? But you break the big monster Yeti of a thing down into smaller, digestible pieces, right? That could be just on paper, that could be in Mural, that could be physically, you know, organizing the work doesn't matter, but you gotta break it down into smaller chunks. Then that third step, and this is I think some of the best leaders I've worked with have the hardest time with this. The third step is ask for help. I think a lot of the times we want to do it. We have something to prove. We feel like we're leading by example, by, you know, taking the work back away from somebody and doing it ourselves. We think we're showing them how that's done. We're showing them how to take work away from somebody and take more back on our plate. That's what we're modeling in that moment. The asking for help piece is huge for, you know, not only scaling yourself and in a fast-moving complex, chaotic environment, but also kind of to keep you sane and centered and healthy in the midst of all of that. So yeah, own the problem, break the big thing into small things, and then ask for help. MR: Now those are three. Oh man, I love that I could apply that to my own life, like right now. JO: Yeah. MR: That's pretty great. I love it. JO: The other reason I ran to my bookshelf was, 'cause I don't know if you've seen this, this is my latest book, Facilitation. Let me just real quick find the page that you are on. MR: Oh, wow. JO: Let's see here. Yeah, we've got a whole section called MVGD. It's Minimum Viable Graphic Design. MR: Oh, nice. JO: It's the basics that any facilitator will need to know about working visually, right. We take Brandy Agerbeck's idea of like layers and levels, right. Things like that. You are the first section here in your seven types of sketchnoting composition. MR: Oh, yeah. JO: We just want to give you a little shout out here. MR: Oh, thank you. That's really cool. I'm very honored. That's pretty amazing. JO: So hopefully we've been pointing some people your way too. MR: Well, that's good. That's what I like about this community is it seems to me at the years that I've been in it, it's very much a everybody wins kind of community. JO: Yeah. MR: People wanna help each other, people wanna do things together, and they celebrate each other's wins. That's something else I've noticed. It's less of a, "Oh, you won, so I lose," you know, zero-sum game. It's more of a growth mindset. Everybody wins together. You know, every time you win, it makes it easier for me to win in the future, right? JO: Yeah. MR: I feel like that's true throughout the community and in all the cases that I've gotten run across it. I just wanna thank you for the work you're doing now with The Grove and that team, but also the work that you've done in the past and all the influence you've had that make my life easier. Thank you for doing that work. I appreciate it. JO: Yeah. Thanks, Mike. MR: This is where we wrap up the show. What would be the best places for people to find out about you? I suspect the Grove would be one place. I don't know, off the top of my head, what that URL is, but I'd love to hear your other places too. JO: Well, now it's, yeah, thegrove.com. You can find me there. My email address is Joran_oppelt@thegrove.com, and I can provide that to you. You can feel free to reach out to me anytime in the notes. Of course, there's books. I've written books visual, meetings, field Guide and Visionary Leadership, and this new one on facilitation. Of course, the Grove has a wealth of books out there. There's the visual series on Wiley, on visual leaders, visual teams, visual consulting all kinds of amazing books on graphic facilitation. Gisela, our new CEO just published a brand-new book called The Liminal Pathways Study. This is all about organizational change and how to navigate the complexities of change. MR: Which I think we're all dealing with right now. If anybody's listening and there's some way things are changing, we just touched on AI and how that's probably gonna change things, but there's all kinds of other change that we deal with and we will continue to deal with. It's part of being alive, I think, right, so. JO: Yeah. It's not going away. MR: It's really cool. I know that you're also on LinkedIn. Are there any other places where people might follow the stuff that you do and the things you share? JO: No, I'm on LinkedIn a lot. It's one of the tabs that stays open, so I would partly invite people to connect with me on LinkedIn. I mean, it's pretty clear if you're a spammer and trying to train people on how to sell or make videos. It's pretty clear the people I don't accept friend requests from, but I accept most friend requests, so please connect with me on LinkedIn. Yeah, absolutely. MR: Great. That sounds good. Well, for anyone who's listening or watching, that's another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Till the next episode, talk to you soon. | |||
| 19 Oct 2020 | Nadine Rossa - SE08 / EP05 | 00:39:18 | |
In this episode, I talk with Berlin-based sketchnoter, author, illustrator Nadine Rossa. Hear how she got into visualization, how she wrote her books, and the excitement she has around online teaching and some of the opportunities and challenges it presents. SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Paperlike, a screen protector for the iPad that makes drawing with the Apple Pencil feel like paper. Paperlike’s Nanodot technology offers the paper-like friction you want with the clearer screen visibility you need. This new surface even improves drawing precision — and reduces arm fatigue. It’s the closest you’ll get to paper on a digital screen. Buy yours today! https://paperlike.com/sketchnotearmy RUNNING ORDER
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TOOLSAmazon affiliate links below support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
3 TIPS
CREDITS
SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 13 Dec 2022 | Season 12: All The Tips - S12/E11 | 00:54:47 | |
In this final episode of The Sketchnote Army Podcast season 12, we’ve gathered all the tips from 9 fantastic visual thinkers to inspire you! Presented by The Sketchnote Handbook’s 10th BirthdaySave 50% when you buy any two of the The Sketchnote Handbook, The Sketchnote Workbook, or The Sketchnote Handbook Video together with discount code HAPPY10. For details on the offer, visit: Offer ends December 31, 2022. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by: Concepts: an infinite, flexible creative tool for all your good ideas. Available on iOS, Windows and Android. The new Concepts 6 for iOS has exciting new features, including a modernized canvas interface, a freshly structured, easier to use gallery that integrates with the iOS Files app, and RGB and HSL color options added to its already extensive Copic color palettes. Concept’s infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Draw and take notes with liquid pens, markers and brushes in your favorite colors. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size — with simple gestures. Drag+drop images onto the canvas, and use layers and grids to organize your creative space. When you’re ready to share, export straight to your friends or team. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
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1. Hermen’s Tips
2. Tanvi’s Tips
3. Jude’s Tips
4. Natalia’s Tips
5. David’s Tips
6. Kate’s Tips
7. Tim’s Tips
8. Raven’s Tips
9. Sathya’s Tips
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 04 Mar 2020 | Season Seven Teaser - SE07 / EP00 | 00:02:32 | |
It’s time for season 7 of the Sketchnote Army Podcast! We’re excited to start this season off with sketchnoter Tanja Wehr, followed each week by guests Manuel Herrera, Paula Fagerberg, Jason Barron, Dulce Pedroso, Yuri Malishenko, and Ole Qvist-Sørensen. We begin the fun next week Wednesday, March 11, 2020. CREDITS
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| 06 Dec 2021 | All The Tips! Final episode of season 10 - SE10/EP14 | 00:59:23 | |
In this final episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast for season 10, Alec and Mike have gathered all the tips: from this season and have added an uplifting music soundtrack to them. We hope this unique listening experience will inspire you as you reflect on this year and prepare for the new year ahead. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Draw and take notes with liquid pens, markers and brushes in your favorite Copic designer colors. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. Drag and drop images onto the canvas, and use layers and grids to organize your creative space. When you’re ready to share, export straight to your friends or team. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
Tips: Alejo Porras
Tips: Eleanor Beer
Tips: Dario Paniagua
Tips: Rasagy Sharma
Tips: Josie Dee
Tips: Matt Ragland
Tips: Sheena Mays
Tips: Ben Norris
Tips: Mister Maikel
Tips: Mina Legend
Tips: Marc Gutman
Tips: Anh Bui
Credits
Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 01 Mar 2022 | Andy McNally visualizes technology - SE11/EP03 | 00:58:24 | |
In this episode, Andy McNally, an illustrator, designer, and sketchnoter, shares how he creates sketchnotes of Apple technology events, has added digital to his analog sketchnoting toolset and more! Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
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ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 06 Sep 2021 | Alejo Porras navigates change - SE10 / EP01 | 00:57:28 | |
We kick off season 10 with talented illustrator and creative leader, Alejo Porras! Alejo is creative lead at The Sketch Effect, a company that offers graphic recording and explainer videos. He’s a trained and talented illustrator and also works as an artist coach, helping artists reclaim their joy in art. He shares stories about his work at The Sketch Effect, including how they navigated through the pandemic business shift and more. You’re really going to love this episode! Sponsored by the Sketchnote IdeabookThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by The Sketchnote Ideabook, the sketchbook designed for sketchnoters. Equipped with a no-bleed, now show through paper, The Sketchnote Ideabook can take almost any marker or pen you can throw at it. Save 15% on your entire order of Sketchnote Ideabooks and Autoquill Pen sets at the Airship Store when you use code IDEABOOK15 through December 31, 2021. To claim your 15% off visit airship.store today! Running Order
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3 Tips
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify,Amazon Music or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 30 Mar 2020 | Jason Barron - SE07 / EP04 | 00:58:17 | |
Need a break from COVID-19 news? Check out our collection of 50+ Sketchnote Army Podcast interviews from 6 seasons at: https://sketchnotearmy.com/podcast Feeling isolated? Join our Sketchnote Army Slack community to chat with other visual thinkers about sketchnotes, visual thinking, or whatever is on your mind. Join the Sketchnote Army Slack for free at: https://sketchnotearmy.com/slack RUNNING ORDER
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SUPPORT THE PODCASTBrought to you by The Sketchnote Ideabook — the sketchbook designed for sketchnoters. Equipped with a no-bleed, no show-through paper, it can take almost any pen or marker you can throw at it. SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes | |||
| 22 Feb 2022 | Renée Stevens visualizes in virtual reality - SE11/EP02 | 01:02:05 | |
In this episode, hear from Renée Stevens an interactive and immersive designer, educator, author, and speaker focused on innovative to use Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Extended Reality (XR). Renée shares how sketchnoters and visual thinkers are needed to contribute their creative vision and skills in these mixed reality spaces and talks about her new book, Designing Immersive 3D Experiences. We have a special 35% off discount on Renee’s book, just for listeners through March 31, 2022! Use code STEVENS during checkout to apply this discount* at Peachpit.com: https://www.peachpit.com/design3d Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
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ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
Tips
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! * Discount code STEVENS confers a 35% discount off the list price of ISBN of 9780137282838 or 9780137282876 when purchased on peachpit.com. Apply code during checkout to receive savings. Discount not valid on Book + eBook "Best Value" bundles, non-discountable products, Safari Books Online/O'Reilly Online Learning, or any title featured as eBook Deal of the Week. Discount code may not be combined with any other offer and is not redeemable for cash. Discount offer expires 11:59 p.m. EDT March 31, 2022. Offer subject to change. | |||
| 02 Jan 2025 | All The Tips Season 16 | 00:46:56 | |
In this final episode of The Sketchnote Army Podcast season 16, we’ve compiled the tips from nine great visual thinkers into a single episode. We hope these tips inspire and encourage you on your visual thinking journey. Happy New Year! Tips from: Emily Mills, Joran Oppelt, Kelvy Bird, Javier Navarro, Blanche Ellis, Peter Durand, James Durno, Diana Ayoub, and Justin Hamacher. Sponsored by ConceptsThe Concepts Sketchnote Workshop video — a unique, FREE, hands-on workshop video where I show you how I use the Concepts app to create sketchnotes on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. In this one-hour, eighteen-minute video, I cover:
The workshop video includes answers to common questions about Concepts. Watch the workshop video for FREE at: Be sure to download the Concepts app at concepts.app and follow along with me during the workshop! Buy me a coffee!If you enjoy this episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, you can buy me a coffee at https://sketchnotearmy.com/buymeacoffee Running Order
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1. Emily’s Tips
2. Joran’s Tips
3. Kelvy’s Tips
4. Javier’s Tips
5. Blanche’s Tips
6. Peter’s Tips
7. James’ Tips
8. Diana’s Tips
9. Justin’s Tips
Credits
Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 30 May 2023 | Season 13: All The Tips - S13/E11 | 00:50:35 | |
In this final episode of The Sketchnote Army Podcast season 13, we’ve gathered all the tips from 9 fantastic visual thinkers to inspire you! Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings — any time you like. You can nudge the curve of a line, swap out one brush for another, or change stroke thickness and color at any stage of your drawing — saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need — large or small. Never worry about fuzzy sketchnotes again. Concepts is a powerful, flexible tool that’s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
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Katrin’s Tips
Filippo’s Tips
Eric’s Tips
Maria’s Tips
Julia’s Tips
Ty’s Tips
Mawusi’s Tips
Edmund’s Tips
Natalie’s Tips
Credits
Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 22 Nov 2021 | Marc Gutman tells stories with words and images - SE10/EP12 | 00:42:29 | |
In this episode, branding and storytelling expert Marc Gutman shares how he uses images and words together to tell the stories of brands for entrepreneurs and businesses. Learn about Marc’s unique visual task list and how sketchnotes have integrated themselves into his life, in this interesting interview. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Draw and take notes with liquid pens, markers and brushes in your favorite Copic designer colors. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. Drag and drop images onto the canvas, and use layers and grids to organize your creative space. When you’re ready to share, export straight to your friends or team. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
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ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
Tips
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 16 Mar 2020 | Manuel Herrera - SE07 / EP02 | 01:13:14 | |
Need a break from COVID-19 news? Check out our collection of 50+ Sketchnote Army Podcast interviews from 6 seasons at: https://sketchnotearmy.com/podcast Feeling isolated? Join our Sketchnote Army Slack community to chat with other visual thinkers about sketchnotes, visual thinking, or whatever is on your mind. Join the Sketchnote Army Slack for free at: https://sketchnotearmy.com/slack RUNNING ORDER
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3 TIPS
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SUPPORT THE PODCASTBrought to you by The Sketchnote Ideabook — the sketchbook designed for sketchnoters. Equipped with a no-bleed, no show-through paper, it can take almost any pen or marker you can throw at it. SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes | |||
| 12 Nov 2024 | Kelvy Bird grounds her work in sustainability with a distinctively creative flair - S16/E03 | 00:52:42 | |
In this episode, Kelvy Bird shares how her artistic background influences her visual approach to scribing ideas and how it becomes a powerful tool for facilitating deeper understanding within groups. Sponsored by ConceptsThe Concepts Sketchnote Workshop video — a unique, FREE, hands-on workshop video where I show you how I use the Concepts app to create sketchnotes on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. In this one-hour, eighteen-minute video, I cover:
The workshop video includes answers to common questions about Concepts. Watch the workshop video for FREE at: Be sure to download the Concepts app at concepts.app and follow along with me during the workshop! Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Tips
Credits
Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with Kelvy Bird. Kelvy, it's so good to have you on the show. Kelvy Bird: Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor and a pleasure. MR: We've been trying to get you on—I think I've been trying to get you on, you may not know this, but for the last couple of seasons and it finally worked out, so I'm excited. You do some really cool stuff. You're really unique, I think, in the visual thinking space with the way you approach things and the way you think about things. That's my perspective, is you're really unique. And so, I wanted to bring that to other visual thinkers who may not know who you are, right. It's such a wide community that there's little pools and spaces where you may not know things, so it's always good to reveal that, to make you known. I'll just turn it over to you. Let's first hear in your own words, who you are and what you do. KB: Well, first, thanks so much. When you said I'm unique, I had a little bit of like, "I am?" That made me happy. Anyone who's watching the video, I have to apologize for my particularly summer feral 90-degree look, but for those of you listening, I hope you'll be spared. I'm Kelvy Bird. I grew up in the Hudson Valley in New York State. Just about an hour North of New York City. My whole family was from the city originally. I grew up near the woods. And a big part of my origin story, those people who do know me have probably heard this many times, is that my parents split up when I was three, and so I grew up going between households, between rule sets, between cultures. They were very culturally—well, I mean, not so much culturally different, but there were a lot of differences between the households at that time in the '70s. Both homes were in the woods, and so I have a strong continuity with nature. Also, that led to my probably keen sense of observation. When I'm in spaces I'm always kind of at the edge of a system before engaging with a system just from a very early childhood, you know, a safety mechanism of— MR: It's what you operated then? KB: Yeah. I mean, it's like, you wanna know that—if you're unsure of environments, you know, you kind of check it out before you really immerse yourself in them. That's really lent itself—well, I probably became ascribed in some ways because I have that natural inclination to observe. I studied art and art history at Cornell in Upstate New York and graduated, I think like '88 or '89 in the Reagan years when there was like, you know, "What could you do as an artist?" You could work in a gallery or a museum to feed your art or you could live in the woods and make candles. What I had planned to do was, I envisioned a really quiet slow life for myself. Which has been very much the opposite of what unfolded. MR: Of course. KB: At some point, so I was making art and then I was out living out in the Bay Area after school and I was doing collaborative art, and then I met some people who—Chris Allen, who was working with Matt—well, was working with an on the board for Matt and Gale Taylor and of MG Taylor. And so, he kind of got me connected into their work, and that was my introduction to scribing. I was working with them for a few years before I really started to be comfortable scribing. I did a lot of sketch noting, I guess now we would call it, thanks to you. MR: Yeah. KB: And you know, time to really learn my visual vocabulary and my method of processing information. Then learn from people like Christopher Fuller and Brian Kaufman. Francis Gillard was in the system then and alongside Peter Durand. Peter and I kind of came up together in that space. MR: Okay. KB: Yeah. MR: He's one of the other guests in this season. KB: Oh, cool. MR: So we can hear his story. You're gonna be in with him. I'm kinda— KB: There's—oh, go ahead. MR: I was gonna say, as I understand, I know I don't have a cursory overview of scribing in that space. My story was I started discovered the Sketchnoting 'cause it just made sense. Then as I got into it and started practicing it, stumbled into the whole scribing community. Like, "Wow, these are my people. I mean, they work on a large scale, but like the principles are the same." And as I understood over time, it seemed like there were two schools that you tended to come from. It was either MG Taylor or David Sibbet's space. That felt like the two, maybe there were more, I don't know, maybe there's some different ones in Europe, but in the U.S., those tended to be the two schools that you would come from. I think like Brandy Agerbeck, I think she's MG Taylor trained, right? KB: Yes. Yeah. MR: They're probably similar, but I'm sure there's probably cultural differences that are a little different. KB: The contemporary scribing with David Sibbet—I've written a little bit about the history, and I did some research for my book. Somewhere out there, there's a history and other people have expanded on it and brought it to be more current, but it originated in the '70s in the Bay Area with David and his colleagues. Then Matt and Gail were also working with this method in Boulder, Colorado with Jim Shannon, who was one of the first people to scribe in their context. The biggest difference I think is David and The Grove use visuals as part of a facilitative. They facilitate while they're drawing. I think now it's become maybe people who learn from them more graphic—I shouldn't speak for this because I don't really know, more like graphic recording. Then with MG Taylor, the scribing was embedded in a range of facilitated methods like music and documentation, the environment, how the chairs were set, how the room was set, how walls were set up for people. The whole scribing was one element of many domains of facilitation. MR: Almost thought of as an experience, like a whole experience and considered that way. KB: Yeah, yeah. It was a more immersive maybe. Also, it wasn't just the scribe scribing, the participants of these large-scale design shops, they're called, are all scribing. People while they're working, are using big walls to draw on. It's very social in that regard where it's immersive and social. Yeah, I should just say—one thing I didn't mention and is just after working with MG Taylor, I was living in the Cambridge area in Massachusetts and got involved in dialogue and systems thinking and human dynamics and the presencing work. And so, my scribing has taken a particular turn in that direction because of my experience post MG Taylor, you know, it all sort of weaves in, but yeah. MR: Interesting. Well, so you're a scribe and you do scribing for companies mainly, I would assume, and organizations? KB: No, mostly I'm scribing for—oh, sorry, you were still going with your question. MR: No, no. I'd love to hear who do you scribe for? Who are your main customers? KB: Now since the pandemic and even before, I was trying to focus more in educational context and less business. I haven't scribed in a lot of big business context for a while. Maybe a few companies here and there, but not like back, you know, 20 years ago. Then with the pandemic, even before I realized that the impact of flying on me as an individual and my own body system, and then also just what it was doing, contributing to for the environment and others, I didn't wanna fly, so I'm not flying anymore. That has really shifted work. So I've gotten more digital and clients have included. I go on site for stuff in Boston. I do a lot of work with MIT and I've been teaching locally at some of the various schools like Babson and Handover. I have a project at UMass here close to where I live and the Presencing Institute still, of course, you know, I work with them when we're doing things on site, but it's really reduced. Oh, I've done a lot of work with the UN in the past year or two, it's been all digital. MR: Interesting. That's an interesting shift because I think there was a huge shift and the pandemic forced it on, I think on a lot of people. It sounded like you were a little bit ahead of that curve. You were already edging toward doing digital stuff before you had to. KB: Not really. I picked it up pretty much—like the first week of the pandemic I was delivering a program. Then I quickly knew though, we all are gonna need to pivot. You know, it's like sometimes you can choose how you wanna evolve your practice and sometimes conditions evolve your practice for you. That was a case in point where you know, you could kind of figure out how to go with what was called for, what was needed. No, I was scrambling to figure it out. I had done some digital stuff before, but not live-scribing more like motion graphics. MR: Yeah. You hadn't fully invested in it as a primary way that you've worked, right. That would be not the case. I think a lot of people in the space, visual thinking space ran into the same thing. A lot of the interviews that I did around that time and after that time talked about the scramble. I talked with William at Sketch Effect and he talked about they were fortunate. They had been seeing digital and had been experimenting, but again, they had not committed fully to it. They were doing physical in-person stuff. They continue to do that. It'd be really interesting now that the pandemic's, you know, a couple years, you know, since it peaked, like how has that impacted these companies? What percentage of digital versus in-person? In some ways, to do a corollary, digital is a little bit like CDs or streaming. Then, you know, the scribing on a board is sort of like a vinyl record, right? It's like this thing or something, in some senses or in some perspectives. I don't deal with those two together much. I do most of my stuff digitally, but personally, I do you know, analog things. So it would be interesting to hear from—maybe do some polling of companies that do this. Like, "Hey, what is the percentage, what is the feeling in the space? What do companies and educators—and what do they want? What do they think they want?" Maybe that's— KB: Yeah, I think that business—sorry to keep cutting you off. MR: No, it's okay. KB: I'm very excited to talk, so I have to like— MR: Yeah, let's do it. KB: - talk, minimize my excitement here. From what I've observed, businesses where the digital scribing might be projected large in a conference with big effect, that seems to be really popular. When you have big audiences and you have a big screen, that really maximizes the show. MR: You can do a lot more than you can with just the board in front, which may be for the people in a large space, hard to see, right? KB: Yeah, certainly. I haven't worked like that in a while. What I tend to do are more immersive environments. I really like this feeling—my art was always like that. My fine art was more really geared towards deep reflection. If you go into a room of Roth Goetz, like at the Tate, modern or some space where you have—or like Donald Judd has a space out in like Marfa out in Texas. When you're in an environment that has art set up in a way where you go in and you are with the vibration of the work, that's a completely different experience than if you have one image on a wall that's projecting out or you go into a cathedral, right, you go into a space of mosaics or something that's been created to envelop you in vibration in some way. That's a very different experience than one, you know, board at the front of a room. I've done, you know, all different types of setups and I'm not dissing or I'm not throwing anything—I'm not putting anything down because they all have their place. I tend to prefer when you can create some resonance, like you create some sort of vibrational, a tonal thing that people aren't even aware of. It's just more of a feeling where the drawings help the sense of containment and safety in a space. Like a nest, you know, the drawings become a nest. When I work with executive education at MIT, for example, they have a few rooms with gyrus boards that go all the way around the room. And so, if I'm working for five days, the whole room will get filled by the end. The group that's in there has—there's a different type of pattern recognition that can also happen because you're looking at—if you were to have your drawings—a lot of them up from similar content or over the same set of time. You know, things come out on one session that then might repeat the third or the fourth or the 10th session. And so, you can create a visual icons or things that start to signal similar themes across time. That's really interesting to me. I'm trying to seek out those types of situations like where you're working with one client over time and the images become part of the cultural memory and knowledge, and yeah, does that make sense? MR: Yeah. That's totally fascinating. It made me think of, for a while, I worked for a company, Johnson Controls, a big multinational in Milwaukee, and they redesigned our studio space for our design space. They had this one corner by the front door, they didn't know what to do with it. It's like this long, narrow space, so they just put a door on it and then put whiteboards in there. I remember I had a big project that I was trying to sort out with lots of information, and that was my room. I claimed it. I had stuff everywhere on the walls. I had stuff on the whiteboards, stuff stuck on the walls. I always liked going in there 'cause I could go in there, I would immediately get up to speed with where things were and I would start saying like, "Oh, there's a connection between that wall and that wall." I would start seeing all this because it was concentrated in this space. I would tell people, "I'm gonna go live in my work for a little while." It was a pretty fascinating experience to be there, so. KB: That's so cool. Yeah, that's exactly what I mean, where, because you—and this goes, where talking earlier about slow and fast thinking. This goes back to helping the cognitive overload that we have in the world. If you're helping people slow their minds down, you present data back, so you scribe in a way that reflects the data and the information in a session back with the specific words and you know, particular images that might represent things, but then you're also setting it up for a slower absorption rate, you know, over a duration when the mind is not as pressed. Like in your room, you find other types of connections that you might not have made. I mean, for me, that kind of gets into the mystery of life, you know, where you're setting it up for discovery and curiosity. Instead of providing all the answers, you're creating some conditions for the unknown to live still. MR: Yeah, you're organizing the information to some degree, but you're not making the necessarily connections. You allow the observer to make those connections, it sounds like. You mentioned at the outset—we said that you're a little different. I think you're unique in the way that you approach things, which is I think awesome. I would love to hear, you talked about this difference when you went to Massachusetts that you started thinking about different stuff. Talk a little bit about that origin. How did that change what you had learned? Or maybe it didn't change it, but maybe it built on top of it, and how did that change your perspective and the work that you did? That's really interesting to me. KB: Yeah, that's a great question. Thanks for asking it. When I started—oh, I came to Massachusetts to help open one of the MG Taylor environments in Cambridge. While we were in that space, Peter Senge and the Society for Organizational Learning came in to see if they could use the space. Then another company called DialogOS came in to see if they could use the space because everyone in the area was looking for a large-scale space to bring people together. Ultimately, it didn't work out because the space was too open. The walls were movable, but they didn't offer enough containment and enough sense of— MR: Separation in some way, maybe KB: Separation and like quiet. There wasn't enough quiet in it. That didn't work out. But then I met these people and got really interested, what is this dialogue stuff? And so, I started working more in that area. What interested me and still does, is it comes back to this mystery. When you have a circle of people and they're sitting together intentionally with a certain awareness or mindfulness about being together and slowing down together, what comes through, that's the dialogue or, you know, that's the word coming through the space. That was really interesting to me. It probably links back to going between my parents. You know, I haven't made this connection, but the space between the ride between my mom and my dad’s was about 10 minutes or 15 minutes. Packing up from one household, going in the car with my brother, just like looking at the side icicles on big sheets of rock or moss along the way or vines or things, that was the, in-between space where I'd be able to—like a suspended reality. I used to love to fly for the same reason. Well, I never loved to fly, but once I was in an airplane and you're in that suspended state—I always like that suspended state. In the dialogue work, you are in a suspended state, so you're consciously letting other people speak and waiting until it's your place almost or when you're called to enter into the space. When the word is meant to come through you is when you speak. And so, I immersed myself there. I thought it was really interesting. I basically did whatever they needed. I took notes for years, texting notes I didn't draw. Then I started scribing in those environments, and then I started integrating. Then I realized like, oh, the drawings can represent this emergence space which is very different than the drawings representing the words. So it's both. Like the drawings representing the words and the drawings being like an echo in the pond. Like you throw a rock into a pond and there's the immediate plunk, and then you kind of have the ripples out and I don't know, maybe something like that. Then when I got involved in the presencing work, it furthered that that kind of inquiry that I had, my own personal inquiry about how we can just be together in different ways. You know, like as human beings. How can we be together as human beings in a way that feels whole and not fragmented, and how can drawings support that kind of wholeness? I think that's been my inquiry all along. MR: That's pretty cool. Talk a little bit more about presencing. I don't know if I have a good definition of it. I'd love to hear your definition. KB: The work was founded by Otto Scharmer and Katherine Kaufer and others, Arawana Hayashi. Dana Cunningham is another one who was in at the very beginning. Otto basically had done the research and the presence thing is when you bring the emergent future into the current moment, so you slow down enough to sense into what wants to unfold. The word itself is a combination of presence and sensing. MR: Oh, okay. Got it. Got it. KB: So you're intentionally reflecting in a way to allow the future to find you. I don't know, sounds kind of weird, but rather than projecting into the future and saying—like, letting it come from just your head of, I think this is a good idea. I'd like to build this building and then you just kind of— MR: Make it happen. KB: - make it happen, and you kind of force your way through which is our western, northwestern society for, you know, since the industrial revolution and before colonization. It's a process of being found, you know, rather than, yeah. MR: A little bit of like a—I sense emergence maybe as part of it. Like letting things emerge. KB: Definitely. MR: Like, I think about, it was, yeah, Stephen King. He talks about in on writing book that he would write these novels and he said he was more like an archeologist than a writer. He would have his brush and he would be brushing off bones, and the bones would tell him things. He said that he would write and he wanted to go in one direction with a character, and the character would just refuse and would go in a different direction and tell him what the character wanted to be or do. He thought that was really weird. It reminds me of this emerging—you're immersing yourself in this story, which in his case, he's making it up, right? He's setting the conditions for it to be this situation. He's setting out to say, I'm going to write a story about these seven characters, and here's the story arc, but like within that, these characters sort of tell him what they wanna be, that is really crazy. But it sounds a little bit like what you're describing in some ways. KB: Yeah. It sounds very parallel. You're listening. It involves really deep listening to what is what you're bringing forward. So when I'm drawing or scribing, a lot of things now—cooking, you know, you feel into what it is you're trying to create and you listen to it to say like, does it need more salt or does it need more red or does it need a big line here or does it need more containment? You know, so you're getting your cues from the thing and your observation or your ability to attend to what is coming to life as you're with it is what sets apart the quality of the life that's coming to form, if that makes sense. MR: Makes me think too about being in a state of flow or being in the zone. KB: Yes. MR: But, you know, getting in that, like—I've been in the flow state many times, and sometimes I'm able to get myself into it with conditions that I set music or a coffee or whatever. It's a great space to be, you know, time just disappears which is strange, but kind of cool. So, I mean, it sounds like all these things overlap a little bit. KB: Definitely, definitely. MR: The other thing I thought about when you talked about your trips between your parents was Dave Gray talks a lot. He wrote a book about liminal thinking. Talks about liminal spaces, so like the spaces in between. Even, you know, going back, we talked about, you know chatting a little bit about AI, our whole way we're thinking about doing things is changing. We're sort of in an, in-between state right now, I feel like, in these years, right? Going from, like, you might even say like pre pandemic to post pandemic is that we're in a transitional state. I don't where we're gonna end up or have we ended up somewhere? I don't know. It feels like there's always a transition happening, but it feels more transitional than normal. KB: Oh, definitely. I really agree with you there. I love Dave's work, by the way. I'm such a huge fan of his and I know that book. I think I've already mentioned, you know, the mystery, like preserving space is a mystery of a liminal space is beautiful because in some ways, for me, it's so hard sometimes to be in because things aren't clear and I want things to be clear. I want to know when the plumber will show up or I want to know what the weather will be so I can dress appropriately and not get caught in the rain like today. But then learning to be the acceptance, you know, just learning to be with what is, my gosh, that's like my lifetime's work. That liminal space, it can be so beautiful if we're not caught in anxiety and over—I should say, if I'm not caught in anxiety and overwhelmed by it, it can be a really mysterious and delightful place, but it's easy to get really it gets thick too, right? It can get a little bit, like, you just want clarity. MR: Yeah. Yeah. After a while, "Okay, I've had enough of this." KB: You just wanna wake up and get vertical? MR: No more liminal. Let's do something, you know? KB: Yeah. MR: I'm curious, this is a really outta left-field question, but when did you start drawing? Did you draw since you were a little girl? Like, you talked about these trips between like what was the spark for your drawing and how did that manifest over time? Obviously, you're still doing it, so, but you even talked about like when you met these people in Cambridge that you were taking tech notes, right? KB: Yeah. MR: So the visuals were not coming out. I've had those moments in my life as well, so, but it still seems like an anchor or a touchstone or something that keeps bringing you back to it. Talk to me about as a little girl drawing and then how that has changed over your life. KB: I always drew from, as long as I can remember. I mean, I grew up—my formative years were the '70s, and so in the early '70s we drew, we just did everything by hand. There was, obviously no computers or anything like that. Actually, my dad was a computer programmer, and so I did grow up drawing on punch cards. He'd bring home punch cards from coding. My early sketchbooks were punch cards. But yeah, it was always a sense-making method for me before even knowing—you know, obviously, at 10 years old or four years old, there's not like the word sense-making, but I was always drawing and you know, I was like, doodling like little shapes or things. We had lots of coloring books and both of my parents were pretty creative. My whole family's pretty creative, so we were surrounded by a lot of art and art was really valued which I think is something that I wish I saw more of in the world. Like every creative, anything that my brother and I did was celebrated and, you know, put up over the previous thing on the refrigerator. We were very encouraged in that way. So I never had, what a lot of people say is like, I drew and somebody made fun of it, and then it shut down the drawing and there was a lot of embarrassment about like, oh, I can't draw a certain thing. I never had that because my parents were so supportive of whatever we wanted to make. But also, you know, they were working all the time. They weren't around that much. So my brother and I would just go out in the woods and play with sticks and just be creative in lots of ways, but I always drew. Then going to art school, I drew in high school and— MR: Furthered it. Yeah. KB: Yeah. I went on an art program in high school with Parsons, with school of design. I was really, really privileged to have my creative thread supported my whole youth basically. MR: Yeah, because that— KB: What you asked, I got so enthusiastic about my parents there. MR: Yeah. No, I think that's all part of it. I'm just I always wanna dig into the motivations or the origins of how you ended up in a place, and it seems like there's so many people who start out drawing and then for whatever reason, there's all kinds of theories about why it happens. I'm sure it's varied for every person, but they kinda lose it, right? I experience it when I teach sketchnoting, the basics. My approach is to bring it back to like shapes, as simple as like five shapes so that you can just get into it without feeling overwhelmed. Then a lot of people that do it, they feel like they haven't drawn since they were maybe in middle school or something like that. KB: Yeah. I have to say, we talked earlier about maybe you're gonna ask a question around like if you get stuck, what people do when they get stuck, but I would just say for me, drawing there's nothing more freeing than working with my hands. Probably because it quiets my mind. I have a very rambling, anxious mind and overactive, you know, in good ways too, but when I draw, it calms my mind down. It could be with a stick in dirt or it could be, you know, then in elementary school we probably had different assignments, like, you know, making books for your parents at Thanksgiving. Then in college it was all the things you were supposed to do like painting and printmaking. Then scribing, it was also, scribing is just another sort of form. In essence, you're free when you draw. And I feel free and I do stuff that like nobody has to look at. That's the best is when you relieve the pressure of anybody— MR: Yeah, just do it for you. KB: - being it, just do it and make something on the inside visible on the outside for yourself. MR: Yeah. Well, it's been fun to hear and get more of a sense of where you came from and what you're into. You definitely have a different perspective about this stuff which I think is needed. A lot of times I think, you know, because its business oriented very often 'cause they pay the bills, there tends to be—you know, and I'm a practical functional person a lot because my dad was very practical, so I've always got this art side and the practical side, and they tend to merge in the middle, but there tends to be like this pressure to perform, deliver, and meet deadline. You know, and we have to, that's just part of life. KB: Yep. MR: I think it's really important what you're talking about here is to not forget to set aside time or space to just let things emerge and reveal to you. Really interesting. If you have anything, you can give us a show note for how to maybe get into this on a website or something, or a video that might help somebody who's curious about this to maybe experiment with that. That would be really interesting. We could talk about that after we're done with the show and put the link in so people could see what you're talking about and maybe give it a try. KB: Yeah, but I'll also say I'm also incredibly practical, so I haven't been talking about that, but you know, I've had my own business search for whatever, 30 years and I love spreadsheets. Anybody who knows me or has done any program with me, I'm like a spreadsheet maniac. I really like attention to detail and I really like numbers. I really like knowing that I can pay for things and they go hand in hand. My structured self of me supports the creative side. MR: Interesting. KB: And the creative side couldn't exist without the structure. If I were just like all, you know, emergent blah, blah, blah, you know, it would be ungrounded. It would be like this airy sort of like swirly thing. No, you need all the elements, so. MR: You need both sides. Yeah. KB: I've got boulders in my life too. I've got things holding me down and I appreciate them a lot. Yeah. MR: That's cool. That's good. Well— KB: So, yeah. MR: - it feels odd just to make a shift, a transition, but I'm really curious, what are the tools that you like to use? We talk a lot about tools, not so much the tools make a difference, but sometimes they do. Sometimes it's nice to have things or maybe they're—you know, my dad always taught me, "There's the right tool for the job. Don't be afraid to buy good quality tools because, you know, in five years you're gonna need to take off that whatever, and you're gonna need that tool." Right. So in my mind, I've got this idea of quality tools because the last thing you need is the marker or the whatever, failing at a critical moment, right? So you gotta get the good stuff that, you know, will be reliable. There's a reason why. So what are the tools that you like? Pens, paper, pen, computer software and things that help you. KB: I am right with you with tools. I love tools. I just restored an old chair from the '60s that I had. I could not find anybody to restore it and so I took it apart and I had to get all the glue off the little pegs. I got this like little file set and, you know, appreciated my teeny little files to file in the little grooves of those pegs. Yeah, I'm a big tool person too. In terms of supplies for our work, it's just been all these years of really refining what works. I don't have a massive amount of colors anymore. I have a very reliable toolkit for each surface. For dry erase, I have—I get all my inks from—I used to get them from Neuland, but now that I'm not flying, I can't really get them anymore, but I have a lot of—I mix my own colors also across all mediums. I've got a whole set of like chalk stuff for blackboards, dry erase, paper. Paper and foam board, not foam board eagle cell board, you know, that kind of slick rigid surface, but a sustainable version, not foam board. That's different than paper because paper has a life to it. Like this, you've drawn and it starts to—you know, it has humidity and it has other things going on, so I have a slightly different set for those. But yeah, I don't know, not getting into the details. You have to just find what works for you. I wouldn't suggest—I mean, the Neuland outliner ink is a total staple. I cannot work—that's a critical ink to have. I would pay anything to have that shipped to me, but I really lean towards what's sustainable. Now what I use or I get the—I don't have anything here, but I have the shells. I can't think of the brand. They're plastic shells that you can put—oh gosh, I can't think of my memory's going. But then I have the same shells for each ink, and then I get separate inks, and then I mix my own colors in those shells. I also have arthritis in my right hand so I had been wrapping all of my—I have like a wide marker with a raft, with like a grip so that my hand can hold a little more lightly, which I think contributes to— MR: You modified it. KB: Yeah, which I think contributes to the—a sense of flow is when you're not holding a pen so tightly. That's been a challenge with digital scribing. Like everybody I use procreate probably. The thing that I love about it are the layers, the colors. You know, using it in a way not to mimic what you can do by hand, but using it for its own—what you can only do with a digital medium. MR: Yeah, yeah. KB: That's something that I've been trying to experiment more with is what is each medium will lend itself to. You can do things on dry erase that you can't do on paper. Like certain textures, you know, putting something on and then using your hand to remove, but then you can't really blend colors on dry erase. MR: Yeah, there's limitations. KB: Yeah. Each have their pluses and minuses. For like large scale—another thing is I've been trying to be sensitive to the production of things. Like where am I getting my papers from? I haven't found a great paper source, but yeah, just trying to get things reduce shipping reduce waste, you know, only do things that can be recycled or erased and washed down. Just like minimizing footprint that is priority. That's kind of premium is just minimizing footprint beyond certain color or a certain brand or anything. MR: That's a consideration. Like circular economy. KB: Yeah. MR: This idea that— KB: Exactly. MR: It's got a plan. KB: Yeah, exactly. MR: Lifespan all the way from beginning to end and could be recycled in some form. Yeah. What about your personal—I'm guessing you maybe do like personnel books where you write in the journal and visualize, do you have a notebook— KB: Yeah, I should show you. I should show you—you're gonna be horrified. I've been journaling or doing like sketchbooks since I was probably 12, so I've got boxes and boxes, but at this point they're all—it's like this, but I write. It's like I write, so it's like, you know, I don't really— MR: It's a craft paper cover, flexible. It looks like one of those—maybe even like Moleskin I think makes sense, right? KB: It's Moleskin. Yeah, it's just like writing. And let's see if I have any drawings in here even. Yeah, I might have like little things. Sometimes like little symbols help get an idea across more than—but I've been using these for a long time and yeah, sometimes it's mixed. I aspire to do the whole sketchnoting thing. At some point, I will, because I think there's so much potential there, but yeah, they're not very organized. MR: Well, the great thing about sketch notes, the way I look at them as it's on a spectrum, right? You can have lots of writing and then just little images that help support that. That's one way or you can go full image with, you know, annotations at the other edge, so. KB: Yeah. Well, again, like I was talking about drawing being like a freeing art, writing is another freeing thing for me because—like, no one's gonna read these journals. MR: They're just for you. KB: Yeah, they're just for me. If I'm doing something for someone else, I'll tidy it up. Like, you know, it will be— MR: It's different requirements. KB: Yeah. yeah, I mean, if I'm taking notes for somebody else, I'd do it on my iPad at this point. MR: Your mind shift—you're in a different mind space when you're doing it for somebody else too. KB: Yeah. MR: If you're imagining who's the recipient, is this gonna help that recipient or not, and what's the most critical thing I can share with that person? Which I don't know necessarily. KB: Yeah. MR: Right. KB: But I have to say, like, one other thing is just, and I'm aware for you of the time and for people listening, but is I really do bounce between order and freeform. I'm in sort of like a meta trend of it now, of trying to be much more freeform in my life in general. Like, hence showing up like this today. But I've been ordered for a long time to be professional and have a business and, you know, do programs and get clients and have what I do, like look good and look professional, and it's been very tiring. I have to say it's been more exhausting than I realized. And so, I'm trying to balance that out with just more spaciousness, more gardening, more stuff like that doesn't have to do with work. That's like an age thing probably where I am in my career. If I had been more attentive to the extreme nature of our work earlier, I knew it was—I could keep up with the extremity of it, but traveling and being in different places away from home, hotels, whatever, all that stuff, different foods, there's a lot of rigor in that kind of work. If I had been more aware of balancing that along the way, I would have. MR: I mean, at the beginning it's exciting, right? It's part of the excitement of doing the work and at some point, it becomes a drag to a degree, right? I know that, you know, getting to the space where I'm doing the work is great, but like everything up to that point is like a struggle. And if you just have to do the struggle, right, you start to be more aware of the struggle, then it becomes less exciting in a way. I don't know. That's the way I would describe it. KB: I think it's been very exciting. More people are probably better at play. People with families have vacations built into their lives. I don't have a family, so I just worked all the time. It's on me, but if you don't have the structures of society kind of saying, "Okay, now it's summer, you should take time off." You forget. So I'm trying to remember all that now. MR: Trying to catch up, huh? KB: Relearn. I'm trying to catch up with all of you who know better. Yeah. MR: Interesting. Well, talking about guidance, let's jump into the question, the practical thing, and this is, give me three tips for someone who's listening, who's a visual thinker, whatever that means to them, who maybe is in a rut or just needs a little encouragement. What would be three things you might tell that person? KB: Yeah, so three tips. Coming back to the materials, I would say, change it up. Put yourself in a space where you can experiment. That would be one. Two would be, I guess just the theme of this whole conversation is—so one is experiment, two is mystery and beauty. Three—hmm, part of me wants to make it 10. Three, I guess it would have to be like, keep yourself healthy. Because if you wanna go full force and travel around the world and, you know, have that intensity, you need to have stamina for that and you need to look out for yourself physically and mentally. And if you choose to work locally, you know, in all ways, wherever, whatever medium you're using or wherever it is in the planet, looking out for our own health and wellbeing, mental and physical, and also that of our peers and our communities, I think is probably pretty key. Bodies age, you know, so take good care. Yeah. Experiment, mystery, care. MR: That sounds like a good combo. It's good trial [unintelligible 49:34]. KB: I should listen to my own advice. MR: Sounds good. Well, where Kelvy can we find you? What's the best place to find your work websites? I don't know how much social media you do, but. KB: I have basically stopped social media. I mean, I still have all my accounts, but I'm posting very little mainly because of AI. I'm trying to pay attention to what's right underfoot, basically. That's the real thing. I have my website, kelvybird.com. I wrote a book called Generative Scribing. If people wanna learn more about the interior—it's not at all a how-to-book-on. MR: Sounds philosophical to me. KB: Yeah, sorry about that. I think I froze, or I must have been talking—I was talking about getting off social media and trying to get more connected with what's right around me, and it froze. MR: I lost some of the— KB: Yeah, so my book— MR: I got like the first tip and then there was some breaks. KB: Oh, really? MR: Yeah. So for whatever reason, the network just was—I dunno if it's one of our side is a little bit flaky, so. KB: The first one was around experimenting. MR: Mm-hmm. KB: So just give yourself new tools, try new things, put yourself in new context, you know, be curious. The second was around mystery, like preserving the mystery of life and seeing beauty in things essentially. And the third was around self-care, mentally and physically 'cause the work takes a toll. MR: Got it. And then as far as the best place to find you, that would be kelvybird.com. KB: That would be my website, kelvybird.com. Also, I wrote a book, Generative Scribing. And so, if people wanna know more about the inner mechanics of my practice or generative scribing practice, they could go to the book. It has a lot of frameworks for dialogue and presencing and those types of things. Also, just talks about the model of practice that I use for my work. MR: So that would touch on, if someone, if you were listening about the presencing we had discussed before, that would be the place to go to go deeper on that book. KB: That would be a place that book that would intersect presencing with scribing and visual practice. If you wanna know more about presencing specifically, you could look for Otto Scharmer's work on Theory U. And there's a book, The Essentials of Theory U, that's a really good starting place. Then there's a book by Will Isaac’s on Dialogue, which I think is also pretty foundational to my practice. Yeah. MR: Interesting. You sort of taken these multiple worlds and blended them together in a way that made sense for you, sounds like in the book. KB: Yeah, probably it's my own—yes, in the book. It definitely is aimed to integrate the all the different pockets of work experience that I had had in practice. Yeah. MR: Oh, that's great. KB: It's very easy reading, I have to say. Each chapter's about two pages with pictures, so. MR: Excellent. Well, there you go. That sounds like a perfect visual thinker’s type of thing. Well, Kelvy, this has been so much fun to have you on the show and learn more about you and your history and how you think about things. Thanks so much for the work you've done and the impact you've had in the community and you continue to have. So thanks for being who you are. KB: Well, thank you for all that. And thank you for who you are because I'm just a huge fan of you and your work and all you've brought into the world and into our field of practice. So, right back at you. MR: Oh, thank you. That's really great. KB: Yeah. MR: Well, for everyone who's watching or listening, it's another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Until the next episode, talk to you soon. KB: Bye. | |||
| 27 Sep 2022 | Season 12 Teaser - S12/E00 | 00:01:43 | |
Hey, It’s Mike Rohde, and I’m here to announce season 12 of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is launching on Tuesday, October 4th, 2022. This season we’re featuring 9 amazing visual thinkers:
You are going to love every interview! Special thanks to our sponsors: Concepts, the infinite canvas sketching app and The Sketchnote Handbook’s 10th Birthday at Peachpit.com. Watch this space on Tuesday, October 4th for episode 1! | |||
| 21 Nov 2023 | Elizabeth Chesney uses visual thinking to help people, animals, and the planet - S14/E04 | 00:56:46 | |
In this episode, Elizabeth Chesney shares her approach to teaching design concepts coupled with handwritten notes to help her subjects understand how design concepts work and why they work. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with Elizabeth Chesney. Elizabeth, how are you doing today? Elizabeth Chesney: I'm good, I'm good. It's evening here in the UK, so it's quite relaxed and we've got a bank holiday, so it's even more relaxed. MR: Good, good, good. Well, you'll be laid back and ready to answer all kinds of questions and let us see inside you, the way you think. So I brought Elizabeth on because I follow her on Instagram. I don't know how we crossed paths, but I'm glad we did. And she does a lot of sketchnoting that she shares online, but also taking design concepts, which I really like. Her approach is taking these design concepts and then breaking them down with handwritten notes on top of them to help you understand how these design concepts work and why they work, which is really helpful education, especially for people who sort of sense something's going on, maybe they're not trained as a designer, but they sense something's going on and they're curious about why it works that way. And you sort of fill that gap, which I love that. I love education, I love that whole thing. So that is how we crossed paths. And I thought Elizabeth would be a great person because very recently, you were doing some sketching for a project, then it turned into a full-blown sketchnote. You shared video on Instagram. So maybe we can even talk about that project. And I thought this would be great to talk with her and see how sketchnoting fits into her everyday life, and the stuff she does. So, welcome. EC: Thank you for having me. MR: Yeah, you're welcome. So why don't you start by telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do. EC: That's great. So I am basically in England, despite my accent, I'm actually Scottish, so any of the British listeners are gonna be going, "No, doesn't sound right." But so I though mainly work from home. I am a freelance based marketing designer. I do two types of things. On the average day, I'm either building assets for commercial teams whether that's sort of layout design, landing pages, websites, and a lot of that is UX based as well. So I've kind of got UX interweaved quite a lot in the background. Very similar to yourself, Mike. It's kind of something I've grown into or using skills I've learned before and applying them in that way. And then the other part of me is actually working with seed-level startups, so people who have an idea but actually don't have anything behind them to help them with the funding. So actually, I build lightweight brands. I call them diet brands 'cause they're like mini logos and brand sheets rather than these big brand books. And then helping them with like a commercial slide deck to help with their sort of buy-in when they're presenting their idea. And then some flat user interface design concept. So they kind of got like, this is what we're looking to achieve. And I also work with 'em in a marketing sense of like, how's the best way to present that information? So they might talk to me for 10 minutes and I say, "Well, this is how you frame it, this is how you'd phrase it." And that's part because of the big marketing background, which we'll get into that I have. And so it's kind of like a unique sort of offering for these startups. And I've done a couple now and it really helps 'em look professional at that seed funding level. So I kind of do two arms, one of this sort of big marketing aspect with sort of SME, B2B companies, so you're sort of quite medium enterprise companies and then right at the start founders. So it's quite nice. I've got a mix that I work with. MR: And I suppose the ideal client would be someone that you helped at a seed stage who turns into the middle stage, right, where they grow, and then you can stay with them ideally, I suppose at some point in the future, right? EC: Yeah. Coincidentally, this is my anniversary today of when I decided to go freelance. MR: Really? EC: Yeah. So a year ago, last year is when I went, "I'm going to do freelance. I'm going to make this sort of decision. This is what I want to do. I wanna work in a sustainability climate action sort of sector as well." So purpose-driven businesses. So it's been really nice to sort of work with some of these seed founders who have got these ideas to try and help the planet or help people. And that's the thing, helping people, planet, or animals. That's kind of my three pockets. I'm quite happy at the minute that I'm working with a lot, which has actually enabled social connectivity. So actually, ironically from some tech issues we had at the start of this podcast, I'm working with one which has actually enable telecoms to more rural areas, so lightweight telecoms. So it's cheaper, it's quicker to put in. So giving a lot of rural areas in Scotland and Wales and Ireland, better access to the internet because the pandemic showed how just proportionate access to technology and internet was. And that's what one of these companies I'm working for at the minute, is doing is these startup telecom pools and cabinets to be able to be put in these places so everyone's got access to the same level of internet. So it's quite nice. It's quite nice to see sort of the different ways that these people are helping communities in their own way. MR: That's really cool. So you obviously, just been a year since you've gone independent. EC: Mm-hmm. MR: Talk a little bit about what got you to that point, what did you do before that, and a little bit of why you decided to go independent. That would be really interesting, especially I think about the audience that's listening here, a lot of times they do sketchnoting or visual thinking on the side or as a side thing at work. And there comes a point for some people that they wanna go independent. I know several people, so it might be helpful for them to hear your journey and your thinking and all that. EC: Yeah. Well, I would start my journey really, you know, 20 years ago now. Which makes me feel even older. I was like, oh, brilliant. [Unintelligible 05:56] for a minute. All right. Monty, come here. Sit. Sit. Wait. I don't know if somebody at my door next to -- so hold on. Wait. MR: Okay. We can cut this. EC: He's very agitated, which makes me think it's our door. Calming down. You are calming down. I know. It's making for interesting TV. MR: What kind of dog do you have? EC: He's a Golden Retriever. MR: Oh. EC: So he's a big loud dog, hence the noise. But I do have my bribery box, so he knows that when he gets a treat, he's quiet. So I told you it was gonna be that subtler. Good boy. Good boy. Right. I think that's it. I think they've gone one tea. Right. We're going through it all today. MR: Makes for a fun time. EC: Right. I'll start again. 20 years ago, making me feel old, I did a dual degree. It was design marketing, so it was about 70 percent design, 30 percent marketing, and it was design-focused as well for marketing. So packaging design, point of sale design, print design, very traditional design. Unfortunately, I am that old where, you know, websites really were just becoming a thing. You know, I went to uni when it was zip disks. That was the biggest thing that you could store everything on. And I remember thinking brilliant. And it was Yahoo search rather than Google search. I was very traditionally taught in design, so very much pen and paper. I think my entire first year was markers, pens, and fine liners. It wasn't digital. And then we moved into digital and the Mac labs and all that side of things. From university, I was very fortunate, got a job straight away into a marketing team doing design for the marketing team. Exactly what I did for about six years. And it was really interesting. You've got telling so much about marketing, it's so much about the inner workings of a business as well and how everything works and the commercial teams, sales guys, you know, all that side. Then lucky for everybody who's old enough to remember as well, then we had a financial crash in 2008 where especially in the UK, most people weren't wanting in-house designers, agencies weren't hiring. It wasn't seen as something people wanted. So I kind of, luckily enough having the degree I had, I flipped my degree. Basically, I flipped my career. I went from doing pretty much pure design with a bit of marketing. So, you know, I used to do marketing admin to started department marketing. So I went up in a journey in marketing. I quite rapidly went up to manager level, but I was very employable because I could do design and I could save companies thousands of pounds 'cause I could do everything they were paying somebody externally to do. Or at least I could take some of the load of that budget off. I think because of that, it meant I had a secure job, luckily. And when it got to about six years of doing that, so early 2010, '11, I was like, right, this is definitely the career path. So I kept going, kept doing the marketing management side, and went into digital marketing specifically to really upskilled in web design and really start to take, without knowing it, a UX approach to website design. I was always data-driven. I was always nerdy about where do people go, what journey did it go, what are they clicking on, and you know, speaking to users and all that side of things. And it got really interesting. But I was getting to a point in my career where, unless I went to the director level where you're just managing people a lot of the time and not doing the work, and I like doing the work. I like doing the job. I don't wanna manage people doing the job. I want to do the job. Because of the financial crash, people still weren't hiring in-house designers. So I decided to take quite a bold step and I decided to retrain as a teacher. So about 2014 '15, that was, I think it was, I retrained as a teacher. And a design teacher specifically. You know, I wasn't randomly gonna go and do geography. So went to do design and that's actually when I came across sketchnotes because I'd obviously gone from being hand drawn-taught, very traditional taught to then being thrust into pretty much computer-first design really. And always going to the computer first, it becomes habitual. And I suddenly realized how I'm gonna be teaching kids that some have never designed before. They may have done art at at primary school, so I always taught secondary school. So high school level. And it was like in America it would be like middle and you know, top high school. I realized I was gonna teach 'em these kids how to draw in terms of design versus art. And then I thought I needed also a way of me relearning how to teach them to design 'cause I can quite instinctively draw a box and I'll draw it in a particular way, but how do I communicate to them, how do you draw this box? How do we annotate? MR: Yeah, it's a process. EC: Yeah. How do we annotate it? And I think as you touched on at the start, I got so used to having to teach annotation side, tell you why this thing does this. And that's why I label a lot my drawings educate and saying this is why it does this and this is why this button does this or side of things now. But back then I was struggling. I was like, "How do I teach them this?" And the funny thing about learning to teach, they teach you how to teach not how to teach your subject in a way. It was quite like, "I'm gonna learn how to go back to basics to draw." And I just by randomness came across your book and I was like--and you know, it was one of those things you think, "I'm an experienced designer buying a book about drawing." And you just kind of think, "This doesn't seem right. But also, really right at the same time." You kind of go, it's like somebody buying me a coloring book. You're like really. So I got the book and then I just fell in love with the methodology more than anything 'cause It really works for me, the logical side, the iteration side. And I thought, this is perfect for teaching kids. It's perfect for actually getting me back into that traditional design, but more importantly, I was trying to find one so I could show you these traditional homework sheets of basically if you were a top end student, I'll give you the end picture, and they had to backwork it in the building blocks. And if they were a lesser able child or one that hadn't really experienced any type of design or drawing, I gave them like little shadow boxes. This is kind of how you build up. So there was like, you can really skill it for different skill sets, but it was also, I was using that principle of, right, well how do I do this? And getting the kids to break things down, it was like, "Look at that object, tell me what shapes it is." Or "Draw those shapes under paper," right. Now, we can combine those shapes under paper. And you could see some kids, their light bulb and their head go in. I never thought I could draw a camera. And then suddenly they just thought, oh, it's actually, I was saying it's a serial box. So they could visualize a serial box with like a round circle in front. That's all it is. And it was interesting where you could just see the thought process of realizing it's not art and it's not got a standard, it's not one plus one equals math. There's a different approach to this. And then I really liked the methodology of sketch notes and it sort of kept it since then. And I would say the biggest decision I made in my life was training to teach. And I would say the hardest decision in my life was deciding not to continue. Because it was quite a big debate to admit saying this is not a route for me, 'cause sometimes you just think, "I've committed to this, now I'm just gonna have to stick with my guns." And I was like, "I've become one of those statistics where people go, ah, there's many teachers leaving in the first year of teaching. I'm now one of those statistics." Which I was like, well it's not really 101, but I'm one of them. MR: You have to be real, right? I suppose. EC: Yeah. And I was very conscious, and yourself and your listeners would be aware that if I was out of industry for a certain length of time, it would be very hard for me to get into a certain level in industry rather than start this at the bottom again. So I had to take quite a big bold step halfway through my first year and go, "This is not for me. At the end of this term, I'm going back into industry." So that's what I did. I then went back into industry working for a manufacturing company, and I love how things are made. So that really ignited my passion again, I think. In a way, it was like taking a career break that I think that teaching it was kind of proved to be that sort of, well year and a half of a career break in a weird way. But it realized that I like design. I do like the marketing aspect in a smaller portion, but people are investing now back into design back into branding, regaining the customer base. So I went back into design, which I really enjoyed. And I was focusing now on more sustainability as well. Sustainable business energy sector, which I work a lot in. And then action and climate change. So I've done quite a lot in sustainability. Learning a lot about that side as well. And I'm really focused on helping people with a purpose succeed. And I got to about four or five years into the company I was working for previously last year, and I sat there and thought, again, "I don't wanna go to this marketing director level." I was getting to the same problem that I was like, I just, I like doing the work and I like project managing, which is a bit weird when you think, I don't wanna be a marketing director, but I like managing project, but I don't wanna be that director level. It's no interest to me and not everybody's career path is to go to the top of the pyramid. There's a lot of us like to sit a couple of steps below that. And that's when I thought I'm gonna do freelance properly 'cause a lot of creatives, I've dabbled with it here and there and I've dipped my toe in and I thought actually -- and you know, it's a year ago to the day that sat, I remember on holiday went, "I think this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go freelance. I'm gonna work for purpose-driven companies. I'm gonna work for marketing teams because I know what assets I have to that team 'cause They understand marketing teams." So I come from a very practical approach to what they do. It's like, this is engaging content and it's practical and I talk marketing. I understand how they can get the budgets for what they need to do. I understand all that side. And then the other part of me was going, if I work on that, then a small part of me now is focused on working with seed founders to help their ideas within purpose-driven, whether it's in climate change or whether it's in animal welfare, whether it's telecoms to level up communities. Whether it's all that. And a lot of the time I'm working with them nearly at cost as well because I am a firm believer in giving back. And I know these ones are wanting to do good. They're not doing this to make money, they're doing -- but side note, some of these are not-for-profits anyway, the way they're setting themselves up. And the a quote that's always stood with me and random person that I heard it from, I don't if it's actually him originally, but it's the person I remember saying it, which is the rapper/singer Pitbull of all people. MR: Okay. Yeah. EC: And he said "Money does buy you happiness, you just have to give it away." And I thought it was a really interesting way of framing it. And I was like, so I worked with these smaller projects to try and give back in a different way. So enabling them to have something that will do good at the same time working for these bigger SME marketing teams. Yeah, so for nearly under a year now, I've been doing freelance. I attempted freelance at the started of the year. I have a contract job with a marketing company which secured my time because of the experience I've had. They were like, "Well, work for us for 20 hours a week." Anybody who's freelance will know, you know, any work 60 hours a week, I'm working for myself as well sort of thing. You know, there's no real, "Oh you only do 40 hours freelance." It's like, 'cause you're also marketing and accountant and HR and social media. MR: Right. Yeah. EC: Yeah. So you know, social media. Video grapher is my thing at the minute. So it's interesting because that journey, all those things I've gone through and experience I've had like the financial crash made me more prepared to be freelance 'cause I knew what I had to put in place to cope with those sort of events. The pandemic also had the same effect. I know what I need to do to that. So hopefully, this is now my journey. MR: Wow. That's really great. And I would think too, you know, going back to your education, you took that year and a half to kind of potentially switch careers and it was clear that it wasn't the direction. But I would think that that education on how to educate as much as, you know, it didn't fit for you to be a full-time thing, you found ways to integrate that. That's what I think attracted me when I was on Instagram. I see you doing that kind of work in the things you're doing. And I imagine for those seed-level startups, you're teaching them how to position themselves and how to reframe, what's the narrative, right? All those things are things you can teach out of your wealth of knowledge in marketing and then teach them in a way that fits their situation. Would that be a fair way to think of it? EC: Yeah. And myself, I'm a constant learner. Like one of the master classes was actually yours, an Interaction design foundation. So, you know, I've watched one of your master classes, I think I've done one of your other ones as well, one you did as an independent webinar. And I'm always wanting to learn and I always like to experience how other people teach as well thinking, oh, I like that or I like that -- MR: Me too. EC: -- that technique. And I'll be like, "Oh, I'll write that down." And funny enough, I have that in my sketch notes. I have my playbook, which we'll probably get to in terms of tips and that. And I write everything down and I'm always wanting to learn, even if it's subjects that are totally nothing to do because I've just got an interest in subject. I've done a criminology diploma because I was just really interested in like CSI and things. I was like, "I just wanna know more about this." I have no interest in doing it as a job, but I wanna learn more. And through my sort of social media and part of what I've tried to do with some of the, you know, here's the buttons and this is why this is this and like trying to break it down to people, like trying to understand to them why like three lines of text, why it should be orientated like this and the different shapes it should do. And it's really nice getting feedback from a couple of people who are actually junior marketing people that are following me going, "Oh that's just made it look so much better now my PowerPoint." And they're applying these little concepts in different ways and it was so nice. A woman was so proud, they sent me like, "Look at this. I took your ideas." And I didn't even know they were following me 'cause I've never interacted with them. But they were so tough just to say. And I was like, it's like that teaching approach. And I've got like a whole program of other things that it's just getting the time unfortunately of other things I wanna say like this way, this is why it looks better than this way. Both are fine, but you know, let's have a look, breakdown. So it's kind of that, it's so nice to see little things I've done just to try and like help and part that information, and as other people are sucking in, like the little silent people, they don't interact, they don't like your stuff. They don't comment on your stuff, but they're clearly just sit -- MR: You're having an influence for sure. Yeah. EC: Yeah. And I get like little messages going, "How did you edit that in?" Like they go, "Well how did you do that in Premiere Pro? And I'm like, "Well I didn't. I used such and such to start with. I said, "It's far easier, if you're not a pro with something like Premiere Pro or something like that." Goes, "Use Canva, use Adobe Express. Just use something that's easier." Sort of thing. Don't think you have to use its big software 'cause the big boys use it. You know what I mean? MR: Right. EC: And I always say, you know, "Use something that's just user-friendly." And that's the kind of the wins. MR: Yeah, exactly. I mean I use iMovie for almost everything, podcasts. I've used it for my teaching. So when I do my training and I cut it up and turn it into a video for sale, I'm just using iMovie. I mean, I've always believed this, like a lot of times we tend to think that we need the big software when simple software that's default on your machine is often more powerful than you realize because you just overlook it and that there's opportunities to really push it further than you really think it could push. EC: And I think like going back to my secondary school education, the most advanced type of art software was the equivalent of whatever paint was back then. MR: Yeah, exactly. EC: We were drawing everything in paint. And I have one of the first things I ever did upstairs, it was a little folder that my mom -- my mom was obviously like, look what she drew sort of thing. And you know, we just think that's cringe. "It's cringeworthy, mom. But now I'm 40, I think that's actually quite cool that I've got something that I did digital or way back when." And I remember looking at every time going, but on the other hand, paint could do a lot back then. And that was 20, and on CorelDRAW, I think we were using and quo we were saying with layout design quo and things. So, you know, I'm in the age with Dreamweaver, used to be owned by Macromedia rather than Adobe. And I do sometimes think like -- I always say to people, Microsoft Paint can actually do a huge amount. 'Cause I'm a Mac -- not a Mac user, I'm a PC user. I use Notepad by default for a lot of things, typing up notes. And it's so great if you are doing web development 'cause it strips all the code out, it strips all your formatting so you know, you've got a clean copy and paste when you're putting in something. So I do think that we forget the simpler things. And it's the same, we've going back to just sketching, going back to that idea of stop forcing myself to use Illustrator straight away because I'm not a pro at Illustrator. I have to keep Googling stuff 'cause I always forget stuff. When you have to remember how to use Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and InDesign, and Figma on your average day, you get to the point of "There's only so much I'm gonna remember how to do." Sort of thing. MR: Yeah, yeah. You focus on the things you use often, right? And you Google things you use occasionally, which is fine. I mean that's -- those tools. EC: I wish Google when I was learning would've been brilliant when I was at university. MR: No kidding. Well, we're on this discussion of software. We sort of hinted at this when we prepared for this, talking about the drawing and software, and so, I think agree in this sense that I think it's important that you do your concepting on paper with pen to get the idea and to think through the idea before you get into software. My theory or my view is, the problem with software as powerful as it is, even the simple stuff, is once you enter software, you tend to adapt to the things that the software lets you do or even to this discussion we're having now. You adapt to the things you know how to make the software do, which is a narrow subset of what the software probably can do. But by using pencil sketches or sketchnotes or whatever technique as ugly or beautiful as it is, it helps you think through where you're gonna go before you ever touch any bit of software. So you're coming with this approach that's not hindered in any way by what the software can or can't do. It's more like what's the solution that we're solving for the person, the customer, the user using this thing. Let's start from that point, which, you know, that's our UX perspective. And then work back to making it happen and then bring the tools in. Would you kind of track along the side of that and have you seen that I would apply? EC: Yeah, I would. And actually, I would say it pretty much aligns with exactly a project I've just sent to print. I've nerve-rackingly sent to print. It's always one of those moments, especially if you're so used to digital design, you've got send something to actually print. You're like, "I'm gonna check this 500 times." So I'm gonna actually a bit show. This is useless for people just listening rather than those watching. MR: If you're listening to the podcast, look on the link for the YouTube and you can check it out. EC: So this is something -- I'm gonna try and get it in screen. There we go. MR: You got it on there. That's all in. EC: There we go. So that is actually quite a few sheets worth of work. But this was deliberately designed in a comic book style. And it was something that I knew if I went to the computer, I'm gonna go and default a couple of things. I'm gonna look at some stock illustrations that can get me the boxes and the styles and the effects. And then I'm gonna go quite rigid and I'm gonna do this. And I'm thinking, first of all, I've got to think it through because it's about actually how product is made from -- it's that telecoms brand company. So how someone gets from that sheet of metal all the way through to a roadside cabinet with a telecoms pool coming out of it and a wifi device at the top of it and all the stages in between? And I've got to remember what those stages are. And I think taking it back to pen and paper, it was kind of a big sketchnote gone wrong. I was starting to actually do it as very -- I did say it was a sketchnote gone wrong 'cause I did originally plan just to do like little sketchnotes, going right, this would be this and this will be this. Then I took another sheet and went, "Oh no, I'll just draw it out properly." And then I got to the third sheet 'cause and I'll add a little bit of marker pen. It literally just started to build up. I was like, "This is quite funny. This is me really not doing sketchnotes now." I was like, "I've abandoned it. It's not a sketchnote, it's a full-on illustration." But the best thing about that was, it took me maybe a couple of hours to draw all out, get the concept, a few annotations kind of like the teaching side as well. Just took a picture of it and sent it to the MD and went, "This is the idea and I don't wanna spend time doing a illustrate if you don't like the concept of this being this comic book superhero theme." And he was like, "I like it. I really like it." Luckily, he's got a good vision. He can see what's gonna be the end result as well. He knows what I'm capable of so he knows what would be produced. And even when he looked at this very basic sketch, he went, "Oh by the way, it's not called that, it's called this so you need to google this." So you already gave me feedback just because the sketch was just good enough where you could get what it was supposed to be, but you could pick up on, "Oh you've not quite got that terminology. So just point in the right path." So my next version of that was fine and then fine lined it, took pictures of it, and then took it into Illustrator. And I think it's better because it's, a lack way of putting it got that one key approach. And my lines aren't quite parallel. Like curves aren't perfect because I've traced the image of that. And it's given a very hand-drawn effect. And rather than if I had gone to illustrate straight away, I know I would've done really nice straight lines. A really nice arc. And it would've looked too polished. And whole point of this was, it's supposed to be somebody sketched out like a story like you do with comics. Sometimes I have to remember that's actually gonna be a better approach. And I think that's why stripping back to pen and paper and having that base skillset really helpful in trying to convey an idea as well and get buy-in. Before I go and invest 40 hours of my time, "Are we all right with this one hour of time I've invested?" MR: Well, and you have to think that way as an independent especially, 'cause that means if you spend 40 hours going all the way with that, that's 40 hours you can't spend on something else that maybe you should be, right? It's sort of a seed idea that, "Hey, is this right?" Even if it gets you arguing over the concept, at least it's movement. And then you can move from there. Either you'd say, "No, that's too loose. I don't want that." Or "Hey, it looks great, he chose that way, but at least it gives him an option and is our invested." And you can now choose your adventure based on that. EC: I think the reason behind doing it as well goes back to maybe the last two to three years of really getting deep into UX design in terms of websites where really starting with pen and paper wireframes. Pen and paper wireframes, then even moving into just block design and saying, "This is where the hero shot's gonna be. This is where the interest's gonna be." And laying it out blocks like that before even building it. And again, web design, we get so carried away from going, getting a brief and going right bang, here's your website. And then going, "Oh actually we don't really like that and it doesn't flow here. But doing it in that stage work, which does take more time, but then that's kind of part of the investment with UX rather than just going straight into web design. And that's part of what I've been trying to do when doing freelance is going, but even when I approach the marketing teams, I go, "I don't do your brochure straight out the bat. What I do is I go, here's the general skeleton structure. This is what your page layout's gonna be." And I give them like a skeleton grid of their say 16 pages. These are where your content blocks are. This is roughly where your imagery is gonna be. This is the idea. And I'll give them a like a mood ball going, "And this is the visuals." And then they can buy in on that. So when they produce the end result, it should be pretty much on the button rather than coming back going, "Oh actually, we'd rather it was a bit like this. And could those be amalgamated together?" Don't go it wrong. You do get ones like that. Where you've somehow, it's been lost in translation. But again, it's to try and help me knowing that that's kind of way marketing teams work as well. If you can give them an idea. If you've got somebody with a remote bit of creative brain, they can visualize it already in their head as well. They kind of know what the end result's gonna be. And it just helps and gives them confidence that they know I know what I'm doing. So I kind of strip it down even if it's digitally kind of blocks. But yeah, I think going straight into the actual design end phase. And in a way that's what sketchnotes has taught me is to not always go for that sort of thing. Not always go for the end result with a color and a fine line and all that. You know, use a pen and paper, use a pencil sort of thing. MR: That seems to work. I've been doing this for many years and sometimes I'll jump right to the computer and stop myself and come back and get out my iPad or a piece of paper and just sketch the concept. And it always seems that those projects turn out better. They iterate better, they're smoother. They're more thought out. Like all those things that you want in an end product, ends up getting bound into them when I approach 'em that way. And typically, I do, but there's times when, if I'm in a hurry, I might forget that step and I'll have to like, "Okay, stop. Let's go back let's do some sketching." Even if it's just a little bit in my bullet journal, just to think through the process, that might be enough, right. It doesn't have to be some crazy detailed thing, but a little dump of ideas and seeing it helps reinforce things and give it direction, which is really valuable. EC: Yeah. I even do that with quite a few of my social media posts. If they're gonna be actually illustrating a topic or I go for one that's about buttons. You know, I've got them in one of my notebooks where I was going, right, this is how it's gonna lay out, these are the buttons I'm gonna talk about. Giving myself the space and oh that's not gonna work. Do the next one. The next one. Rather than going straight into these ones were done in Figma. So rather than going straight into Figma and going, "Oh no, I have to resize this and I have to move this." I already know what it's gonna be. MR: You got the map. Yeah. EC: Yeah. And you can go straight in. And I do think going digital first sometimes isn't the best way. And I think that's one of the big benefits of having the career that I've had where, you know, my first year university was pretty much analog and that set me off success. You know, we learned proper old school market techniques. You know, with the blending up and sort of thing and you know, and having to use masking tape to keep your line script. So I've learned all of those skills. You wouldn't think that looking at some of my designs. I look at some of my sketchnotes and going, "I have no idea how I've got the degree I've got sometimes. Or how I was allowed to teach children how to draw." But then that's kind of one of the things I try and do is go, "Don't get hung up on the way it looks. Just get it down." Sort of thing. MR: Yeah. Functional, functional, functional. EC: Yeah. MR: That's really cool. This is a great story and it's brought back a lot of memories for me as well. So that's encouraging. Let's shift a little bit. I'd love to hear the tools that you like to use. You've hinted at some on the design on the marketing side which you can certainly go into. You can start either analog or digital, whichever way you'd like first. EC: Well, I think we should start analog because you know, we're saying we should go analog first. I'd like to say I'm a black pen enthusiast. I have a lot of black pens, those listening to the audio, there. I try lots -- MR: A bucket full black pens. EC: Yeah. Obviously, some of them are different thicknesses and some are like brush tip and normal tip. But doesn't matter which black pen I use, I go back to an actual Uniball finite pen. Just 'cause it's a really simple, nice black pen. And I like it 'cause it's reliable and it's consistent. And usually come in packet of like five 'cause I seem to lose them. I don't how I'll lose them. It's like batteries, you know, they just disappear. But I really like the Uniball high fine pen. And you can get them in like every supermarket here in the UK. Especially, at the minute it's back-to-school stuff. So, funny enough, I've just bought another packet. I like them as well 'cause they're consistent. It doesn't really matter what paper I use, they come out the same. They don't really bleed and it's just got their nice crispness to it. And then with them, if you think I'm a black pen enthusiast, you still need to see the amount of marker pens I own. But I have a huge amount of color and marker pens. But for the sketch notes side, I found I was trying to focus too much on the color instead of just giving it a bit of a highlight and a bit of a punch more than anything. And then my brain tweaked them I was like, well just use highlighters sort of thing. So one of the things I really like is, these are the Sharpe highlighters. So the s-not and they come in about20 or so colors MR: Look like nice pastel colors. If you're listening, they're not the traditional intense crazy colors. It's more like pastel colors. EC: Yeah. And I think that's why we like 'em because they've got a bit of a punch of a traditional neon sort of highlight. You know, they've got a bit of that punch, but they've got the softness of the pastel sort of very zebra, I think bring out a pastel range. I've got twitch, I've got God knows how many of them as well. MR: Oh, okay. EC: But they're kind of very vibrant and they come in a whole range of colors. You wouldn't get that -- you know, there's no neon, real true neon, but them combined, they just give that highlight. And what I try to do is I look at what I'm taking a sketchnote off. So if we go back to -- they're always learning. That's what I use my sketchnotes for is always like watching the webinars and using it to remember what I'm learning. Or when I read books, I try and condense a book I've read into one or two pages of notes. So one of the things I do is, so I've got quite nicely got to actually a page use those. So I try and use the colors just -- I pick a couple of colors to match maybe the brand of the person that I'm watching. Or it could be to do with the topic because then it helps me remember it and learn it. I'm that design nerd, so I'm kind of thinking he needs to have a nice theme. I can't just rock up with any random color. MR: Yeah. EC: So that's kind of how I do. I always have a Uniball pen on me. I've got them in my bags. I've got 'em in the car because they are just so relatively foldable as well. They're really quite cheap. It's only like a few bucks for a pack of three or five, however many they come in. MR: That's great. Yeah. EC: And paper-wise, I'm quite particular. So when I'm doing the actual UX design, so when I'm doing wireframes because I really don't want to use color. These are black and white and I know if I use white paper I'm gonna add color 'cause I know what sort of person I am. MR: Interesting. EC: Yeah. So I use Kraft brown paper. MR: Oh wow. EC: So deliberately you put color on that, it doesn't really show at all. So I've got like a nice sort of spiraled brown and it's quite a nice size as well. So sort of landscape orientation, it's kind of monitor then portrait orientation, you've kind of got more of a mobile style. I've got a couple of these now and they're quite thick as well. So if I wanna use a heavier-duty thicker black pen, they work really well. MR: They can't bleed. EC: Yeah. And so I use Kraft, and it forces me not to use color. It forces me to keep -- this is purely about wire framing. This is where the base element's go in the page. And then I use post-it notes to highlight up to like, this is where it's gonna move. In terms of the notebooks, it was funny enough, I was just looking at the sketchnote one the other day. But I use quite a thick, really thick gram paper. And I like nice notebooks. It's one of my things. I don't like just using generic paper as well. And I think 'cause those sharpies can be quite heavy duty. It's a Sharpie at the end of the day, you know, it's gonna have a bit of a bleed through the page. So I'm quite conscious of having a really heavy gram paper. And I like dot grid. I can't do the blank paper. 'Cause Even those comic book strips, actually it's on the reverse side of blue graph paper. So I can roughly see the graph through it. So I've got an idea of where the lines are. But I like dot grid. All of my general notebooks are dot paper or grid paper, depending on how people call them. And that's kind of what I like analog-wise, I'm quite traditional. I think. I'm not really into anything fancy. MR: So for the heavy gram notebook, that looked like a LEUCHTTURM, if I were to guess. I don't know If that's the brand. EC: No, I'm gonna pronounce this wrong. I already know I'm gonna -- Ottergami MR: Oh, okay. Ottergami. I haven't heard that. There's a fun shot now. So for bullet journalists. Or bullet journalists and they have quite thick paper. EC: Yeah, it's really nice quality. From my sustainability side and also, 'cause I am actually a vegan as well, so I'm very conscious about them not having real leather on the covers and things. And it is a bit like your own one, which -- that's how I came across it. 'Cause I was looking for notebooks that weren't real leather covers. But I do like it because it is so heavy duty and it's got that nice quality. And I think if I'm gonna be writing something I'm gonna look back on, I want it to feel nice. You know, I want that tact. I like the tactileness sort of thing. And I think that's, again, goes back to being old-school print design. You like the feel of the paper and it's got the nice gram effect, et cetera. MR: Yeah, exactly. Now what about if we switch to digital, assuming that you don't have any other analog tools that you'd like to share? What would be the tool? EC: Well, I have a lot of analog tools, but I don't think any of them are -- I've got, you know, every type of color pencil going. Digital-wise, 'cause I'm not a Mac user, I am a Windows user, so I've got a Samsung Galaxy Tab. And I use Concepts because it's just a brilliant app. MR: That's a great tool. EC: Yeah. The Concepts app. And I would say in the last two years, the Samsung Pen has been really up its game with its sensitivity. It works like my old Apple iPad Pro, what was it called? Yeah, iPad Pro that had the tablet. I had one of the first edition ones and then Procreate stop supporting it, so I sold it. And that's when I was like, well actually it was the last piece of Apple products I had. So I thought, well, this is the time I'm gonna move to Galaxy Tab. And I wanted something smaller because this is small enough to go into, you know, a small like rucksack. So in a out and about. And I love the Concepts app. Really been looking at using it in the last year or so. I like the never-ending art board as well, although sometimes it kind of feels like you don't have scale. So I've noticed when I've gone back and looked at sketches I've done or UX wireframes where some look proportionally fine and then I zoom out and then somehow I've managed to do giant boxes and tiny boxes. But because it's vector-based, at least you can start to resize things. MR: Yeah. You can size it. Yeah. EC: But sometimes you kinda lose the awareness of where you are 'cause it's obviously a smaller screen 'cause it's a Galaxy Tab rather than like a big iPad Pro. But I do like the Concepts app. I've tried a few and they just didn't seem to have that sensitivity with the Samsung Pen. But equally they didn't have even just a free version of Concepts, the wide range of colors, wide range of pens available and not. So yeah, I do like sketchnoting though, because you can press Undo and you can change the line that you just thought it's a bit dodgy. MR: Yeah. That's nice. EC: And it does the smoothing out. I was like, "Oh, I like this. Why can't I do this a real life for a pen and paper." MR: Yeah, exactly. So the tab I think is more like an A5 size? EC: It is. To be fair, it's not far off the size of notebooks. MR: It'd probably be closest to an iPad Mini if someone's used to iPad. It's probably more in that range. EC: Yeah, it is a nice size. And I got that 'cause I wanted something that was bigger than my phone for actually learning because a lot of learnings now online you can't get books for a lot of things anymore. But I didn't wanna have to keep using my phone. And when I've spent 11 hours of the day at my computer, I don't wanna have to have my computer on an evening. So I bought it originally to be able to read eBooks or do some of the courses I've signed up to. MR: And do a training. Yeah. EC: Yeah. And even like your webinar, I think I watched it on my Galaxy Tab or potentially drew it on my Galaxy Tab. I can't remember now. But I use it for that. And then it's like the penny dropped. I was like, "Well, why don't I do some sketch notes on this?" And then I've started to use it more for the wireframes because it's easy then to take that and then put it into likes of Figma. And that's I found rather than having to take pictures and then move them in. So I'm using Concepts more for wireframes than sketchnoting. I think the tactlessness of the notebook for sketchnoting. MR: Well, that's really cool. We don't have lots and lots of PC-only users or Galaxy Android users. So it's good to have represented because I know there must be more out there. So it's good to hear that. Good feedback. Yeah. EC: Well I was like -- my computers all the way through university, even all the way up to near enough when I went to teacher training, were all Macs. For those who are watching, you'll see I've got in the background probably you can just see I've got an original iPhone, an iPod on the wall. Still have a better battery life to old iPhone 'cause they still work. And I had the old school, massive Mac, the Blueberry Mac with the big blue colors. So you know that I had one of them. So I've always been Mac from training. And then it just got more into PC-based because I knew a large portion of my audience were using PCs. The market teams teams were using PCs. It was an easy sell to people to, "Well, we don't wanna put a Mac into the IT system and things." So I got used to using a Windows-based ecosystem. And then gradually as things in my Apple ecosystem died off, they just replaced with a Windows and Android. MR: Yeah, makes sense. EC: So I kind of smoothly moved over. MR: That's pretty cool. Well, thanks for sharing your tools. People always like to have this section so they can learn about new tools and try things out. I know I learn about tools all the time from this section as well, so. EC: When I walk the dog and listen to the podcast, I'm always like, "Oh, I didn't know that." Or, "Oh, there's another pen I'm gonna -- I think that's another pen I'm gonna buy." And then go back to the Uniball. Hence the tub of nearly 50 black pens that I own. MR: Wow. Well, let's go to the next portion of the show, which is your three tips. So I always frame it as someone's listening, they're individual thinking, whatever that means to them. Maybe they've gotten into a rut and they need just some encouragement. Like what would be three things you would encourage them to do to kind of get back into a good rhythm? EC: I think the first one, and this is something that I used to champion a lot when I was teaching and trying to get kids to get out the mindset of. You've just come from, you know, maths or you've come from geography or history or wherever it might be. And you've come and sat in this room, you've gotta get kids credit 'cause they've gotta suddenly switch from one class to another. And I'll just be sitting going, I can't get my head into this mindset. Or it's not perfect or it's whatever it might be. And I used to say to them at the level they're doing, or the level that most designers are doing, there's no standard. Don't worry about a standard. Try and remember there's no standard. This is not maths. One plus one doesn't equal two. So your standard is not my standard. Your design is not my design. And that's why I actually love sketchnotes 'cause everybody's is completely different. Everyone's styles are different. And trying to remember that unless you're doing architecture and building regulations, design is quite free. And don't you put that pressure on yourself? So give yourself a break. Remember that you are setting the standard in a way and try and give yourself a break. 'Cause I think we all kind of get a bit too hung up on, "Oh, it needs to be like this." And it's kinda like, no, just, there's no standard to design really. It's, quite freeing. It's not as free as art. Granted. But that's very expressive. You know, you've got the fine line. You know, we do have some standards, you know, we're not going to the really, really fluid art world, but yeah, try and remember that you are the one giving yourself a hard time. So let up on yourself. There is no standard. So I would say that's probably number one. The second one is a bit something that I wish I did a lot early on in my career. And I've only started doing in the last, I think five, six years actually after I finished teaching, really, I'm gonna get an example, is I create playbooks 'cause a hybrid of a sketchbook, a scrapbook, important notes. Things that I find I think are really interesting that I want to sort of scrapbook. And the reason why I wish I started this earlier -- so for those listening, I'm sort of holding up some like cutouts I've done and I've annotated them and things that I've found online or logos and packaging that I like and I cut them out and I sort of stick them in and I write why I like them or why it's worked and so annotating them. But I also do my sketch notes in it from the books that I've read or the webinars I've attended. And I have one for each year. And the reason I like them is sometimes it's really good to just, if you've got that mental block, is go back and look at something, pick a subject you've read and think it could inspire you. Or if you think, oh, this is no good, look what you were doing five, six years ago. And it's like, when I look at the thing I designed when I was 15 using Microsoft Paint or whatever it would've been, I'm like, "Oh yeah, I've actually come quite a way since then." Sort of thing. So I wish I did these earlier because it's so interesting to look back on. But more importantly, I get inspiration every time I look at them because it is personalized to me. It's my journey. It's my type of design and it helps inspire me to look at it and go, "Oh yeah, why didn't I try that?" Or "Oh wait, I forgot about this." And sometimes it can spark that idea or give you the confidence boost. You remember you can actually do this, right? It's like when I draw badly or -- I wouldn't say badly. It's not a word I like to use. But I draw in a way where I just think, "How do people pay me to do this?" Sort of thing. I deliberately sometimes go -- and I've got like some really nice hand-drawn, colored in really heavy-duty, 20 hours sort of pencil colors drawings in my playbooks, in my sketchbooks because it's just to remind myself I do actually have that talent. It's just my brain's not using that talent at the minute. It's clearly using it for something else. You know, it's worrying about, "What I'm gonna have from a dinner." So it's nice to look back and it kind of reaffirms where you are, but also gives you that inspiration. And I would say the third one is probably a classic one is walk the dog. The amount of things I can solve by walking my dog. I take him out for a walk, 45 minutes later I'm either re-inspired, I fixed a problem while either walking the dog. I might think, "Oh, this is a different way to approach it." The dog is brilliant 'cause I talked to him like a crazy dog owner I am, you know, and he doesn't answer back. He has a good go, granted, but he generally doesn't answer back. And I would say, so take that tea break, go in the garden, walk the dog. Like during a pandemic was harder. So I used to go in the garden and just walk up and down a few times throwing a ball with a dog because as soon as my brain -- it is that adage of, to be creative, you also have to be bored. You have to have that bit where your brain is not thinking about what you're trying to think about. And that's why we have our best ideas in the shower when you're going to sleep because you've suddenly switched off. So I try sometimes a dog, it's four walks a day. MR: It's a lot I'm sure. EC: Yeah. Well, it gets to a point where it's like, "Oh, do we have to? Do we have to?" So I think we really underestimate getting away from your desk. Get out to nature, walk the dog. Just, you know, that fresh air is something about it that for me really works to help me get over that struggle. And it could be any struggle, it could be a design struggle, it could be from the marketing stuff that I work on teams with, saying how should we approach this? So I find it's one of the best things I've -- well say it's nine years in now. It's the best thing I've had really in terms of my tools as well, is very analog tool. MR: Yeah. That's good. That's good. Reset. EC: Mm-hmm. MR: Well, those are great tips. Thanks for sharing those, Elizabeth. Very helpful and encouraging. Making me wanna take my dog for a walk now, which maybe I should do after this 'cause I've been sitting for an hour, so EC: Well, yeah. One of my friends, she says she plays with the kids. She says she'll go and she'll just build Lego with the kids or she'll go and color in with the kids because it is one of the few friends I've got that's in a relatively similar role. So she gets it as well. And she says sometimes just doing that and drawing it back to a more basic level makes her go, "Ah, that's how I could approach this problem." Or "That's how I could do this logo idea." 'Cause She's very much logo design and she's like, ah, that's -- you know, it's like the penny drops moments 'cause she's doing something related, but at the same time not thinking about it. So I really do think sometimes you have to give yourself 10 minutes to go do something else. MR: Yeah. Let's your subconscious work for a bit, I guess. You know, so it can kind of churn on things and give you back some ideas. EC: Yeah. MR: So Elizabeth, where can we find you? What's the best place to locate you? A website, social media? Where do you hang out? EC: My website is Below Two, so spelled out T-W-O.co.uk. And that's pretty much all of my social media is the same. So it's Below Two Studio. So whether it be Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, the whole lot, very rare. I've managed to secure it on all of the platforms. Especially in today's world where so many things are taken up. But you can find me there. I'm generally mostly on LinkedIn and Instagram. I've quoted Twitter there, which just start getting called using X, that's the term. But yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, Instagram mainly and my website, which is a key thing. MR: Okay. That's really great. And you can go check that out everyone. We'll have of course, as always show notes and samples. And if we can get some samples from Elizabeth, we'll link to those as well so we can, she can throw 'em on our website and send us some links and we can see some pictures of her playbooks and some other things that she's talked about, if you're listening. EC: It'll be great once this has actually come out, the thing I've just done a comic book stuff, we'll actually have all the end results. MR: Oh. EC: It's part of a huge exhibition that the entire standard is now gonna be comic book superhero design. So we've done the whole lot to that sort of style now. MR: Wow. Cool. EC: So hopefully, I'll have some quite like, literally here's the idea here. Is it now fully? MR: That would be cool. Yeah, that'd be great. EC: So hopefully I'll have that. MR: Great. Well, thanks Elizabeth for all the sharing and teaching you do on Instagram that I've seen and for your generosity and hanging out with us and telling us your story and laughing and having the dog bark and the network flake out and all the things that we've gone through. It's been a joy just to hang out with you. EC: Yes, thank you very much for having me. It's made a nice start to the bank holiday weekend here. MR: Well, that's great. That's great. For all those who are listening or watching, this will wrap up another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Until next time, talk to you soon. | |||
| 12 Jul 2024 | ISC24TX San Antonio with Prof Michael Clayton | 00:37:07 | |
In this special episode, Professor Michael Clayton, the lead organizer of ISC24TX in San Antonio, Texas, talks to Mike Rohde about the event on August 2-4, 2024. Hear more details about the event, the venue, and the city of San Antonio and what to expect if you attend, including continuing education credits for educators! Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 28 Mar 2023 | Filippo "Sketchy" Buzzini builds his visual portfolio by being authentically himself - S13/E02 | 00:42:11 | |
Visual practitioner Filippo "Sketchy" Buzzini shares how he is bartering his skills for other services and learning skills, growing his portfolio, and visiting new places at the same time. Sketchy is a firm believer in creating a broad comfort zone. Sponsored By ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings — any time you like. You can nudge the curve of a line, swap out one brush for another, or change stroke thickness and color at any stage of your drawing — saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need — large or small. Never worry about fuzzy sketchnotes again. Concepts is a powerful, flexible tool that’s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! TranscriptEpisode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike, and I'm here with Filippo "Sketchy" Buzzini. Tell me about the sketchy word, Filippo. I'm really curious, where did this come from as you tell us who you are and what you do? Filippo "Sketchy" Buzzini: Yes. Hello. Thank you, Mike. It's great to be here. The sketchy word, I guess because I'm a sketchy character. It comes from, my name is Filippo Buzzini. I'm a visual practitioner from Switzerland with my company, it's called Sketchy Solutions. Because I don't want to limit myself to one specific field, as long as I can draw it and help you find a solution to a problem, I'm happy to do it and give it a try. That's why Sketchy Solutions. The great thing of having a company of just one employee is that you can pick your own title. So I am the Chief Sketching Officer of Sketchy Solutions. MR: I saw that. FSB: I'm a visual practitioner from Switzerland. I live now in Bern, the capital city, but I grew up in the Italian-speaking part in Locano in the South of Switzerland. The warmer, sunnier, and palm tree, French part of Switzerland. MR: Ah, there we go. FSB: What do I do? Mostly, I do a lot of graphic recordings. But in general, like anything, as I said, any type of sketchy solution that we can think of. I do always more strategic visualizations. I give visual thinking workshops, and I do also some illustration work, design work. I've been drawing, for example, book covers or book illustrations. I've done some logos or t-shirt designs. I'm also one of the visual storytellers of Drawify. It's a project where for people that don't want to draw themselves, we're a group of visual storytellers from around the world that are drawing templates and connectors and icons that can be dragged and dropped on a blank canvas and adapted. Also, been developing some fonts as well lately because I'm very interested in lettering. That's also something that I've taught a little bit and I'm planning to teaching some more online. So yeah, I think in general, like for many things in my life, I need variety, I need change. I need to be challenged on as many levels as possible 'cause otherwise, I get bored. MR: You're quite the generalist then, I would say. It seems to me. FSB: Yes. Or I'm a multi-specialist. MR: Multi-Specialist. I like that even better than generalist. That's really great. And so, that leads me to my next question. How did you end up in this space? This is my favorite question of every podcast, 'cause I get to hear the stories of all these interesting characters in our space, visual thinkers. Let's start from when you were a little kid. I imagine when you were a little kid, you probably drew a lot, but maybe not. Tell us that story. FSB: I’ve always been drawing and I always had to occupy my time creatively. I think I've always been building things and creating little stories when playing with my Legos and Playmobils. Drawing was always something that I did it to, well, occupy my time or especially at school, when I was bored, I just took a pen and started doodling. Doodling on the page and filling a page. I had more drawings than notes on any given booklet or whatever that I had. I think in general, I grew up and I've always been a quick learner, but it also meant that I was getting bored pretty quickly of things. I always needed challenges in my life. I don't know, I think there's few things that always characterize me is that well, I think creativity. I always need to find a creative output, to be different, to do the things kind of my way. A great curiosity for everything. I get passionate about, really plenty of things and I wanna know more. If I like something, I never get enough of it. I just wanna get further. And adrenaline too is something that I constantly seek. I guess growing up then, yeah, I've been drawing for a while and then been interested in graffiti, in street art, doing a lot of it on paper. I always felt a bit different from the other people and not really fitting in. And I found a good outlet in punk music. Like really punk music where — but I think it was a catalyst as well to my creativity because there was something where you can bend the rules, where you can go your own way, where you don't need to be precise to do something. You just create. You know, just a few chords, a few emotion, and you just get it out. And I guess that's also what sparked my drawing that is like, I was never great a drawing class. I could not work exact portrait, but I always had the ideas on how to do things. I could do it simple. It could be, you know, as long as you have the right energy, you could DIY, you could do it yourself and you can just get going and no matter if you make mistakes. That's the thing, just like drawing, like punk music, everybody can do it. Everyone can do it. So, everybody can feel empowered and try new things. And I guess the creativity, adrenaline, and curiosity, it's something that accompany me as well. In other aspects of my life, for example, I really like action sports, like board sports. I do a lot of snowboarding. I do kite surfing, you know, or summer things, I go hiking a lot, and I'm just wowed by nature all the time. I keep getting inspiration from that. I'm very keen traveler as well. This as well, I guess goes on with the curiosity and the adrenaline. That's for the context. I left the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland for studies. I went to Frieburg in the French-speaking part. I have a master's degree in history of contemporary societies and geography. I think that also contributed to my visual thinking by giving me a framework on how to think, how to analyze information objectively, how to grasp the important topics, how to get to what is important and how can you summarize complex topics by keeping it to the core. And I guess that re-structure my thinking. That is why I kept drawing a lot because well, having a master's degree and every time I was bored in class, I was drawing. That means I've been on class desks for many years. For 20 years, there was like well, many, many hundreds of hours of drawing practice anytime I was bored. After that, I worked for an NGO that was empowering young people to make their sustainable project into life through workshop. Then I was facilitating workshops. There as well, I got an in into the non-formal type of education and different way of learning and teaching, and facilitating. I think that also helped. After that, I worked for the European mobility programs. I was responsible for Switzerland for youth information network. And there as well being at the service of young people. Always young people could come to me or my colleagues all over Europe and just ask information about starting working or volunteering abroad. And there as well would help me, I know always adapting the type of solution to the needs of the person asking. When my contract ran out with this job after three years, the second last week, there was a workshop, two hours workshop during our international meeting on visual thinking given by Tonja Wehr From Germany. And my mission there was like, okay, write down one project you're gonna work on in the future for this network and try to draw it. And because I was about to quit my job, I was drawing, okay, my mission is to find a job. And I drew that. Well, little did you know that actually, the job would've been the drawing that I was doing, looking for other jobs instead of the actual content. Well, the feedback was very positive from colleagues from all over Europe, and say, "Oh, you're good at that and stuff." Was like, "Maybe I should try it. Why looking for a job? Why don't I try to learn more about it, and the worst-case scenario I learn a new skill and among other things." Then I got my hands on your book, "The Sketchnote, Handbook," and it was a revelation like yours and then Brandy Agerbeck's, Graphic Facilitations Guide. They were eye-openers. And then I just started. My partner at the time was organizing an international conference and development corporation in the water sector. And she was like, "We cannot pay you, but why don't you come along and do some graphic recording just to see one, if you're able, and two, if you like it." MR: Good practice. FSB: Yeah. And that was, what was it? May 2017, my very first graphic recording. MR: Really? Wow. FSB: A couple of weeks before, I also took part on Mona Ebdrup From Denmark. She's used to study in Bern, and she was giving visual confidence training. And I really needed some confidence because already my first graphic recording booked up, but I didn't have a clue where to start. And it really, really helped me. Really giving me the confidence to just go out and try. In a very anarchistic way, I just said, "Just go on, just do it." And I wasn't satisfied at all about my results. Like, oh, they can be so much better, but people in the room were wowed. And I'm like, "Okay, yeah, there's something to that. There's something to that." Then in the meantime, I found another job and I said, "I need to reinvent myself." I took an internship in a development corporation organization where among the other things were organizing a conference in Australia, and I was like, yes, I take an internship, but I would also like to develop my visual thinking skills, so I'd love to do a graphic recording at the conference in Australia. I did that. One of my first full day graphic recording was actually in Queensland, was actually in Australia. Since then, well, after that internship was done, I already had several rough recording. I worked with three previous employers in the first six months. I was like, "Yeah, there's something into it." So decided in March 2018 to go all in and invest and starting doing visual thinking my full job. I had zero clients when I took this decision, I just love doing it. I know I could do it in all the language of Switzerland plus English, that means also all the language of the neighboring countries. I see that there was potential for growth. Since then, I don't know, it's been a rollercoaster that full of highlights that doesn't stop since. MR: But sort of fulfills your need for the adrenaline, right? FSB: Absolutely. Yeah. MR: The jumping in without— FSB: The recording, it gives me this adrenaline, this adrenal boost. Also, for the curiosity, it's always something new. It keeps changing. You cannot get bored. That's why it's my icky guy, I guess. MR: Nice, nice. I would guess, you know, for those wondering where the adrenaline comes from, the adrenaline comes from, this could all go wrong really easily, right? It could go bad. I think that's what, oddly enough, I've discovered in myself, like doing things that I never have done before. I'm not a thrill seeker. Like I'm not a snowboarder or kite surfer or anything, but there's something fun, a little bit like improv, right, when you go into a space and there's she possibility that anything could happen is really fun, right? Of course, you could crash and burn, and that might be fun for some people to watch, but that makes the success even sweeter, right? The possibility is you could crash and burn, and then actually, you deliver something. Like you said, the first one you did, you thought was terrible or wasn't good up to your spec, and yet everybody else in the room, because they don't practice that skill whatsoever. To them, it was amazing, right? So that's gotta be satisfying and I think draws you into more wanting to try stuff. FSB: Yeah, absolutely. I think also, just having an attitude of, it doesn't need to be perfect. You can make mistakes. And seeking the thrill, like, just the same way when I get to go puncture when I still go switch stage diving with 37-year-old, and I don't care. Maybe they don't catch you, but it's just about jumping. It's just about going for it. It's going for it. I see mistakes sometimes that I point out mistakes to my clients, maybe in some work that I do. But in general, it's just about going for it and having the confidence that you're doing your best. You're trying to help. You're trying to help and you're trying to provide a service and an added value to your client. Even a not your best work can be extremely helpful. MR: Yes. It can have value. Interesting. I have to tell you, my impression of Switzerland, I've only been there once, is that it's a very buttoned up, very conservative, very structured place. If you're in Switzerland and you're working, you must really stand out, Filippo. Is that a pretty good guess or am I misinterpreting Switzerland? Maybe Switzerland is different than I realize. FSB: Oh, no, no. Switzerland is definitely very buttoned up and let's say, well, boring or reliable. MR: Yes. Yeah, very reliable. The trains run on time in Switzerland. FSB: But yeah, I don't fit in. I guess I've got a bit of leeway, a bit of game, the fact that I'm from Italian-speaking part. We are considered Italians of Switzerland, even though the sports national team we support is not Italy, but still, we have a bit more of a laid-back way of facing work and life. And so, there's a little bit of game there, but even there, I don't really feel like I fit in myself. I get some jokers because of that. I'm selling myself, I'm selling not just my services. I'm selling, my business is me, is my person. So I need to be authentic. I always wear caps, and some clients might not be so—you might not feel so comfortable of wearing caps in between suits, but then I designed my own caps so that's kind of part of my uniform. For example, I went to the United Nations in Geneva, and I went past security, I had my shoes, like nice shoes and gel in my hair and I was wearing a tie and a jacket and whatever, but as soon as I passed security, I put on my hat and changed my shoes for Converse. And it's like, "Nope. No compromising on that." MR: That's great to hear that. FSB: That's my uniform. MR: Well, I think that sets you apart, right? When they say Sketchy, everybody knows who that is. They don't even have to say your real surname or your name at all. It's sketchy. FSB: I guess I don't know. Also, in my work, several colleagues have told me that they can recognize my work from—they can say, "Oh, okay, that's Sketchy. That's Filippo's work." Because I don't know, I guess there are some rules to follow, but I always like to bend them and adapt it to myself. I do not wanna do graphic recordings in the way, like the standard. Learning how to make the—like there are dozens of people doings that could be interchangeable. MR: Yeah, exactly. FSB: I think that my personality, the energy needs to come out in my work and I'm not really compromising on that. Lots of clients like it, some don't, but then I'm just not the right people for those that don't. MR: Yeah. Exactly. The right people find you. Tell me a little bit about something you've done recently that you're excited about. Could be work stuff, maybe it's something else. FSB: Well, what I've done recently that I'm pretty excited about, it's kind of work-related, but let's say I wasn't really paid for that, but I did some graphic recordings in Antarctica. MR: Really? FSB: Yeah. It was a dream of mine to set foot on the one continent I've never been on the seven Continents. I had a chance during one work event to meet some people from a company that offer cruises to Antarctica. And my goal was to reach out and say, "Hey guys, I can do a lot of things for you. Can we make a deal or something?" The graphic recording was not part of the deal, but I've got a very good offer, a pretty massive discount in exchange of some drawings that they can use for the marketing. And when I was there, I'm like, "Well, I have to do some graphic recording. You never know. Does anybody has ever done it?” There were all these presentations on glaciers and on Wales. And like that I was like, yeah, it will be a pity if I don't do it because I don't know if it's ever been done. It was just super great to combine—in general, I've reached a good satisfying level of work-life balance where my life supports my work and vice versa. I've become a big fan of bartering. I know we're in a privileged position in our job because we do something that people like and everybody can use it in some way. I'm always more doing, "Hey, what can I do for you and what can you do for me? And let's just exchange that." I'm going to Japan snowboarding in couple of weeks and I don't need to pay for accommodation because I've drawn the logo of this ski school where I'm staying. MR: Be creative, right? FSB: Or like, I'm not paying for coffee. I have a deal here with my best friend. I just get free coffee and then whenever they need something, some flyers for events, or the blackboard with the menu and stuff, I'll just do it. So, I guess that, yeah. That speaks to your open nature. I would say, you seem like a very open person to new experiences, right? So, when you do that kind of thing, you open yourself up. Like tomorrow, you might come in and they say, "Hey Filippo, we need a big poster for a party next week. Can you make that for us?" Like, "Yeah, go for it." Now you have a poster that you made, right? So, it goes into your catalog of number one, skills, but also number two, now you have a portfolio piece that says, "Yeah, I've done that before." And it just adds to your opportunity. I always thought of it that way whenever there was a problem or something to solve, I always felt like that was good. 'Cause every time I solve a problem, I now have something in my library to help solve the next problem that I don't know is coming. It becomes part of my solution set. And I think it feels like you've sort of approached it in a similar way. FSB: Yeah, absolutely. That's what I said before about the name of the company, Sketchy Solutions. Why? Because if you're an English speaker, it sounds like, "What the hell is that?" It doesn't sound positive, but it's literally what I do, it's sketchy solutions. And if a client ask me, "Oh, can you do that?" And it's something I've never done, usually, I go, "Yes." And then I'll figure out on the way to do it. I like to be open to learning new things, to be challenged to learning new things, and figuring out new ways of working. Of course, then to amplify my portfolio because also curiosity and the need to be constantly challenged and the stepping out of—I don't know if it's stepping out of the comfort zone is the right way. MR: Interesting. That's an interesting way to think of it, like broadening your comfort zone. So, what maybe in the past was uncomfortable is now just, "I've done that before. We can do that." FSB: What's uncomfortable gives me adrenaline, makes me rush. Like even stress in the end. Adrenaline is stress. So, I'm like, okay, I'm stressing about that. It's good. It's good. MR: You turn that energy. I remember someone when I was first learning how to do public speaking, and his comment was, when you get butterflies, you're going up in front to speak in front of somebody. He's like, "That's good, Mike. That is energy. You're excited about what's coming. You need to turn it into a positive and then give it back to your audience." So, it's just energy, if you redirect it, it can be really powerful. Which it sounds like your motto and your mantra, I guess, that you follow. FSB: Yeah, no, absolutely. In general, I seek thrills in my private life and in my job. And they're intertwined. MR: Interesting. That's really great to hear. Let's do a little shift now. Let's talk a little bit about your favorite tools. We'll begin with analog and then go digital. Markers, paper, notebooks, pencils, I don't know, whatever stuff you like. And then jump into your, whatever you use digitally. FSB: So analog, I’m a huge Neuland fan. They have the whole lot. For a visual practitioner, you cannot hope for more. Everybody's super lovely. Also, the people, they have refillable markers. Sustainable. Say for graphic recording, typically I would have the No.One—No, the outliner, both the black outliner, both with Chisel and a round tip. Then a couple of other colors I know I'm gonna use with black, I always have the No.One, both Art, so brush, tip and chisel, and the big one as well, chisel. And now that there is the BigOne Art as well, that's also. So, I will always have the set for each color and then the refiller of those colors as well. So that I always have a choice of what marker to use. But I also love, for example, for Sketchnoting on smaller formats. Now they have this new FineOne. What are they called? FineOne Flex with the flexible tips. MR: Yep. I love that one too. FSB: Yeah, I really, really like that. They're great for lettering as well. MR: Yeah. FSB: There's a different size of the stroke. I've got the graphic wall. One of my first project in 2018 was a brand filmmaker and another producer storyteller. We did a video where I was filming with drone and everything. We were in the Swiss mountains or in front of the government building or In Geneva at the UN. We were just moving around the graphic wall and telling a story with that and drawing with that. Graphic Wally, I use as well for online workshops. I guess analog, well, there again, it's kind of digital tools, but the IPEVO. I recently got an IPEVO camera. It's a document camera which is great. I use it mostly for making what they call the time loops. No, time lapses. MR: Yeah. They take a shot and then you wait a bit of time and keep taking shots. FSB: No. Well, pretty much I take a video and I speed it up. MR: You kinda squeeze it. Yeah, speed it up. FSB: Speed it up so that it looks really nice as well. I guess pretty much, I guess Neuland has all what I need for my needs. MR: All your needs. Yeah. FSB: I use the AcrylicOne's to draw. My balcony tables are all completely drawn. You could give me a marker in my hand, I will start filling whatever surfaces in front of me. MR: That's great. That's great. And then digital, I'm assuming you must use an iPad as well, and what's the app that you like to use there? FSB: I have an iPad Pro 11 inches. MR: Oh, me too. FSB: Boring as everybody, Procreate. I'm using Procreate. The flow is so nice with Procreate. There's so many option, I guess the force of habit. And otherwise, I also use Concepts for when I need to do something vector-based. But I feel like, yeah, it does not have the same flow, the same ease of use as Procreate. MR: Different interface. Yeah, for sure. FSB: That's about it. MR: Simple tools. FSB: Yeah. MR: Well, that's really great. Let's shift now again to tips. This is the place where I invite you to think about someone listening, who is in the visual thinking, whatever that means to them, but maybe they feel like they're on a plateau or they just need some encouragement from you, Filippo, what would be three things you would tell them can be practical, can be mindset, whatever that you would share to encourage them. FSB: For sure, as I mentioned before, something I really like to do now, and I think that more of us should do that. Barter, barter your services. You have very unique set of skills. Just what do you like from potential clients or from your friends? You wanna go to holidays somewhere, just reach out and say, what can I do for you? And you'd be surprised at all the good deals that might come your way in exchange of your drawings and your skills. So, barter. MR: Love that. FSB: Second one is ask your colleagues, connect, share, and give. I've learned so much. When I started, I connected first with the European visual practitioners and then also with the IFDP, and now we also have some meetings in Switzerland of a visual practitioners in Switzerland just to exchange and learn from each other at any given moment is so extremely valuable because most of us we're working alone. And you don't get real feedback, or you cannot grow much just from client work, because most clients would just say, "Oh, that's beautiful." And you might not even want it to be beautiful. You want it to be helpful. Getting constructive feedback, honest, constructive feedback from peers, it's something that can really help you step up your work. MR: That's great. I like that. FSB: And finally, more maybe technical tip for graphic recording, prepare your titles ahead. Your title, for me, is one of the most important things in your graphic recording. Is the one thing that should not—maybe also with logos and maybe your signature, but the titles is the one thing that should not be done while other people are speaking. You should put thought into it. Say, what do I wanna communicate with this title? Because it's probably gonna be the largest font on your paper, and when people enter the room, they're gonna see that as the first thing. And you want them to keep looking at it and not to just say, "Oh, what is it? Yeah, no, not interested." And turn their head away, because then—so really use your title to hook the attention of the public and to really give the framing of the meaning of your recording. The other controversial tip, I may have an extra one. I know that there's some visual practitioner that might crucify me for saying that, but use Post-it. At least I'm very keen on the truthfulness of the information, of the accuracy that there's no points really missed. That all the essential points are on the recording. And you're always a bit a delay in recording compared to somebody speaking. So, Post-it have been a lifesaver for me. Just pick it up, put them in order. Because it even allows you a further selection level. Once you have four or five Post-it, it's like, yeah, maybe not all of that is necessary. Or, oh, wow, look, this is the flow that I need to follow. So, I dunno, I think the Post-it are a little bit of a secret weapon to have complete and relevant graphic recordings. MR: In some ways, that's like a buffer capture, right? So, you're trying to capture things quickly. It doesn't have to be beautiful, but you can capture that idea. I talk about that in Sketchnoting. I call that putting a stake in the ground. If you're working on a page, like maybe you start the section and then you just guess how much space it will take. Could use a Post-it note there, I suppose too. A little one and put it in, but basically leave the space and come back to it right in, just enough so you can fill it. I like that. Even if it's controversial. I think it's just—it's funny, people will come to me and say, "Well, this isn't Sketchnote." It's like, why not? Using references, using Post-It notes, your goal is to communicate ideas and get those ideas captured. How you do it, I don't care. If it doesn't look beautiful or it's not sanctioned or whatever, who cares. The goal is not for me to do it exactly as someone else told me to. The goal is, if you can come up with a way to deliver that message, then you win. That should be really the ultimate goal is to, like you said, not people looking at it. Oh, I don't care about it, or that it looks beautiful, but does it capture what we're talking about? Does it move us forward? Does it help us to remember so that we don't forget what we talked about, and then it pushes us ahead? That's really the goal of all the stuff we're doing, right? We're communicating visual ideas. FSB: Yeah. The bottom line is does it help? Am I doing work that is helpful? I'm usually paid for it, so I want to give the maximum added value to my client, and I guess that whatever means help you to capture the most and to be the most helpful to your client, that should be used. MR: Yeah. I agree. So, I'm very pragmatic, I guess is the right word. So, if it works for you, then you should go with it. FSB: Yeah. And I think similarly, another thing I've been reading in a lot of books is about, you know, you put down the pen, the moment the person stop speaking. And I feel like you can do that, but I don't think it helps in really having a complete and helpful recording because maybe, you know, the last session, they're like, "Hey, let's collect all the next step. Let's have a quick popcorn brainstorming session." And I'm gonna come up with a lot of information, which might all be relevant, and you still wanna take the time to actually write it down completely and maybe take 15, 20, 30 minutes longer after the end, just communicate it clearly to the client before. If that helps, then why not also take a little bit of time longer, and I'm not saying then finishing at home in the next few days. No. It just take a little slot of time afterwards that agreed upon beforehand with the client to actually get the time to finish thing and not just lock down something if it's something very relevant, you want to give it the space that it deserves. MR: When I do sketchnotes, I try to do most of the work in the moment, but I always reserve at least 15 minutes to look for typos and make sure that things make sense. If I did that staking technique where I started to capture and I didn't finish, to make sure I fill it in, right? So, to plan in a little bit of time at the end, I would think is a normal process for graphic recording too, right? Just to check your work, make sure that things are, you know, oh, I need to cross that T or dot that I, that's something that I'll get caught with sometimes. So, I think it's important to build in not just the minute you stop, you're done. Well, you can come back and fix things, or. I would think that that's a pretty standard thing. FSB: Absolutely. Yeah. MR: I would hope so. Anyway. Well, Filippo, this has been so great. Tell us how we can reach you. Where do you hang out if we wanna reach you on social media or a website, or what would be the best way to reach out to you if we wanna get in touch and connect? FSB: Sure. Well, you can visit my website www.sketchysolutions.ch. You can follow me for example, on Instagram or Facebook as well, Sketchy Solutions. Or add me on LinkedIn. I'm quite active on LinkedIn. It's Filippo Buzzini. I will send you all the links. MR: Yeah. We'll have show notes, everybody, for everything we talk about. It's one of the things we like to do here is have good reference, so you can go check things out. So, thank you so much. It's so great to meet you. Really, I'm so happy to see the work you're doing in Switzerland, and every time I discover somebody new, it's exciting to see that the work that we do is happening all over the world. That's really exciting to me. So, thank you for the work you do. I so appreciate that you're willing to be who you are and you're not afraid of it. That's such a good thing to see. FSB: Well, and thank you so much, Mike for helping so many of us start and putting us in the right direction and keep inspiring us. But it's really a big honor to be interviewed by you and to be able to chat in general, like, wow. If I would've told that to the first-year graphic recording, Sketchy, I would never have believed to say that I would be sharing a Zoom call and having a chat with the Mike Rohde. MR: Thank you so much. It's really an honor. Thanks so much. Well, everyone, it's another episode of the "Sketchnote Army Podcast." Until next episode, this is Mike. Talk to you soon. | |||
| 03 May 2021 | Season 9 Recap with Alec & Mike - SE09 / EP14 | 01:11:23 | |
In this final episode of season 9, the Sketchnote Army Podcast audio engineer Alec Pulianas and I take time to reflect on each one of the season 9 episodes, and each guests unique perspectives and ideas they sparked in us both. We hope this episode sparks you to revisit and reflect on season 9 episodes with new ears, so you can learn and apply the valuable teachings from every one of the guests on the show. SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by The Sketchnote Ideabook, the sketchbook designed for sketchnoters. Equipped with a no-bleed, now show through paper, The Sketchnote Ideabook can take almost any marker or pen you can throw at it. Save 15% on your entire order of Sketchnote Ideabooks and Autoquill Pen sets at the Airship Store when you use code IDEABOOK15 through May 15, 2021. To claim your 15% off visit airship.store today! RUNNING ORDER
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 16 Nov 2020 | David Brittain - SE08 / EP09 | 00:56:13 | |
In this episode, I talk with David Brittain, a co-founder of the powerful drawing tool, Concepts. We talk about David’s path into programming, the philosophy and origin story of Concepts for tablets. If you haven’t considered Concepts before, this discussion will give you insights into why Concepts works the way it does. SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Neuland, the innovative maker of visual thinking tools. Every Neuland product is designed with passion to be durable and sustainable. Check out their newly redesigned Neuland FineOne® line of water-based, refillable markers. Save 15% with code amb290425 until December 31, 2020 RUNNING ORDER
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 21 Sep 2020 | Xina Gooding Broderick - SE08 / EP01 | 00:47:46 | |
SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Neuland, the innovative maker of visual thinking tools. Every Neuland product is designed with passion to be durable and sustainable. Check out their newly redesigned Neuland FineOne® line of water-based, refillable markers. Save 15% with code amb290425 until December 31, 2020 RUNNING ORDER
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 29 Oct 2024 | Emily Mills grows her illustration, visual facilitation, and business skills - S16/E01 | 00:40:52 | |
In this episode, Emily Mills shares insights she’s learned in illustration, visual facilitation, and business in this live interview recorded at the International Sketchnote Camp in San Antonio. Sponsored by ConceptsThe Concepts Sketchnote Workshop video — a unique, FREE, hands-on workshop video where I show you how I use the Concepts app to create sketchnotes on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. In this one-hour, eighteen-minute video, I cover:
The workshop video includes answers to common questions about Concepts. Watch the workshop video for FREE at: rohdesign.com/concepts Be sure to download the Concepts app at concepts.app and follow along with me during the workshop! Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike Rohde and I'm here doing the Sketchnote Army Podcast live in front of a studio audience with Emily Mills, who actually appeared at least on one episode. We have to verify the archives and see how many she's been on it. Maybe two others before, but welcome back, Emily. Emily Mills: Thank you. Glad to be back. MR: So when you were on, I think it was pretty earlier in your career, maybe not at the beginning, but it was pretty early in your career. I think you maybe were independent at the time. EM: Mm-hmm. MR: And that, I think you worked for a company for a while. Instead of doing it this way, let's first say who are you and what do you do. EM Yeah. My name is Emily Mills. I'm an illustrator, and that's the big umbrella term that I use now because I do a lot of different types of illustration, and I think for me, sketchnoting falls under that. So if I meet Joe Schmo on the street, I'm an illustrator, and then once I get to know you, then it's like I'm a book illustrator, I'm a graphic recorder, I'm a sketchnoter. MR: You can kind of refine into those sections. EM: Yeah, little buckets. MR: Got it. How did you come to that decision about umbrellaing underneath Illustrator? Did it go through some iterations? EM: Yeah, a lot of trial and error, because my background is in graphic design. And so, for a while, it was like, I'm a creative, I'm a designer, and then I stopped doing design and I had to refine the language. It's always an ever-evolving process. I'm sure it'll change in a year or two. MR: Got it. We talked about it in the original episode, but it would be fun to hear, now that we have got new period of time that you've been doing this work, your origin story, how did you get into this? And then bring us up to the current day. But you can go all the way back to when you were a little girl if you like, and sort of— EM: Crayons on the wall. MR: Yeah. Any kind of key moments that have sort of led to where you are now. EM: Yeah. So growing up as a kid, I really liked that. I started cartooning. I was very inspired by The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes. I really liked Garfield. Just pretty much anything in the newspaper I was a huge fan of. And so I drew comics, cartoons. Growing up I had a little strip called Sheepish. I had a strip called Busted Wheel that was like a Western theme one. I had one about dingoes. I was really into animals. And then when I hit middle school, my school was kind of new, and so they started a school newspaper. And so, I did the school newspaper cartoon from eighth grade, actually, all the way through college. MR: Wow. EM: So my background was, I just like drawing, I like characters, I like creating stories that are very short. And then, studied graphic design in college because that was around the 2008 crash, and everyone in my life was saying, "You have to get a job." And I was like, "But I wanna do art." So studying graphic design was like my way of doing both. And studied the graphic design, went to graphic design career, but I still kept cartooning. In my office, whiteboard door, I would draw a little cartoon every week. Had a coworker that remembered that when he had left, he went to work for a video studio. They hired me to do a whiteboard video. I'd never heard of that or done one, obviously. And so, they brought me in to do that. We ended up doing two or three of those, and I kind of put that in my portfolio. Then a company saw the whiteboard video, and they were like, "Hey, have you ever done sketchnoting?" I was like, "I don't know what that is." But it was, kind of like a cool moment because by the time I had hit college, newspapers were basically no more. So my dream of becoming a newspaper cartoonist when I grew up were kind of dashed. MR: You sort of lived that life through your high school and college years. EM: Yeah. So it was like, "I'm gonna be a cartoonist for the newspaper when I grow up." And then it was like, "Oh, newspapers don't exist, so I don't know what to do anymore. I guess it's just graphic design." So when someone told me about sketchnoting it was like, "Wait, I can be a cartoonist for real, like when I grow up, it's like another avenue?" And so, I was excited about that. My style's more illustratory and less stick figures, more characters just because that's where my background is. But worked for a company for a short time doing graphic recording, and then went out on my own. And I've just been doing that since 2016. MR: Great. And I think I've seen you kind of refining the work you've done from that moment you went independent. In a lot of ways, I feel like you've narrowed your focus a lot because I think when you started, you were doing graphic design, you're still taking contracts for that, but I think you've narrowed it down to fewer things. EM: Right. MR: What would you say it would be your strengths areas that you sort of would lead with or you consider are your strengths that you do now? EM: I really like graphic recording at live events. So whether that's a virtual graphic recording gig on my iPad, or it's in-person at a giant eight-foot board. I really enjoy the live events. I think I just am the most experienced with that. But I also really enjoy book illustration doing—now when people hear that, they think kids lit. And that's not what I do at all. Like, I'm actually not a very whimsical, cute illustrator. And so, I don't do kids’ books. I just do adult business books. But I really think I do have like a cartoony style, but it lends itself well to business ideas. I really love illustrating "boring" things and kind of creating the life in it. MR: Making them more interesting. EM: Yeah. MR: Or revealing the interesting nature of the concepts or ideas. EM: Right. And so those are the two areas that I like to lead with. Like, "Oh, let me illustrate your live event." And if you don't have a live event, maybe you have an article or a blog or a book that I can illustrate for. I recently just took a workshop on visual facilitation because after doing live events for almost 10 years, I've learned a lot about meetings, and I've seen a lot of meetings run very poorly and I'm like, "You know what? I think I could learn to do that." And having the people skills to facilitate a room is a skill set that I don't have, but I'm excited about maybe stepping into. MR: Well, as someone new to that space and knowing graphic recording and sketchnoting and those things, how would you separate the skills needed for graphic recording, live sketchnoting with now facilitation from your perspective? EM: I think it's a spectrum. On the far left, you have straight-up illustration-like art. And then on the far right, you have facilitation, which is like, just writing. And I think in the middle is where it gets confusing. I would say sketchnoting is probably more on the left-hand side because of course it's ideas, not art, but we still like to add color and shapes and creativity. Then as you move towards the facilitation and on the right, you lose the art, but you can still be visual without having the art. MR: Do you think with facilitation, it's a little bit more of people skills that you're learning? EM: Definitely. MR: Because you own the visual skills, that's not an issue, you're confident there. EM: Yeah. The workshop I took was three days long, and the first day and a half was really focused on graphic recording. And a lot of the students in the class hadn't done it, so that was their first time for me, it was actually— MR: You had that advantage. Yeah. EM: It was a helpful review. I actually did learn a few new things, but the last day and a half was all facilitation. It was reading the room, learning how to deal with "problem children," and learning templates to bring people through problems. Facilitation is also about you not being the star, but the group being the star. So learning to get the focus off of yourself and into the group. MR: Yeah. You're a little bit like my friend Steve Silbert. He's an agile coach but like a scrum master in his perspective as someone who eliminates blocks from the group. So to let them flow and keep going, in a lot of ways the facilitators doing those same things, but in a room, in a meeting, in a set time. I could imagine in a meeting like this, talk about "problem children," someone who keeps throwing in some outside of the agreed upon scope of what we're gonna talk about and drawing the group into argument or something. And being able to shut that down and redirect, those are really important skills. EM: Yeah. And I think those skills lend themselves well to any profession, even if I never end up pursuing facilitation, I'm really glad I took the workshop. MR: So here's a question that's I didn't think about until we got into this discussion was, what if you're an introvert, someone who's not a people person, do you think you can be a facilitator or would that be challenging? EM: Yeah, that's a great question. I think it probably depends on the person because I think we all express our creativity and introversion and extroversion on a spectrum. Like me, I'm definitely an introvert, but I can turn on the extroversion. I might step into a facilitation role and thrive, but then I might need to take two days off after that. MR: Yeah and restore. EM: So maybe the extrovert can do that and then they just jump into work the next day. So maybe it's more about the recharging and less about the ability. MR: So sort of knowing yourself. EM: Yeah. MR: So the things you might do as an introvert would be, "I know this is stressful for me, so maybe I make sure I get rest on the front end. I do a lot of prep. I know my people, I read my information." Which is always good practice, but maybe that gives a introvert structure and confidence. And then knowing that I should not organize some brain-heavy thing the day after, would be just knowing yourself so that you don't do things that put yourself in a pinch. EM: Introverts might actually be in an advantage now that I think about it because an introvert doesn't want to be the star versus an extrovert— MR: That's a good point. EM: - who gets to be a facilitator, they're just like, "Oh my gosh, look at all these people looking at me. This is great." Versus an introvert who's like, "Let's get the attention off of me as soon as possible." MR: Yeah. I've been fascinated with restaurant stuff lately. You think about like, so there's back of house in front of house. So back of house where they make the food, the front of house is where they take the orders, but there's someone who, they call it manning the pass or running the pass. You're the one in between those two places. You take all the heat from the customers, but you don't often tell the people and back. You relay it in a nice way. And then you gotta yell at these guys, "Hey, I need a hamburger. Come on, I need a hamburger." And you're managing the expectations of the front of the house. So in a lot of ways that facilitators a little bit like that role. EM: That's cool. I love that. MR: Interesting. You've done this education. Do you have a sense whether that makes sense as another offering you might offer or is that an experimentation, you're gonna do? EM: It's definitely an experimentation. I think just having done graphic recording for nine years, I don't feel stagnant, I'm always looking to make things better. And I think it's easy to hit a wall and just stay there because I'm comfortable and it's, "I've hit my groove, I've hit my stride, I know what to do." But once I just keep showing up in the same way, it's like, "Hmm, I don't think I could keep going like this forever, how can I, I don't know, shake things up?" That's the best way I can phrase it. MR: And expand your skills so you could—if the job was maybe—so coming back to this is, I've heard in past discussions with people who do this work that often they'll have a facilitator and a visual person together in a room because it's really hard to do both. EM: Right. MR: It can be done. There are people that are really good that they could do it. The first person that comes to mind is Brandy Agerbeck. Really good at both, right? But that's like the unicorn skill, right, to be able to both do management. Manage the room, you know, stop the "annoying kids" from causing trouble and getting visuals on the wall, is really challenging. EM: Yeah, it is a lot. MR: Did they talk at all about that kind of setup where you maybe partner with someone? EM: Yeah, they did. They mentioned it's good to have all the skills so you can do what you can by yourself to the ability that you can. The instructor said he always works with another graphic recorder. Even if he knows how to graphic record, he hires somebody else because they're passive. They're in the background constantly capturing. And then he can always interact with them because he has that graphic recorder experience. They speak the same language. He can direct them in a way that helps create that artifact for the group. That, I think a graphic recorder could do by themselves, but the facilitator can help direct the graphic recorder. So many times, we get in a live event and we don't know what's gonna happen. We don't know if the speaker's gonna go over or if something's actually important or if it's a tangent. The facilitator can tell the graphic recorder, "This is a tangent, don't capture it." Or, "This is actually really important, draw that huge." So it could be a really cool partnership. MR: That makes me think too the way you partner. You could have two graphic recorder facilitators like a tag team in wrestling, right? Like, ding and you tag in and this person goes to the wall and they're drawing while this person's facilitating and then you would switch back, and you could have this kind of dual thing. Maybe there's strengths that one person has that the other doesn't have, and you get more out of that situation. EM: Yeah, I think partnerships would be really important moving into a group like that. MR: And I imagine too, as you do that work, a facilitator might like say, "I can do visuals, but it's not my strength. I really like the facilitation role." And they look for people who understand the dynamic but can do the wall stuff. And then the people that do the wall stuff could then have these partnerships and know, "Okay, I got this situation where I need a strong facilitator so I can focus on the visuals 'cause it's important." Then you would partner. So you have these options to mix and match based on what you wanna do. EM: Yeah. MR: So I heard you telling a story, and this will our last discussion on this space 'cause it's really fascinating, is you were just at the IFVP event in New Jersey. EM: That's right. MR: And you put yourself out there to say, "Hey, I will sketchnote the opening session." And then suddenly you got called up to the front. Tell us that story. I don't wanna lead too much with details, so. EM: Sure. So IFVP is the International Forum of Visual Practitioners. They have a conference every year. For the keynote and some of the workshops, they had a sign-up sheet for graphic recording those sessions, kind of on stage to the side. And it was just like, "Hey, if you wanna practice, get your practice in." And so, I just signed up for the first keynote 'cause I thought it'd be fun. MR: And you said nobody else signed up for it either, right? EM: Right. No one else. The keynote speaker is a facilitator and a consultant who's very experienced. He's written books. And so I think people were a little weary or wary of recording in front of him. It was like high pressure. But I didn't know who the man was. I'd never heard of him before. MR: What was his name? EM: Chris McGough. MR: Okay. I don't know him either. So I mean, now I'm learning things. EM: Yeah, we're all learning together. And so, I guess some people were a little intimidated by that, but since I didn't know, I didn't know any better, so. MR: Which is probably maybe the good trouble you can get yourself into, right? EM: Yeah, so I signed up, I got there early and I made a little title. Chris pulled me aside a short minute beforehand and said, "We're gonna work together. It'll be fine." And it was very— MR: What does that mean? EM: I was like, what does that mean 'cause I'm very used to being in the back of the room. No one talks to me, no one interacts with me. It's kind of different that it was on stage, but it's IFVP, we're all watching each other. It's professionals. So I kind of understood it. Well, then he gets 10 minutes into his keynote and which is about facilitation and working with a graphic recorder. And it was kind of meta. He was like, "And the artifact that Emily is creating is really important, so why is she off in the corner? Let's bring her up to center stage." MR: So he used as an opportunity to do a— EM: A teaching moment. MR: A lesson. Yes. EM: So he brings me on center stage. That was kind of intimidating. Again, I'm used to being in the corner and I love the corner. MR: As an introvert, that's a place you wanna be, your happy place in a lot of ways. EM: So be like me, dark, happy corner. So then he brings me up and then he talks about how it's a partnership. Like we were just saying, the facilitator and the graphic recorder have experience with each other's skills and strengths and so they can work together. So he was saying, "We're working together as a team and we also wanna involve the group." So he stopped kind of the keynote and reached out to the audience and was like, "Okay, so we're about 45 minutes into this presentation, what did she miss? Is there anything missing from this graphic recording that is important enough to add back in? There were some comments about gender. There was some comments about what kinds of drawings were there. Chris also had two flip charts that he was working on. And so, some of his images didn't get translated onto mine 'cause I was busy drawing what he was saying not what he was drawing. So I was like, "Well, he's got the flip chart, should I copy that? We already have one version." That was a lot for me to navigate. MR: Where you've got two streams of information and you have to make decisions. Yeah. EM: It was kind of a little overwhelming. I was just like making quick decisions in the moment saying, "Well, it's already on a flip chart. I don't wanna copy it. I'd rather just continue moving on." MR: You could capture it later if you needed to. EM: Right 'cause it's written down. I feel good about that. But then when he pulled the audience it was like, "Well, that thing Chris Drew is actually missing. We need to put it on the artifact." But I actually really enjoyed that process of involving the audience and getting their opinion because it's for them. It's great that I have this lens that I'm listening through, but if this artifact is for them, why don't they get a say? So that was a new concept for me. It kind of blew my mind. I was like, "That was actually really fun." It was stressful, but it was fun. MR: I guess that reminds you that you're just one individual with two ears doing your best. And you can't be omniscient and know everything and stop time and rewind it and stuff in a live moment. EM: Right. MR: It's a good reminder. EM: That also reminded me, so when people were giving their feedback, I also kind of just came to this realization on stage like, I can't please everybody in this audience. And so, I had to make decisions based on what I thought would be good for the group as well. One person said, "Add more emotion and color." And some person's like, "It's great as it is. Don't change anything." I can't please both people. MR: Right. They're going two different directions. EM: Right. So you just have to pick one and someone's gonna have their feelings hurt. That's just the reality of the world. MR: Well, and I think, if I'm not mistaken, graphic recording, there's a real emphasis to try and be as neutral as possible. EM: Right. MR: And it's impossible to be completely neutral 'cause you have a perspective. EM: Right. We're all biased. MR: So that, you just have to accept and you try your best to kind of neutralize that. But I mean, probably in the moment, it wasn't great to have people like throwing darts at you. "Emily did this wrong. You did that wrong." EM: Yeah. Afterwards, I had a few people come up to me and say, "I would've cried if I had been put on the spot like that." Or, "Oh, I'm glad it wasn't me." MR: Yeah, yeah. But I think that's when you learn. The other thing too is just like here at this conference, you're kind of among friends and people who, they're not there to beat you up, they wanna improve so you learn. So you take all of that in that context, which is really good. EM: Yeah. If it had been any other conference, I would've been probably way more scared to do that. MR: Oh yeah. EM: But if it's like, oh, we're all graphic recorders here. It's okay. MR: It was a lesson for everyone else too. They were taking notes. I think back in time of moments when I've done that kind of facilitation, it wasn't that formal, but I worked in a software company. I was the only designer and there were 50 developers and project managers and stuff. And the way we—I just made the decision because I knew I was a bottleneck. How can I alleviate a little bit of this bottleneck? So our solution was that business analysts and I, we had a big whiteboard in the space, and we had Whiteboard Mondays. And so, Whiteboard Mondays teams would rotate through and say, "Okay, what's the feature you're working on? Let's look at how it's done in the old app that we're replacing. Let's talk about what kind of stuff we think would be cool. While we're doing that, Mike will go up and draw what you're saying." And I would talk with people and try to capture that. So I would draw and then annotate in another color. EM: Cool. MR: And the cool thing was as we got into a rhythm where they got to expect and know how it worked. And I loved it when someone would say, "Hey, I have this idea, can I draw it?" I was like, "Yes." So I'd hand the marker off and they would draw their thing. I wouldn't redraw it, we would just leave it the way it was. EM: That's cool. MR: But they felt confident enough that they could come up and express their ideas. What I found was some of the most difficult features needed the developers to come up. The other thing was we would do sessions. I remember one session, it took like four or five or six iterations of sessions rehashing that idea 'cause it was complex. I think on the seventh one, before everybody came up, I drew like a tombstone and I wrote the feature on the tombstone and we were just having fun with it. But I think people really appreciated. And some of the most innovative stuff was those hash out sessions where we had to go over it over it again and developers are drawing, but we came up with really cool stuff that way. And I think probably in the end, seeing that it was facilitated that was most interesting was if someone said, "Well who designed that feature?" It's like, "We all did." EM: Yeah. MR: It wasn't me, it wasn't John, it wasn't Mary, it was all of us together we're feeding and building this thing and reacting and giving comments. And ultimately, the sketches we did would then be taken by a developer and built. And there was modifications at that level. But that was a kind of a cool feeling to feel like this is a real collaborative environment. And that's probably— EM: And it's not all on your shoulders if something fails. MR: Right. You're just one part of the team and even if things would go wrong, we would correct it. There was always this feeling like there was the ability to have a say and correct things as we went through the process. I really enjoyed that. Now that is in a comfort zone for me. I knew that topic and I had a system. I wonder how I would do in unknown topics. And that's the challenge, right. You're always going into these unknown topics and trying to make sense of them. I guess you have the advantage of being an outsider. You hear and see things that the insiders miss 'cause it's now a blind spot for them. EM: Mm-hmm. MR: That's really interesting. That's exciting to hear that you're doing that and you're thinking about adding that, augmenting your skills that way. EM: We'll see what happens. MR: Yeah. Yeah, that's really great. Maybe you'll get some work from this. I don't know. So, we'll see. Probably the other thing that I think is big since you were on last at least that I'm aware of is, you were single at that point and now you're married. You also lived, I think in Nashville at the time. EM: Mm-hmm. MR: And now you live somewhere else. Talk a little bit about the transition personally and where you're at. EM: I met my husband in Nashville. We were actually both from Colorado and we both moved to Nashville for job opportunities. And then we met at a drawing event that I was hosting called Drawing in Donuts. MR: I remember you promoting that. Yep. EM: So that worked out great. We were in Nashville seven years total. Neither of us are really big city people. I grew up in Colorado Springs. He grew up in Pueblo, which is like a south of Colorado Springs. I think we're both introverts. He's a little bit more extroverted than I am so big cities just aren't really our vibe. That's the best way I can put it. We also just had trouble connecting. I think Nashville's a different culture than we were used to. The South is very different from the Rockies and even the West coast. So, we just couldn't really adapt and fit in. And it just got old after seven years. MR: Banging your head against the wall for seven years, right? EM: Right. We just kept renewing our lease. Like I guess we'll stay, but after the pandemic, my in-laws, one of them retired and said, "Hey, we're gonna go on a grandkid tour. Why don't you come live in our house for free for a year?" And so, we were like, "Yes." MR: Wow. EM: Saving money is always a great thing especially after the pandemic. And we wanted to buy a house and Nashville was booming even more than it was when we moved there. MR: Super difficult to find anything. EM: Yeah. We were just kind of getting priced out and we didn't love it. So it's like, "Why are we here?" MR: Right. EM: So we just decided to go live with my in-laws for a year and then just figure that out. We thought maybe we'll go back to Nashville or maybe we'll go to Colorado or maybe there's something else that we haven't thought about. That was just a very temporary, like, "Hey, let's go figure it out. Just take the next step and we'll figure it out as we go." So we lived in my in-Law's house for a year and we loved it so much. We stayed. We moved out, got our own little rental in Bend, Oregon. We love the culture there. We got connected to a church community really quickly. We made friends faster in Bend than we did in Nashville. And so, it just felt like a really good personal fit. I was a little worried moving from a city to a smaller city for work 'cause I do live events and all these conferences. And my work has shifted. I obviously don't do as many big conferences anymore, but I am doing a lot more virtual events. MR: Which has also changed after the pandemic. EM: Right. As people have been asking me here at the conference, how much are you working? What's your travel ratio? What's your graphic recording to illustration ratio? And I just say, "I am sorry, I don't have a good answer. Everything's been weird since the pandemic. Some years have been really great and other years it's been a struggle and I can't really pinpoint it to any one thing." I just kind of have a lot of things factoring into why business might be good or bad. And moving and pandemics don't really help with your data. MR: Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of all mixed up. EM: Yeah. MR: It sounds like you found the right alignment. It sounds like even making friends with people was probably due to alignment. It aligned with the way you guys thought and were. EM: Yeah. And I think just, I'm happier in drier climates than I am in humid ones. MR: Yeah. Like everybody is maybe, I dunno. EM: I got into birding during the pandemic. That was my hobby. MR: I see that. EM: And so Nashville has great birds and then we moved to Bend and it was just like, "Ooh, new birds." And so, like spending out time outside hiking and discovering the nature there, it's just been like personally fulfilling and really fun. I feel like I was creatively stifled in Nashville 'cause it wasn't a personal fit. Now that I'm in Bend, I feel like I'm personally thriving, but professionally, it's a little wonky still. MR: Maybe I think that will come into alignment 'cause you're personally aligned. EM: Mm-hmm. MR: Which is, you're talking about doing facilitation, so that's another challenge. EM: Right. MR: And I would suspect that's a kind of a thing that you have to do in person more often than virtually. EM: Mm-hmm. MR: Which is probably also a challenge for you, right. You can't be in your dark corner, you gotta step out. Even though you're not the center of attention, it requires you to physically be somewhere. EM: Yeah. And Bend is a resort town, so a lot of professionals from California and Portland and Seattle come to Bend for their retreats. So I see an opportunity interesting for maybe being a local facilitator or graphic recorder at these resorts. Maybe they don't have to bring in somebody from out of town. Maybe I can be the option. MR: You wouldn't travel anywhere. EM: Yeah. MR: Hmm. Does Bend also offer a reasonably large airport so you can get places easily? EM: Yeah, we have about five airlines. MR: Oh wow. EM: We have two baggage claims. It's a tiny little airport, but it connects to a good number of places. MR: Oh, that's good. Well, and if you've got resorts there, people are at least coming in, which means they have to go out again. EM: Right. MR: So seems like it's worked out pretty well. EM: Well, I'm only two years in, so I guess it can only go up from here. MR: You've always got options, you know. So, let's talk a little bit about tools. We talked in the past, I don't even remember what tools you said. I'm sure you used Neuland markers at the time. What are you using now and are there new things that you've discovered that you might wanna share that people can check out? EM: Yeah. One thing I've learned in the past couple years is I just got really bogged down in my tools. They were holding me back. So I used to use this—gosh, whatever that standard Moleskin size is, like the half page. MR: Five by eight, or something. EM: Yeah, five by eight. That was my go-to for eons. Then I realized I wasn't creating as many sketch notes because the page was too big. It just felt like a lot of work and I was like really busy with illustration. And so, my fun sketchnotes took the back burner. MR: It become work. EM: It became work. And I was like, it's too much to do. It's gonna take too long. So I just stopped. But once I got a smaller sketchbook, I felt like I was doing it way more often. I switched to these pocket Moleskin sketchbooks that are— MR: And they're kind of horizontal, right? EM: They're like a three by five. You can orient them horizontally or vertically. I really like those. I'm vacillating between those and, let's see if I can remember the brand name, handbook. It says hand.book on the cover. It's a sketchnote or sketchbook, that I found. Mike Lowery, who's an illustrator uses them a lot. I got the tip from him about these sketchbooks. They're square. I think it's maybe five or six by six. The paper is pretty thick and I really like those. So, usually have, one of those two sketchbooks with me. MR: Going on. Okay. And I suppose the other thing too is those smaller books, a lot of the reason when I started Sketchnoting, I used a pocket-sized Moleskine was because I could stick it in my pocket, and only travel with a pen and the book. And I was always ready to go at any time. So like cycling or birding or hiking. That's the kind of thing you could take anywhere. EM: Yeah, yeah. The big Moleskine journals, I never took them anywhere. MR: Too clunky. EM: My purse wasn't big enough. MR: What about pens and things, have you found any different, have you gotten into any watercolors or anything like that? What stuff are you using in the books? EM: U Brands has a felt tip pen. They're pretty similar to microns. You can buy 'em at Target or OfficeMax. I really like those. They're not very black, but they're pretty light, not light fast. They don't bleed. So I can write with the U Brand's pen and then put yellow over it and it doesn't bleed. I love that. And they don't bleed through the paper, which is great. Bleed through is my number one pet peeve right now. MR: Okay. EM: I do like Tombow Mono Twin pens. MR: I love those too. EM: Those bleed, but they're also really black suits, like pros and cons. MR: Trade off. Yeah. EM: And then, I don't really do watercolor. I'm still pretty much on the marker train. I use Tombow dual brush pens and zebra mild liner brush pens. Neuland, I don't have the fine tip Neulands as much. The ones I have are probably 10 years old. So the nibs are starting to wear out and I haven't replaced them, but Neuland fine ones. And then iPad, I use Adobe Fresco. MR: Okay. So it sounds like maybe you're not doing as much board work as maybe you have in the past if your Neulands are getting old and they're getting frayed. EM: Well, those are the fine ones. I still have the number ones and the big ones that I use for the board work. But yeah, board work has definitely decreased over the years. MR: Hmm. There's an interesting company called Art Toolkit. We interviewed the person who runs that right in Oregon, up the coast, I think Port Townsend. I'm not sure how that looks. EM: Oh yeah, that's in Washington. MR: So that's in Washington. That's Maria Coryell-Martin. EM: Oh, cool. MR: She does something called Art Toolkit. She's really interesting. You'd probably really vibe with her. She went on expeditions and so she kept on squeezing her tools down. She's into— EM: Oh, wow. MR: - watercolor. But what she's produced now is like these little zip up books with the nylon, like ballistic nylon cover. Inside you can put whatever notebook you want and then these little square tins and you can buy the colors you want. They're magnetic. EM: Oh yeah, I've seen those. MR: And you snap 'em in this little thing. And then they include a water, like a syringe. So you could suck up water from a stream and then you can do water coloring with it. EM: That's so cool. I haven't tried that yet. MR: They make little kits. It's called Art Toolkit. We'll put a link in the show notes and then link to her interview. That's kind of cool if someone's listening or watching it into outdoors. EM: Yeah. MR: I've got one that she sent me and I took it on a train trip we did with our family and it was a lot of fun. I need to do more outdoor stuff so I can actually use the dumb thing so I don't feel like I've lived up to her expectations, but she's always really nice about that, so. EM: That's cool. MR: Well, that's really cool. We typically do tips. I don't even remember what tips we did back in the old days. EM: Me either. MR: The way I frame it is someone's listening or watching, they're a visual thinker, whatever that means to them, and maybe they've hit a plateau or they're just stuck. What would you say to someone like that to encourage them or to give 'em ideas for how to maybe break out of it or do something new? EM: I would say just keep experimenting. I've been doing visualization for almost 10 years and I feel like I've hit those plateaus before. And sometimes the experimentation looks bad and it feels bad, and it feels like you're stepping backwards, but that's actually making progress. So just keep experimenting is my advice. MR: Cool. Gimme two other tips. EM: Ooh, two other tips. MR: I wanna go for three. See if I can get two more outta 'ya. EM: Ooh, let's see. MR: Kind of on the spot. Sorry. EM: I would say maybe try something outside of your practice, but still creative. Take a pottery class. Go for a photography, outdoor walk, or just something creative that you wouldn't normally sign up for. 'Cause I think so much of our creative advice really translate across fields, and sometimes it's fun to go eavesdrop on another field and see what you can learn from it. MR: For me that's been learning how to bake bread and make pizza. EM: Oh my gosh, you're pizza. I'm gluten free now, so every time I see it— MR: Well, we're going gluten free, so we're having to figure that out. EM: No. MR: Yeah. I think we're going sourdough probably, so that helps. But yeah, that was my experimental space too. And I think it's important to be a beginner somewhere. And then you can, like, I've always talked about overlaying, so the sketchnoting skill overlaid on something like for you birding or cycling or hiking or whatever travel, your travel work that you've done. EM: I think one last tip would be just be very careful of when sketchnoting becomes work. So whether it feels like work because it's too big, too intimidating, too complex or if it's work because maybe you're starting to do it professionally. I'm not saying don't do it, I'm just saying be aware of when it starts to feel like work and then find something else to supplement that joy factor. The sketch noting can have joy, but if work is attached to it, maybe there's something else to fill the joy bucket. MR: Yeah, that switches the pressure which isn't helpful sometimes. Two things I wanted to mention before we go. Number one, you got a great book, the Art of Visual Note Taking. Tell us a little bit about the status of that now. 'Cause I think when we first had you on, it was brand new. I think maybe it launched or it was close to launching. Maybe it was just before it launched. And now it's been a while. Tell us how long it's been out and how it's selling and what's your experience? EM: It turned five years old in March. MR: Wow. EM: Or May sometime last spring or this spring. My publishing numbers are always six months behind. My last numbers were 19,700. Somewhere there. MR: Wow, that's great. EM: It's doing pretty good. My agent called me a while back and he was saying it's time to start thinking about book number two, but I'm actually pretty stuck there. I don't know what to write about next. I don't have an inspiring idea. I have a post-it system that I use every week. My back burner section is just stuff that I should think about. And my second book idea is just always in the percolation section. MR: Sometimes it just has to percolate for a while. EM: Oh, yeah. I don't wanna rush it. MR: Yep. And then the other thing I was gonna mention too was, I really loved when you traveled to Sweden and Norway and I think Finland and Scotland or something like that. EM: Yeah. We went to six countries in three weeks. MR: I couldn't keep up, but you did really beautiful. And I think you were experimenting with those notebooks you talked about, right? EM: Yep. MR: The ones that could either be vertical or horizontal. Tell us what was that experience like? EM: I've looked at travel sketchnotes a lot and I was so inspired and I wanted to do it. That was my first time in Europe and traveling overseas, so I really wanted to capture it. And so I made a commitment, I have to sketch every day. Before I go to sleep, I have to sketch at least one page. MR: Something. EM: It doesn't have to be a whole spread, but knowing me it's just like overdone and there's like five pages for day one. So I had to actually adjust expectations and like simple down instead of just overdoing it 'cause it's like, "I'm jet lagged, I wanna go to bed really bad right now. I'm just gonna do one page." I was kind of taking care of myself at the same time, but wanting to document visually in a journal so I can remember what we did and where we went. I had pages where it was a traditional sketchnote where it's like little popcorns with a path of the time. Then I had others that was just text with a little icon here and there. I really had fun and played with it. I have spreads that are all realistic sketches and then I have pages with cartoons. It's just kind of everything. MR: It was fun for me to go through and see your experimentation and how you're changing. I think later on you got sick. EM: Yeah, we got. MR: So you were dealing with like, "Okay, I made this agreement I have to do. What if you're sick, how do you deal with that?" How did you deal with that? EM: I don't know what I had, whether it was flu or COVID or something like that, but we got to Scotland, and I was just fevery. We got off the plane and it was raining and the rain felt so good. It was just like, oh, thank goodness we're in a cold place 'cause Paris was so hot. We landed, we got to the Airbnb and I just slept for like three days. MR: Wow. EM: I did not sketch. I thought about it. I was like— MR: I think that's probably where you can let yourself outta that agreement. EM: I did, and so then I caught up afterwards. I left a couple blank pages saying, "Okay, nothing happened. I was in bed for three days." We'll just— MR: Draw the picture of you in bed. EM: - I'll just do a journal entry there. Then we went to Berwick-upon-Tweed for a little half day trip. And I started that sketch the next day. Then after we got home, that's when I did the journaling about being sick 'cause it was less interesting. MR: And then you could reflect on it a little bit— EM: Yeah. MR: - in a way. Yeah, that was really cool. I thought that was a lot of fun. We'll, of course, include the link to the book and the travel sketchnotes so people can check it out. Well, it's been so good to have you on the show in this unusual setting. EM: Thanks, Mike. And always a pleasure to listen and be on the sketchnote Army podcast. MR: Yeah, not a problem. So for whoever's watching or listening, this wraps another episode. Till next time, talk to you soon. | |||
| 12 Dec 2023 | Ordained minister Rev Andy Gray, loves to turn what people say into art - S14/E07 | 01:01:18 | |
In this episode, Rev Andy Gray, who obsessively drew as a kid, shares an incredible 30-year journey of graphic designing and how his art has evolved to become an editorial cartoonist, coach, and graphic illustrator. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everybody, it's Mike and I'm here with Andy, a.k.a Rev Gray. Andy, how are you doing? Andy Gray: I'm doing all right. Thank you. MR: It's good to have you. We were connected by Patty and Grant, good friends of mine who actually just finally met in Holland, just this fall. So really good to make that connection and have people out there. I've always got people out there suggesting people I'd have on the show. So thank you, Grant and Patty. Probably more Grant than Patty, I suppose. But Rev, why don't you tell us who you are and what you do, and then go right into your origin story? How did you get here doing what you're doing, and all interesting tidbits along the way? AG: Yeah. We're gonna go back a long time. So who I am, and what do I do? I'm a graphic recorder and I'm a children's and grownup book illustrator, and I illustrate magazines as well. Think of me—I don't know whether you've ever heard of a guy called Quentin Blake. MR: Quentin Blake, I don't know that name. It sounds familiar, but I don't know him. AG: If I say "Charlie in the Chocolate Factory." MR: Oh yeah. AG: And I say Roald Dahl, and I say, the person who illustrated Roald Dahl then immediately you start to get to know who Quentin Blake is. MR: Got it. AG: He's just turned 90, actually. MR: Wow. AG: And so if you take his style and you mix it with people from the other side of the pond, 'cause obviously I'm a Britt, people from the other side of the pond from your side say, "Oh, you look just like the New Yorker." So think of me as an editorial cartoonist illustrator, and you won't be far off. I'm also a Church of England Minister. I've been in youth and children's ministry for decades, and I plant churches and stuff, and I train people and coach people. And basically, I try and help everybody to live life in their fullest. I'm also a DJ, magician, a dad, husband, and general mad person. I do everything I can. I get bored easy. MR: Well, you fit right in the Sketchote Army podcast and in the Sketchote community, 'cause we're all quirky. I've been reminded of that when I just came back from Laiden, from the International Sketchnote Camp there. And loved everybody. You know, we're really community minded, but we're all quirky in our own ways. So you fit right in. AG: Fantastic. Yeah, I've kind of got this target, and next time you do something like that, I wanna be there. So I was too late to take advantage this time, but I'll be there next time. MR: Sounds good. Well, why don't you get into, like, where did you start from? You can go back as far as when you were a little baby, I suppose if you remember. AG: We were talking just before we started rolling, weren't we? Okay, so this will make some people either laugh or they'll be sick. If you're eating at the moment, do stop. Have you finished your mouthful? Excellent. Good. Right. Because my mother tells me very reliably that the first time that I really I got into art was when I was in my cot when I was about two years old. In fact, probably younger, actually, I was just a toddler. So maybe about 18 months. And when she put me down for a nap in the afternoon, I would take the contents of my nappy and I would smear them all over the walls. So, you know, it is early start in my expressionist period using brown pigment and various shades. So funny enough, she stopped putting me down after that. I guess then I mean, I've only just in the last what? In the last five years, been diagnosed having autism or being autistic. I'm actually autistic because we prefer Asperger's or neuros-spicy. Which makes sense for a lot of the things which I'm gonna talk to you about. But I couldn't sleep as a little kid, which is quite normal for autistic people, you know? And so, I'd wake up about 1:00 in the morning and I'd have pens and paper, and I remember so often I just would be sound asleep for about four hours. So I'd get my pens and paper and I would just draw continually for about four hours. And then mum would come in and she'd see me that I'd be falling asleep with pens and paper all over my bed. And so, the next thing would happen the next night. So I obsessively drew, and that's kind of like always been my story. I couldn't draw that well. I used to always be jealous of my friends at school. They could draw really well and I couldn't, probably bit rubbish till I was about 14. And then it started with me copying Bino. Have you ever come across Bino? If I say comic, the problem is, it's sort of like around the world, comics are kind of like superheroes and stuff. In the UK, we talk about comics and we're talking about sort of like cartoon characters in strip cartoons you might call them. MR: Yes. We had this in the newspaper. I don't know Bino, though. That's not a character I know. AG: Right. Okay. So it is that kind of style. So Dan de Bino UK people know exactly what I'm talking about. So think for you, it's the kind of simplistic style that you get with peanuts. MR: Yes. AG: And we have magazines full of that which is just fun. And I used to copy Backstreet Kids which people will know the name of over here, and I could get it so that I could draw them without needing to reference them. And so, I just did that and, you know, covered all my school books in Backstreet Kids and other illustrations. And then you weren't supposed to, I went to a Deb Posh private school, and you weren't supposed to do that. And I did. It wasn't naughty, but I just didn't get told off for it 'cause they like recipe me work as well. So I drew all of this stuff. And then when I was 14 like I said, I couldn't really draw. And then my little sister was born and my dad took me away. And when he took me away, he I bought a book o pencil drawing pencils. So we just done a whole day for two or three days, and I just started drawing from that book. And suddenly, literally overnight, it clicked and I was able to draw anything I wanted in pencil, you know, realistically or not realistic, however I wanted. So the first gig came in maybe about six months after that from somebody, and she wanted a picture of Peter Rabbit. So I drew it and she paid me 10 quid. I thought, "Ooh, this is easy." MR: Wow. AG: So, yeah. So back in the '80s, 10 quids is nothing to be shy of. So I did bits and pieces here and there, but I really wanted to be an editorial cartoonist. So when I got married in my early 20s, I self-study the style of how to be an editorial cartoonist. And it went really well. But I ended up working so hard. I was also working for a company called British Gas. And it was a regional office, and this, it was the size of a warehouse and it was just open-plan office space. So, if you can imagine what that was like and what that did, I was right in the middle of it, what that did to an autistic brain, not knowing it was autistic at the time. And I was trying to get this editorial cartoon business going. And we didn't have internet in those days. Do you remember that? MR: Yeah. AG: We didn't have internet, did we? MR: I was there. AG: In the very early '90s, I had a fax machine. I was dead proud. And that was it, that's all we had. And so, trying to get the business in was really hard. And although I sort of like did—you know, the newspaper did pick up for a couple of issues, that was it. And I ended up burning out really badly. And during that period, I couldn't have time off work with stress, somebody came to me and said, "Look, you know, find out what God really wants you to do." So I'm a Christian, like I said, I'm a minister. They said, "Find out what God really wants you to do." Within two weeks I'd worked out that really, "I need you to put the pens down," and just say, "God, what do you want me to do?" And within two weeks somebody came back and said, "Why don't you train for youth and children's ministry?" So it's like, "Hmm, all right then that sounds right." And it came from so many places, people saying it, they didn't know each other, so I thought, "We're gonna do it." So dived into going training and I sat in the lecture theater, listening to theology. And it's sort of like getting fairly bored. 'Cause theology is quite a boring thing, really. While everybody was taking notes, I didn't know taking notes. I learned how to mind map, I also learned memory techniques, and all sorts of other things. Just trained myself in the whole lot. But then when the thing interesting was happening, I just started drawing. And so, I didn't draw anything particular. I just drew in the same way as I used to drawing my school books. So that was great. And then I found myself drawing a little bit for the college 'cause they wanted little bits and pieces done. So that was okay. Then I went to go and be a youth and children's minister, and I found that the art stuff that I did then became what I was doing as part of my ministry. And so, that lasted for, I think about, we'll do rough figures about 10 years, and then I went to go and work for a Christian publishing organization. So they got about 10 million, 12 million pound turnover. And they did publishing as well as training people. So I trained people around the country and in the Northwest of the UK in working with young people and children and how to do it and how to help them get a life of fullness and all the rest of it. And they found out that I could draw. And so, they said, "Would you mind drawing a book for us?" "Oh, that's quite good. Draw a book for you". And they paid nicely for them. Oh, that's all right, isn't it? And they said, "Would you do some more drawing for us?" And so, I had this side hustle of drawing at the same time, and it all went through their book. So I didn't have to do any bookkeeping or anything. And that was very nice. At the same time, as we drew to the end of, I was doing more and more drawing for them. I was also learning how to be an entrepreneur and developing those skills of running businesses, but also lots of side hustles. So I got things going and I was trading mp3 players and all sorts of other things on the side. It was great. And then I got a calling to go and get a dog collar. So, you know, it's the whole dog collary thing to be a church minister besides just a youth and children's worker. So, for me, it wasn't really an upgrade, it was just a development of ministry, and I was doing something else, but I was gonna become a pioneer, an ordained pioneer minister, which means planting churches in interesting places like coffee shops and things like that, rather than just going running normal churches. And I knew that I didn't really wanna be in full-time, paid ministry because it ties you to the church. And I'm a minister for people who don't go to church. That's the kind of person I am. Anyway, I trained in theology. And while I was doing it, I went back to drawing at the back of the lecture theaters 'cause it's boring. I could write the papers, no problem, do the study and stuff. And then one day, 'cause I mean it was pretty small, things that we were doing, small cohort. It was only about 40 of us. And we were just really good friends. So I was about 40-odd at the time. And I was really good friends with the lecturers, you know, 'cause we all just got on together. It is that kind of format when you're doing this kind of training. And one of the lecture one day turned around, he said, "Would you draw what I say?" I said, "Sorry, what?" He said, "Would you draw what I say?" He said, "Well, yeah, instead of just drawing," he said, "I'd love to see what it looked like if you drew what I said." Oh, all right. So I drew what he said and he's like, "Oh, that's quite interesting." So I then just started drawing what people said. Instead of drawing sort of like—I mean, I dunno whether people are familiar with what you might call Christian art drawn and painted in sermons and the like, but it's usually quite squirly-worrly. And it's usually got hands in it and it's usually got a dove in it. Sometimes it might be the story and that's about it and it's art. But I wanted something else. So I started drawing art and then combining key phrases in there and making it part of the arts and doing that. And I just built on that. And then when I was ordained and I was a trainee vicar, if you like. So the best way of putting it, so cure it. Sometimes I wasn't lecturing , I wasn't actually leading, and I wasn't preaching. So I'd sit there bored again. I can't stand church. I'm a minister who hates church I get bored. That's why people love my sermons and my talks and the way I lead church 'cause I get bored quicker than anybody else does. So that's great. So I sat there drawing instead, and because I got in this habit of drawing what people said, I started drawing the sermon. And I would start by seeing, so we'd have a bit of a Bible story or a Bible passage, and then I'd draw the outline of that. Then I'd start putting in smaller elements of what was preached on within that bigger picture and where necessary adding words. Great. Did that for about 10 years, you know. And then I found that throughout all of this, with the theology side of things and stuff, people started saying, "Andy, can we have a copy, please? It'll help us remember." Brilliant. There's no skin off my nose, you know. So they'd take copies, then they'd share them around and all the rest of it. I did another job coming out of that because, after 10 years of church planting and all the rest of it, that was great. And then I decided that it was time to start moving away from being a paid minister. And I wanted to achieve being a self-supporting minister so that I wasn't tied to the whole—there's quite a lot of management involved in the Church of England now because you have to look after more than one church. And so, there's a huge number of meetings, and everything else. I thought that's not me. I have to sort of like, be freelance, if you like. So little bit of prayer, "What do you want me to do, God?" And answer came back looking to try and work towards being self-employed and stuff. And then what should I do? You know, be an illustrator. I'm not sure I wanna be an illustrator again. And then within two weeks of this conversation somebody came to me and said, "Andy, you don't remember me from college days 20 years ago. We were in the year below you. We've just found you on Facebook. Do you still draw pictures?" Well, oddly enough, "Yes. I've just started getting back into drawing pictures and being paid for it." "Oh, great. Could you illustrate our book for us, please?" " Don't wanna Illustrate books." Spoke to a mate of mine. He turned around, he said, "You gotta illustrate." He said, "You can do whatever God sends you." Oh, all right then. Okay, fair enough. I did this one book, and it's not stopped ever since. MR: One thing leads to another. AG: Yeah. Slowly the price has gone up. Every time I've finished one book, another book—I mean, I've got, I think it's eight projects sitting on my desk at the moment of books people want illustrating. It's a nightmare. Anyway, can't complain. So what happened was, though that as I got out of this, so this was what? This was five years back. And I dropped down to working for the Southwest of England, training people in churches and to talk about their faith. Fun enough. But carried on training people. And I've got a way of coaching and a way of styling how I train people. It's all the same thing. It's selling them the idea that they can actually do it. It's great. And so I can do that. During this time, I was illustrating more and more books. And then September last year, I realized that I'd started—the grant funding was running out this coming summer. So the summer is just gone. And I realized I'd have to leave even earlier than I thought before the money ran out. So I said to the guy who was my line manager at the time, I said, "In one week I've turned down 3000 pounds worth of money. I can't keep going like this. I think I have to leave early." He's a brilliant Christian man. He said, "I think you do actually excellent and we'll help you to do it." What? So like, oh great. All right. Okay. And I thought, "Well, I wanna see what God wants as well. So I said, "Okay, God, what do you want me to do next?" So illustration itself, I mean, I developed this very fast illustration style because the way of making ends, meters and book illustrates is you've gotta be fast and people have to like what you do. So I'd really gone to this point of really refining my art style into a very, very posh art style, which took ages to do, and was very pretty. And people said, "Yeah, that's really nice. I really like that." And I get paid for it. But it wasn't quick enough to make an income. And then we were just finished with the diocese, paid for us all to do coaching. Coaching, training. So I'm a trained coach. I'm not a coach, qualified coach 'cause I've not done the hours. But I'm a trained coach 'cause I've done the training. So take it as you leave it. So don't call yourself a coach, but you know how to do it. And during that time, we had to practice coaching each other. And there were two really significant things that came up. One of them we'll might mention later, which is something about phrasing coaching. So it would be good to come back to that because I think it's a top tip is that one. MR: Okay. AG: But the other thing was I was trying to work out how to make ends meet. And I was in this coaching session with this bloke. He was coaching me, I was just having fun. And I said I have to work out how to make ends meet. It was then I realized that I had to dump my style of being very posh and fast, very posh and nice and digging ages, charge more, much more, and drop back to the fastest speed that I developed when I was 18, 19, 20 years old of this editorial cartoonist. And it just so happened that the 20 years previously—20 years? 15 years previously, as I'd been doing the book illustrations, I got so fed up with posh illustrations what basically burned me out a bit on the illustration, that I picked up a book and this is gonna be one of my recommended books by a guy called Quentin Blake to basically for the people who couldn't draw. Now I could draw, but what it did is it was so close to my style and I hadn't realized, I thought, well I'll read this book and you're drawing in it at the same time. It's brilliant. And you draw and you read at the same time, you draw what he tells you to. By the end of it, within 36 hours, my style had completely relaxed, and was 20 times faster than it was before. And I started putting it on Facebook and people weren't just going, "Oh, that's nice." They went, "Oh wow, that's so awesome." And I'm like going, okay, faster, people think it's awesome and I can charge more, brilliant. So that became my style. And you'll see how that's relevant in a minute because 12 months ago, not sure what I was gonna do next. I of course start praying, saying, "God, what should I do next?" You know, and said, "Oh, I give up. I've got no idea what to do next. It's your job." And within 24 hours, somebody gave me a call. I called him Matt Pritchard, and he gave me a phone call. And he said, "Andy", he said, "You drew for me 15 years ago a logo." And we've been in touch ever since. We're both magicians. He's much better than me. Much better. He's a member of the magic circle. I'm not. And he said, "Can you draw conversations?" I said, "Oh, don't know. I've got no idea. What do you mean?" And he said, "Well, have a look at the Bible project." So I went on there and said, well that's the kind of style. Okay, right. And he said, "Do you wanna have a go?" And I said, "Well, let me look into it and see if anybody else has done it now." So I thought, what could he refer to? And I thought, well, what is it? lsn't it a live illustration, maybe? So I looked it up and went, "Hang on, it's got a name. It's called graphic recording. I've been doing this for the last 30 years. What? And it's an industry. This is so cool." So I jumped in with Benjamin Felis' course 'cause I had no idea. So I like to learn fast. And because of doing all the artwork, and so, I built up some money in the business for training and stuff. So I bought his course. So props to Ben on that one. His main thing was that really helped me was the reference to three books. To a few books. And I saw a line finally between a TED Talk and what he was saying, how it was done. And I went, "Ah, I do do this already. It's not just called drawing in church, which I've called it for years. I can do it." So I've not even come across you by that point, you know? MR: Sure. AG: More conversation with Matt, and I said, "I'd like to do it on iPad 'cause then we can try it out and just link it through a video projector." And he said, "Well, I think it should be done on paper or on canvases or something. So I looked around, and well, you could do it on a big foam core board, but I thought, well, the people we are doing it with, were gonna be young people talking about faith and science and the link between the two. And I thought I can't draw it like that for you. Because they would feel guilty if they threw it away. Anyway, I said, we'll do it on iPad. Anyway, it was in January just gone that I was going to a conference, and I thought, "Well, I know they won't mind if I sit at the back. But I wanna do it a bit more than just on a piece of paper. I don't wanna draw an iPad. I can do it on paper and see what it feels like." So I got myself four pieces of foam cardboard, which is about A1 size on its side. But then I also got the paper and I used the foam call board as my board, a real lightweight board, and my previous easel of broker. So I bought myself a new easel dropped another a hundred quid on market pens and some paper. And I said to the guy, the tech guys that back said, do you mind if I just sit at the back with you? You know, it wasn't a big space. Only about 200 people there for a three-day conference and said, "Can I just sit at the back with you and just draw?" Anyway, so I did. Quick cut ahead, the result of doing that means that the main people presenting then found out what I was doing. The fact that I could draw, become really good friends. And I've ended illustrating for them and recouping about 5,000 pounds worth of work of them. That's beside the point, the graphic recording stuff. I've done books for them. They go internationally. So I'm an international illustrator, you see. I was at the back drawing and then somebody came up and saw what I was doing and they went, "Oh wow. Can I take a photo? I thought you were just doing normal Christian art, like everybody else's but this is different." And then I even had one person—so people start taking photographs and I've got these small pieces of paper, I say small, but A1s or landscape all over the place being drawn in this style. I do focus on the art first, but I was trying at that point to say it was kind of like there was a bit of a popcorn method going on. But I wanted it to be artistic. By that point, I hadn't quite managed to smush these two things together. You know, the style I used to do together with actually sort like trying to get data that people can hook in with. So I was like, "Oh, my word. Okay, yeah short Cushing photographs. For an artist, people taking photographs of your work is like, that's the best ever. You don't care about selling if you just, I mean, you want to sell stuff. You have people taking photographs, and you get excited. And then I asked this lady, come up, looked at this picture, and burst into tears. I thought, "By it, what I done now." And I said, why? She said, "I can never follow anything that's said in these sort of things. And I feel so guilty about it. What you have done have made it so that I can remember what was said." MR: Wow. AG: And one of the things that my friend guided me on—well another friend actually, I got too many millionaire friends and one particular millionaire friend said to me, when I was trying to work out what to do, he said, "Well, how does your art serve people?" And I said, "Well, I dunno, really." And digging around then we discovered that doing the art as the books is I help people tell their stories. So that's my tagline. But I realized that this person, I'd done an act of translation and later I found it was actually even similar to the way she reacted, was even similar to someone you get sign language if they're hard of hearing or deaf or deafened, because some people, they can't manage to remember what's said. And so, doing this meant that it wasn't just exciting, and oh, look, my words have been drawn. And more recently I've discovered a better word is interface. But we can come onto that one as well if you like. So anyway, so I thought, well, I've never managed to do nine hours a day for three days on an iPad. It would've done my head in. So we're gonna do paper. So I phoned up, I can't remember whether you've had him on or not, but Tom from Inky thinking? MR: No, I need to have him on. I need to have him. AG: He would be cool. He'll be cool. I'll link you later at another point. MR: Okay. AG: But they're one of two suppliers in the UK for Neuland products. MR: Hmm. Okay. AG: And I spoke to them, and he was really good. And after talking to him, I decided I was gonna actually invest in the graphic wall. MR: Yeah. I've heard that. AG: LW hyphen X, you know, this sounds very cool, but you can expand it in all sorts of things. I mean, I've got now got five panels, so I go out four meters by one and a quarter-meters tall. So this thing's huge. I've even got the winders on the ends now, so I can do 25 meters nonstop, which is just so cool. MR: And for those who are watching or listening who don't know what the GraphicWally, I think is, was the name of it. It's like— AG: Well, the GraphicWally is the little thing. MR: It's the little one. Okay. AG: It's quite narrow and small. I'm talking about the free-standing job basically. MR: Big guy. AG: If you take a flip chart board and basically, you just stack them for 4 meters. MR: Five AG: It's five. Yeah. That's what I've got. All right. And it just keeps going. It's awesome. MR: And I think it's got like a winder, isn't it? A roll of paper that you can continuously AG: It doesn’t unless you drop the funds on the new stuff, so. MR: Oh, okay. AR: So be aware this stuff isn't cheap. I think I've dropped about five grand on equipment so far. MR: Yeah. I think that's the key of the GraphicWally, is it's a smaller one. I think they intended it for a camera or something, right? AR: Yeah, that's right. MR: Because I know Ben Felis has it, and it's got like a crank. It's got a roll of paper on one side and a roll on the other. And it's sort of like old school film, you know, you would drag it across and take pictures. AG: Yeah. Well, if you 10 x that, literally 10 x it, you get what I've got now. MR: Oh God. AR: And the thing is that, I mean, this is a top tip for anyone wanting to go into graphic recording, go with looking like you know what you need to do. Now apparently, I might be wrong on this, but apparently Disney discovered this. So I go full lo place. So Disney they had a little bit of full feedback. Apparently, Disney, Europe, I think had some feedback. The people thought that it was dirty. So what they did, they got more cleaners in and people still said it was dirty. So they then put their cleaners in yellow jackets. Everybody said it was clean. One of the things that I've established in the past is a Ballgame Cafe. So a community Ballgame Cafe. I mean, I made the money through affiliate processes at Amazon to buy the ballgame for the Ballgame Café. Is great, and just left it there. So, community thing. But we recognized that if people came along to the cafe for the first time, 'cause the popup cafe and looked, I went, "Oh, look, you've got just a few games, haven't you?" They won't be impressed. In the end, we've got about 3000 pounds worth of games all through me raising entrepreneurial funds. So it all works. And raise these funds to buy all these games. So people came in, it's like a sweet shop, they went, "Oh wow." Got excited and then stayed. And it wouldn't have been in the same way. And, you know, take the tip from Disney. I mean, I heard about Disney later, but I've always had since then, make it look like you know what you're doing by having the right kit. The idea of all the gear and no idea isn't quite true. Because actually, if you go in and you've just got sort of like ropey stuff, you can have all the ideas and the, the professionals will look and go, yeah, I haven't got a clue. And so, you won't have that start of a 10 of them getting that first impression. You have a good set of kit, and they will look and say, you know what you're doing, and therefore they'll come with that mindset. It is called the Pygmalion Effect, I do believe. So look that one up. Quite interesting. So anyway, so I invested in this kit, went and did this gig elsewhere in the country for my mate Matt. And we first of all worked with those from primary school age up to about 11 years old. And it was brilliant. It was great fun. And then we did it again, and this time with teenagers. And the teenagers got well into the conversations. It was really deep, it was a really heavy day that they were talking about, science and faith and really digging deep. I mean, they did heavy lifting. And I just drew it. It was a bit more text than I liked on it, but it didn't matter. And we ended up with this really big board of that particular one was three and a half meters long with all of their conversations throughout the whole day. And illustrated all illustrated. And at the end of it, these 16, 17-year-olds came up and photographed their own work. MR: Wow. AG: And it's like, hang on a minute, you know, you have done really heavy lifting and you've been excited about taking photographs of this work at the end of the day. And the holy grail of a young person's phone is their photo albums. And it's like, I don't believe this. So it kind of like went on from there. Then I started drawing for different people and carrying on sort of like, 'cause I mean, once you've invested, I mean, at that point it was about 2000 pounds. MR: Now you have to use that stuff. AG: Yeah. I've gotta use it. You know, even if it just benefits people. And I discovered I started putting things on LinkedIn about, you know, sort of like what I was discovering on the way through learning stuff still out, you know, building up relationships with a number of people. So, you know, Grant was one of those people on the way through and Patty as well. And then there were other people. A guy called James Duro. Brilliant, brilliant chap. He worked in South Africa. He's just wonderful, wonderful man. And so, he's been doing it for 25 years. And Dario, I know you've had Dario on. MR: Of course, yeah. Dario. I've had in on, yeah. AG: Yeah. You've had him on. And he was just like really helpful. I didn't take part in his course. He just helped, which is just brilliant, you know? MR: Yeah. AG: So at some point I gonna be jumping in with him just to just pay for his course, say thank you for everything he's helped me with for free, you know? MR: Yeah. AG: And it was just been a right old journey. So in one sense, I've been doing this thing for 20, 30 years, and in another sense, I've been doing it for 12 months, which is bizarre. But I think for me, the most exciting thing was, you know, I did a very big gig on Thursday. So like just this last Thursday, gone, and they had sort of like these major, I mean, you've probably heard of BP and maybe Iceland. I dunno if you've heard of Iceland. MR: Yeah. AG: They had those kinds of people, really top-level people, and my top-level managers there at the same time. And there's a guy there from I won't say which big company it was, but the feedback you gave, I'm just gonna read this to you 'cause this actually kind of like encapsulates everything I'm trying to do. So remember, I'm trying to make art. So I'm coming from an artist's point of view. I'm coming from an artist's perspective rather than I'm trying to communicate. And we can talk about, actually no, you do do art. Don't care what everybody says about how we are not an artist. Yes, you are. And I'll tell you why. But this is what this guy said to me. He said, okay. So he said this, "What became more apparent to me through the day with the benefit of using illustration to help capture and enhance the message, creating a new perspective, and helping people make necessary connections to understand the story." So this was a day of virtual, nothing but data. And I was thinking, "How do I illustrate data?" And pictures were forming, so I just drew them. He said, "And although individuals may have taken away something different, it highlighted to me that a different perception of reality is often needed. People of the nervous system of any organization. Yet often the importance of people, their perception of reality and how they connect everything together is underestimated." So what I do is I turn what people are saying into art. I will use as few words as possible to make it make sense so that it creates a bit of a dissonance. People have to solve the puzzle. Because when you solve puzzles, you get endorphins. You then, this is how Wordle works. You then share it with somebody next. You say, oh, I solved it. And they go, oh, I've solved it as well. And then they talk about it. Then endorphins work and community works, and then it becomes human. And I realized at that point that from what I got the other day, I thought, that's what I'm doing. It's is interpretation, but even more so, it's interface between data and information, and even if it's told in story and creating an interface between that and people who are listening and watching, and it's making it more human. So in a world of AI, when we're going faster and faster towards AI, me going in with my analog tools of paper on purpose, 'cause it's a choice I've made, makes it so that it makes that stuff more human. And the more human we can make things, I think that's the way forward for the future. MR: I would think that because it's physical and it becomes more visceral, right? Like if you had done this on an iPad and even broadcast it on the same size screen, it might've had a similar impact, but there's something about that physical, like you can go up and touch it. Like those kids, those teenage kids can go up and touch their words that were drawn by you and maybe they can even feel the ink, right? You know, like theres something tangible about it, right? Because the other thing is so much of our world is intangible, right? It's these photons and pixels and bits that we have control of, but they can change or they can disappear at any moment. And that's aren't real are real. AG: One of real the big influences was when we had when Australian side paper or digital paper or digital. The team who's doing the school's work stuff sent me through one of their promo videos. And on it, one of the teachers, the head teachers from a previous session had said, what I love about this and this wasn't my drawing or anything else, this was pre-me getting involved, says that we spend so much of our time on iPads and screens to have the kids be able to come in and talk in and explore in an analog way. Is fantastic. So when it was being suggested to me by one of the other team members, oh, let's just do it on iPad. It was like, but then we're just going back to the thing that the teacher said was not the unique selling thing. So I thought, I've gotta do it on paper because it has to be unique. And that's kinda like, just captured me. I've always been, for the last 30 years, whenever the world goes in one direction, I go in the other direction on literally on purpose. So what are you all doing? We're not going digital. I'm not. So if somebody says, "Will you record this virtual? Will you do this virtual event for us digitally?" I'll go, "Nope." "We'll pay you money for it." "Nope." I'm only doing paper and I'm only doing in person. That's it. And I'm only doing it on big sheets as well. So if you don't like it, I'm not doing it. MR: Interesting. AR: Find your people, dig deep. MR: There's plenty of people who will do that work and do it well. So I mean, they can't find somebody you can recommend them. AG: I've got friends I can recommend, actually. MR: I would think so, yeah. AG: I do pass it on. That's if I can, anyway. MR: It's good to know your boundaries because then you can be really clear and you can really lean into the specific elements that you've chosen to work with, right? That's pretty cool. And obviously, like you said, that you, you're not a typical churchman, right? You're the vicar for the people who don't usually go see vicars. So this fits right into your personality, I would think. AG: Yeah. I lean into it. That and the autistic side I really lean into on purpose. And it's quite amazing how many people then talk to you about that kind of stuff and makes them realize that we've got a human face. Well, supposedly, anyway. MR: It's funny. Your story of discovering graphic recording is not so different from my discovery of graphic recording. I started exploring Sketchnoting. I had no clue, just like you, that this whole community and "industry" existed. And this was, you know, 10, 15 years ago, I just stumbled onto it and realized, you know, the stuff I was discovering myself and building Sketchnoting totally matched the same principles that they were doing. They simply did it large scale, in person. You know, maybe they were trying to be more neutral. A lot of graphic recorders just try to be interpreters, right? They don't leave an opinion. So yeah, that was a little bit different, but I mean, at the core of it, it was really similar. And then, I don't know, was it 15 years ago? I was invited to come to the IFVP in Pittsburgh since I was nearby and spoke to that group and then became really good friends with lots of graphic recorders and see the relationship. But it's kind of amazing that you can have these ideas and sort of practice them and only later stumble into like, "Wow, there's like this community." AG: Yeah. People pay for it. What? MR: Yeah. It's pretty exciting. AG: People pay for that. Okay, fine. MR: I could do that. AG: Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I don't even need to think and I get paid for it. I'm great. You know, it's awesome. It's awesome. MR: So well, you know— AG: I just— MR: Go ahead. AG: Yeah. no, I was gonna say, I mean, I mentioned earlier, didn't I? That I mean it's a big, it's a big thing. Thing for me is the whole thing about, 'cause I remember when you say, say that, so my brain really bounces between one thing and another. I think that's what really helps me to be able to do what I do. And with you saying about IFVP, I remember, there's not that much on YouTube, you have to really dig for it. But I found one of the recordings of one from about, I think about 2017 or something, and I think it was Kelvy Bird, was saying "No, we are artists. Stop saying you are an artists. " And I was trying to think about why is it that so many people, you know, sketch notes as well, who come across and say, oh, it's not you, we're not artists. You're, and, and I think you've got your little certificate, haven't you, saying it's okay to suck at art. MR: Yeah, I think it's great. AG: And I think one of the problems is that I mean, you might disagree, happy for that. The problem is that people look and say art is realism. So what they do is because they can't draw something realistically. They say, "I can't draw, so I'm rubbish and I'm not even gonna try it again." Whereas I'm trying to teach people and say, well, actually no, do you know when you do your letters in a particular way, that's as you are? If you haven't noticed, you can go and buy prints of letters and put it on a wall. So I'm coming from a very much an artist's point of view, and I'm saying, look what art does—I discovered this in the Tate Gallery. Do you know the Tate Gallery? You're familiar with that? So it's basically, it's all modern art and stuff and made-up stuff. I say, made up. Yes, it's true. And here was a huge canvas. I'm saying huge. I mean, we are talking feet upon, feet upon feet by feet upon feet upon feet upon feet of gray canvas in this white room. And he'd walk in, it was battleship gray. And it was like, what's the point of that? You know, why, why. So abstract art, always ask why, seeing what it does to you. So abstract art is about what's it do to you. Abstractionism is slightly different, but what's it do to you? And people are going, "No, that's a bit rubbish. That isn't it? How can that be in any gallery?" But if you went up and you read the little plaque, the little tiny plaque next to this huge canvas, it says, "This is not saying that this is art. It is saying what does art do to the room. What does art do to the room?" So in other words, the gray canvas, it says this gray canvas wasn't here, it just be a white room. Now the gray canvas is here. What's it do to the rest of the room? Ignore the canvas. And you had all sorts of things. You've got people having conversations, deciding what it was, and you start to realize that the aesthetic of art is that it makes people talk. It makes you think different. It has an impact. In fact, I'm always saying that art is not meant to be hidden away in a secret gallery. Art is meant to be responded to. When I do a piece of art, I say, "What do you think?" And that person says, "Well, I think this." And I go, "Oh, why do you think that?" Because it's the conversation it initiates, which is the important bit. And I think that that's the point that when we do our graphic recordings when we do our big physical thingies, you are creating conversation. You are not trying to just sort of like having—you're creating conversation. So whether that's just in letters or images, it doesn't matter. And then you get to the point of saying, well, actually, what is art? So art is a triangle, and you've got a symbol. You've got realistic, and you've got abstract. And art falls somewhere in that little triangle somewhere. So if you look at my style, which is like I said, New Yorker style, we're looking more about the symbol. Somewhere in the symbol artistic kind of element. And the more—sorry, symbol and realistic. And the more realistic you do something, the more people will notice problems with your picture. They'll notice it's all squiffy, whatever. But the more fun you make it, the more cartoony. I mean, I can draw one hand bigger than another to make a point. Make a point 'cause the hand's bigger. And that's great. 'cause People say, "Oh, it's just a style, isn't it?" And they won't try and say it's wrong. So what I'm trying to say here is that you can actually draw, but just have fun with it. Don't try and worrying that away. I haven't drawn a car that looks quite like a car. Instead you you can draw a car and say, well, if it's got these elements on it, people recognize it as a car. It's a bit like a symbolic emoji of a smiley face. It's really just a circle, two dots and a curve, and that's it. But you arrange them and compose them into the right way., it's now a smiley face. And I think that so many people in the graphic recording and sketchnoting and visual thinking world have got it into their heads that they can't draw. And so put up these barriers saying, "I can't draw, therefore I don't do art." And not realize that actually what they need to do is say, "Actually, maybe I create art in a different way, and I could explore it." And if they explore it and say, well, I can do art, then it might open the floodgates for them to be able to explore new spaces to go into and relax a bit. So yeah, it's one of the things I do. I coach people and train people in art as well. So, if anybody wants to know, I'll help them. MR: That discussion came up in Laiden with my friend Ben Crothers, who's from Australia. And he was challenging, like, you know, 10 years ago when I wrote my book, my big mantra was Ideas, not art. It was positioned as so many people had baggage around art that would stop them from doing anything whatsoever. And the solution that I had at that time was, you know, let's focus on the ideas. Don't worry about the art. That was the message I was saying. Like, you can put a few elements together and you're producing communication. And then the problem is over time, if you hold onto that, you feel like, well then I'm not an artist. Exactly what you're talking about. So we discussed that maybe the phrase could change to something more like ideas than art. So in other words, you begin building the ideas and then eventually you realize you're kind of moving into an art space where it is art and we can learn from artists to improve and level up and keep growing. So that was something we discussed right on that same track. AG: Yeah. And it's about just practice, keep practicing and trying ideas out. And also, I mean, one of the things which I'm interested with sharing the work which I've been developing with other graphic recorders is they give you feedback and initially find that what they're feeding back is their perspective on what it should be. One of the things about training in theology and I've done for literally decades is reflection and understanding. Reflecting, refine, reflect, refine, reflect, refine. So I've developed now a filter process and reflection process so that I can look at a piece of work I've done and decide what needs to change. And then when you are working on something, don't try and change everything all at once and learn to do everything all at once, but instead, look and say, "Well, do you know what? I'm gonna learn to do this one bit better in my style. And then when I've learned to do that bit, I'm gonna learn to change this bit and do that over and over in the next thing." So you're doing iteration and you iterate fast, but you just do lots of them, but then you are changing. If you want to draw cartoon characters, you know, learn to draw eyes, learn to draw ahead, what's your style of drawing head learn to draw the three-quarter view. You know, really most of the time you're only face on side on and three quarter. That's all you need to do. Then you can do this like the clever tilting of the head and everything else. But just do those three, first of all, learn how to do it. Draw a ball, learn to draw a ball, and then do the half circley things on them. You know, it's not rocket science. It's kind of fairly simple, really. MR: Take it a bit at a time. It seems like it is a good way to approach it and not leaving it to be overwhelmed pretty easily with the totality of what you could do. So focusing on small bits and keep on working. And then eventually it will all come together as a unit. AR: Well, if people see my work, they get gobsmacked. They go, "Oh, you are so fast and you are so good. I can't draw anything." It's like, Yeah, that's 'cause I've developed slowly and because I'm an illustrator as well. One of the things that if you look at an athlete and they do drills, they slow it down and they go through the process. So if you watch an athlete practicing their hard link, they kinda like do this weird goose step kind of thing as they're just programming their muscles to do it. And I think that actually if anybody wants to learn to draw really fast, go really slow and learn what it looks like really slow. Go slow, learn to construct, and then do some little sprint exercises of how quickly can you do it, and then go back and do it again. Go slow and then sprint. MR: It's kind of a slow building process. That's really good advice. AR: Yeah. MR: We're almost stepping into tips, but we want to talk about tools before we get to the tips. AR: Okay. I go all over the place. MR: You mentioned Neuland, you mentioned the graphic wall. AR: Yeah. MR: Do you wanna get into like that kind of stuff? And do you do personal small scale stuff and sketchbooks with pens? Are there any tools that you, especially like? AR: Well, I mean I will grab any bit of ground as they're called, any bit of paper or whatever. Some days I'll use pencils. Some days I'll use a ballpoint pen. It just depends what mood I'm in, you know. I like a good bit of color. I mean, you find a lot of graphic recorders they will use one, maybe two shade colors 'cause they can't flick fast. But as I've done my work and my family have looked and said, "No, we like full color best," So I have to draw full color. And I thought how I'm gonna draw quick enough. And then last week when I was working with a neuroscientist and he was linking together the ideas I was saying to be able to feed back to the group as we were working with these 200 people. He said, "I wonder what to do while you are drawing." I said, "I know you can be my colorist". MR: There you go. AR: So I drew, and then he would color for me. So, this I'm gonna have going forward. I'm gonna have somebody coloring for me 'cause it's a heck a lot easier. And I'll just put a little bit in and say, "What color do you want?" "I want that in pink". "Really? Yeah. Let's go pink." So I kinda like put really bright colors in. So I try to reflect the brand, but then I'll throw in other colors at the same time. So I work in that color spectrum 'cause I'm an artist and I love color. MR: So, well, if you look at comics, I mean, you have the inker, you have the penciler, the inker, and the colorist. They are separate in that sense. AR: That's where I'm coming from. We were doing tools, weren't we? Ignore the digital, I hate digital apart from when I'm doing the book. So we won't even talk about them. Procreate, you all right. You know. Oh, have you seen Procreate Dreams? That's exciting. MR: Yeah. That's the newest one, yeah. AR: Yeah. But no, I work in pure paper, but there's other tools as well, which I've just got. So those people who end up breaking their backs, carrying those big boards and the stands and two rolls of paper in your ski boot or your document tube or whatever. It must weigh about 10 kilos. I've just bought myself a camera bag a big 100 quid for all my marker pens. All right. So there's a top tip. You save money on big boxes and things. A camera bag is brilliant for all those marker pens and all the s spare inks and everything else. But put all those is I've just bought for myself something called a Rock N Roller, which I think have built for gigging musicians. You get all types of them, but basically this thing drops down to about a half meter, but it'll stretch up to about a meter and a half. It's got stands on it and you can put a bag on it, a big bag with ends on it. It's like this giant Ikea trolley thing and it'll take up to 500 pounds of weight. MR: Wow. AG: So I can put all this in my car, I can put the little Stanley my car and put everything else into it and then wheel it all in in one go. Genius. I'm a bit proud of that. So tools, get yourself a trolley and stop wrecking your back in 'cause five boards is about 30 kilo. It hurts. MR: Yeah. And you're gonna need your back to be performing. AR: Oh yeah. You wreck your shoulder. So camera back and a Rock N Roller trolley to push everything in. MR: And Neuland markers. It sounds like you're doing more with that. Yeah, the best. AG: Yeah. Neuland markers and the biggest paper you can find and the graphic wall and all the rest of it. MR: Cool. Well, let's shift then to tips. I think we've already got one, don't wreck your back is probably tip number zero. AG: Yeah, I would. Very important. MR: So I request three tips from people. And I frame it as someone's listening who maybe they're in a rut, maybe they just need a little encouragement. What would be three things you would tell that person to help them move forward? AG: Okay, three. Right. MR: It's not limited to three. I mean, you can go beyond three. AG: Oh, might be going a few hundred, actually. I've go to a thousand sets. Gain contact with me, I've got some training. I hardly can't charge anything at all. Actually, I mean, at some point I was trying to come up with it with it already, but I've not managed to get round to it, but I'm gonna be putting a course together next year. It's gonna be subscription-based 'cause the cost of entry into this world of graphic recording is huge. It's really expensive. And so, I wanted people to have a start of a 10, if they liked it, and then they can go and buy a bigger course or whatever. So that's the intro to the tips. But I would say practice, the biggest thing of all is practice. So practice going slow, practice going fast. But one of the best things you could do, I think is find the long-form videos on YouTube. There's plenty of them. I would hate to say this, but dump Ted Talks, they're great, but they're so fast. You just feel depressed because you can't keep up with them. MR: Can keep up, not when you're starting. AG: Yeah, I've tried and it's like you know and some of them aren't all that good. So instead, what I suggest is go and find the long-form videos especially those based around business because then you are learning at the same time. Okay, so that's the first thing. Graphic record, the business ones. Okay. Second tip, and I dunno if this works in Android, but it certainly works on iPhone. When you've done your practice of your business tip, right. Take a photograph of it. I mean we always just take photographs of all the work because iPhone, if you then type into search, it will search for the words that are actually on your graphic recording. Did you know that? Do you use that or not? MR: No, I haven't used that. AG: Which is brilliant because then it means, especially if you remember to write on the YouTube name of where you found it when you want to reference back to find the information—there are loads of things on there as well like book summaries and things. When you want to reference it, you can say, oh, I remembered that it was the name of this guy who did it. So you type it into your iPhone and then it'll bring up the graphic recording. MR: That's pretty cool. AG: What's more, if you say you want, if you wanted a subject on sort of like abilities. So you wanted to find out, well what is it about—lots of people I've heard recently have talked about the word ability and I've now written it a few times, right? So you type the word ability in and it brings up all the graphic recordings you've done on ability and now you can link the ideas together. So that's really useful. And related to that is if you're gonna become a professional graphic recorder, it's stuck with me the other day. So this is new thinking. I like to give people new thinking. We are the best networkers in the world. And there's massive value in putting people who can network. But because we are going in to deal with different companies and people, we can network people together. So that's another tip. And the final one I think we would say, which is which is very useful it's a technique which is called something about, and I got this from the coaching when we were being coached. So the way that it went was that is that you were put into partnership with somebody and you talked to them and you were told, right, "Tell them everything about what recently happened." So you tell 'em the story. And then the other person has to tell you back everything they can remember from what you said. And you go, "No, you didn't remember everything. There's bits you missed." They said, well do it again, another story, but this time the other person's gonna summarize it into two or three sentences. And so, this time you go, oh actually you got it quite right there, but you missed this bit of this bit. I said, right, you're gonna do it one more time with another partner. And this time you're gonna go say something about and give them one word. Okay? So you do that so you're listening and you finally realize you can't remember everything. So all that stress I try to remember you can't do. And so you just relax and let the whole ideas just merge. And then you get the kinda like this one idea that seems to almost evolve in your head. And then you go, "Is this something about this?" And you say one word and the other person goes, "Yes, that's exactly it." And it's the weirdest feeling. When you experience this, you go, "I just felt heard." Now if you take that and apply that to graphic recording and visual note taking and sketch noting, you suddenly realize that you can use so few words, and the fewer words you use the better, which is brilliant. What I tend to do in my process is—I've seen people write on post-it notes and stick them up and stuff, and I couldn't do that. If you get a 2B pencil, so this is the people working on graphic recording on big walls, so I have a top tip for them here. You can actually write on the wall with a pencil and from a distance of about five, six foot away, no one can see the writing, they can't see it. You write quite big, no one can see it. So you don't even need to rub it off at the end. So you write it in pencil as you're going along. So when people start, they're often, like I'm doing today, waffle mode. They're telling stories, this is my history, it's got nothing to do with the thing they're gonna talk about. And you don't wanna capture that so you just start write it and just write out what they're saying long form if you want, just so you can remember the bits they've said. 'cause something might be relevant in the future. And then suddenly they'll say something and they'll say it slightly slower and slightly louder and you'll go, "Ah, that's important." And then you look back at the notes and now you can take everything they've said and turn it into an image and then you're off 'cause now you're drawing at the same time as listening. So you can do that and bring all those things together. I think creates a rather exciting space. MR: Well that's a great tip. AG: I do apologize. That was rather a lot. MR: I think you ended up with like five or six, which is great. AG: Yeah, I know. We didn't limit it, so. MR: I told you, you could go beyond three. So you know, you went however that you want. AG: Oh, I could waffle forever, I'm afraid. MR: Well Andy, that's been so good to have you. How would we find you? What's the best place to find you? Do you have a website? Are you on certain social media, LinkedIn? AG: Yeah, you can find me on virtually everywhere. Well, I'll say everywhere. You can find me on Instagram, you can find me on LinkedIn, and even my website and it's onegraydot. So spell the American way. So I'm gonna spell it out for you 'cause nobody gets this right for some reason I came up with it years ago. So it's O-N-E-G-R-A-Y-D-O-T, all one word, not separated. And it's all onegraydot.com, LinkedIn onegraydot, and so it goes on. And it's gray. So what I do is I start off with a big blank wall and I put one gray.in the center of it and I say it's no longer blank, so you can't spoil it, now it's got one gray.in it. And I say, what do we do? We connect the gray dots, just one gray dot at a time. So all links in into salesmanship. MR: Yeah. That's pretty cool. And you know, while you were talking, I just for fun, I did a little search and brought up your Facebook page and at the top you've got an image up there. And what it reminds me of, like you said, New Yorker, for me, it reminds me of Red Bull. You know, the Red Bull gives you wings, cartoons. Have you seen these? It's exactly like that. AG: It's all editorial cartooning you say. MR: Yeah, exactly. AG: So it's all sort like of the same kind of thing really fast. So yeah, best place to find me for sort of like this kind of stuff is probably on LinkedIn and Instagram. MR: Okay. Well, of course, we always good show notes. AG: Facebook is Rev, Andy Gray, if you really wanna know. So Facebook's Rev, Andy Gray with an A. MR: Gotcha. And we'll of course put show notes, links to everything that can find and that we can bother Andy to send to us and put into the list. So if you're curious to see more, you can click there and check it out. Well, thank you, Andy. It's so good to have you on the show. Thanks for the influence you're having in the world and with people who maybe don't expect it and need it. Thank you so much for all that work you're doing. I really appreciate it. And thank you for being on the show and sharing your story. It's been great to have you. AG: Well, thank you. MR: And for everybody who's listening or watching, this is another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, until next time. | |||
| 13 Sep 2021 | Eleanor Beer and her path from analog to digital - SE10/EP02 | 00:32:45 | |
In this episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, I talk with Eleanor Beer, a Graphic Facilitator and Illustrator near Cardiff, United Kingdom. Hear Eleanor’s origin story of how she came into the visualization space as well as the challenges she overcame during pandemic by adding digital graphic facilitation to her analog work. Sponsored by the Sketchnote IdeabookThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by The Sketchnote Ideabook, the sketchbook designed for sketchnoters. Equipped with a no-bleed, now show through paper, The Sketchnote Ideabook can take almost any marker or pen you can throw at it. Save 15% on your entire order of Sketchnote Ideabooks and Autoquill Pen sets at the Airship Store when you use code IDEABOOK15 through December 31, 2021. To claim your 15% off visit airship.store today! Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 06 Apr 2020 | Dulce Pedroso - SE07 / EP05 | 00:38:11 | |
Need a break from COVID-19 news? Check out our collection of 50+ Sketchnote Army Podcast interviews from 6 seasons at: https://sketchnotearmy.com/podcast Feeling isolated? Join our Sketchnote Army Slack community to chat with other visual thinkers about sketchnotes, visual thinking, or whatever is on your mind. Join the Sketchnote Army Slack for free at: https://sketchnotearmy.com/slack RUNNING ORDER
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SUPPORT THE PODCASTBrought to you by The Sketchnote Ideabook — the sketchbook designed for sketchnoters. Equipped with a no-bleed, no show-through paper, it can take almost any pen or marker you can throw at it. SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes | |||
| 12 Oct 2020 | James Baylay - SE08 / EP04 | 00:52:06 | |
SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Neuland, the innovative maker of visual thinking tools. Every Neuland product is designed with passion to be durable and sustainable. Check out their newly redesigned Neuland FineOne® line of water-based, refillable markers. Save 15% with code amb290425 until December 31, 2020 RUNNING ORDER
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 04 May 2020 | Ole Qvist-Sorensen - SE07 / EP09 | 00:49:30 | |
Need a break from COVID-19 news? Check out our collection of 50+ Sketchnote Army Podcast interviews from 6 seasons at: https://sketchnotearmy.com/podcast Feeling isolated? Join our Sketchnote Army Slack community to chat with other visual thinkers about sketchnotes, visual thinking, or whatever is on your mind. Join the Sketchnote Army Slack for free at: https://sketchnotearmy.com/slack RUNNING ORDER
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SUPPORT THE PODCASTBrought to you by The Sketchnote Ideabook — the sketchbook designed for sketchnoters. Equipped with a no-bleed, no show-through paper, it can take almost any pen or marker you can throw at it. SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes | |||
| 23 May 2023 | Natalie Taylor is dedicated to improving her sketchnoting skills - S13/E10 | 00:52:15 | |
In this episode, Natalie Taylor shares how she slowly built her sketchnoting skills and is now sharing her work through her channels. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings — any time you like. You can nudge the curve of a line, swap out one brush for another, or change stroke thickness and color at any stage of your drawing — saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need — large or small. Never worry about fuzzy sketchnotes again. Concepts is a powerful, flexible tool that’s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with my friend, Natalie Taylor. Natalie, welcome to the show. It's so good to have you. Natalie Taylor: Thanks, Mike. It's so good to meet you, and thank you so much for inviting me on to the show. MR: It's good to have you and I love your accent. We mentioned this before we started recording. Your British accent into the north, which I picked up. It's fun to hear. I don't hear it all the time, so I will enjoy that as we have a discussion. Tell us about who you are and what you do. NT: I am Natalie. I'm from the Northeast, as you've mentioned, in a small seaside town. Full-time, professionally wise. I'm a market manager at a brilliant university here in the Northeast, and I'm an avid sketch noter on the side in my spare time. MR: That's great. We'll definitely dive into the sketchnoting details. That's what this is all about for all the crazy fans of sketchnoting who are willing to listen to a podcast or watch a YouTube video and learn. I think that's what it's all about. I'm really curious, so we know what you're doing now. Obviously, you've got some skills in marketing. How did you end up where you're at? Maybe particularly, from a visual thinking perspective, were there things that happened when you were a little girl that directed you, or maybe in your college years or, school years that guided you to where you are now? What would be those key moments if you were to give me an origin story, I like to call it? Like a superhero origin story for Natalie Taylor. NT: I love that. I love the Avengers origin story. That's what it always makes me think of. MR: Yes. NT: Looking back, it's interesting when I've listened to the podcast, I've listened to so many episodes and I notice a lot of people tend to describe that they've always been very artistic and very into doodling and drawing. For me, I used to think that I wasn't very creative, but looking back, I've always been quite creative, but more in the writing sense. I have always doodled, but I wouldn't sit and draw and do these kind of detailed drawings. It would be very basic, like smiley face, love, heart, and flowers. I would say it's quite a recent thing that I've got into sketchnoting. I say recently it's probably 9 or 10 years that I've been into presenting information in that way. Yeah, it's interesting 'cause I didn't have that artistic background if that makes sense. University, I studied media and communications, which at the time, it got given a bad rap a lot of the time as a degree that isn't sometimes as respected as some degrees. But looking back at that, that was very creative and a lot of the tools that I used in that degree are tools that I still use now. Things like Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, even setting up a website, creating a magazine. It was all creative and using graphics in that way. Like you mentioned, my professional background is in marketing and communications, so I've been in that for around 11 years-ish. It's a little long-winded way into how I got into sketchnoting but when I finished university, I wasn't quite sure what to do. It was just based around what jobs I was looking at the time and I thought, oh, PR and marketing obviously sounds quite fun and that's creative. It was creating leaflets and a lot of design work I suppose. That is kind of in the artistic realm. It was for the local fire brigades that was creating a lot of leaflets and newsletters for the local community about fire safety. That's how I got into marketing and having quite a creative role professionally. But it wasn't until my next role, 'cause that was a one-year temporary contract that I learned about sketch noting. I was working at a very, very small startup in the ed tech field. They had this brilliant software, which was the result of academic research all about collaborative learning. It started on this amazing technology. I dunno if you've ever seen the huge tabletops. When they were around, it was around 5,000 pounds, I think one of these tables. MR: I've seen the Microsoft Surface table, the original surface, years and years ago. Something like that. NT: Yeah, exactly. Similar to that. I think it worked on that and the Promethean giant tables. It was for this very specific hardware and then it adapted to be for iPads. But when I say small startup, it was me and the director, they were the directors, but not working full-time and then a computer programmer. I was doing everything marketing and communications and trying to raise the profile of this small startup company. It's part of that getting involved, building up the Twitter following, and finding things that people would find interesting. I don't think I've actually mentioned, but basically, the target audience was teachers and educators. It was when I started going on basically education Twitter that I came across Sylvia Duckworth. MR: Oh, yeah. NT: Who's sketch notes I absolutely love. That was my first experience of sketch notes and I would just look at them and be like, "Wow, these are absolutely brilliant. And they're just conveying the message she wants to converse so well that I thought I'd absolutely love to give this a go." I did find it really, really hard to get to grips with how to actually start. At the time I would just share her sketch notes with our Twitter followers 'cause they would find them really interesting. Then as part of that role, there was also the Bett show in London. This is a very international education technology conference, and we would go along to that. We didn't have our own stand but would be on hardware stalls and demonstrate in how the hardware could be used with our software. MR: Got it. NT: Then there was just snippets of time I had to go and watch some of the keynote speakers so I remember trying to take in—Sylvia had put some advice out on how to do sketch notes, but I had at the time a little iPad mini and I didn't have a stylus. I remember just trying to do sketch notes just with my finger on the iPad Mini which was really hard. MR: Yeah. Frustrating. NT: Yes. MR: I've tried that. I can relate. NT: I bet you, yeah. It's so tricky. Sylvia shared guidance on tools and things. I clicked on the links and it was this stylus that wasn't available in the UK and I just couldn't find an alternative so I tried doing them with my finger. Then I think I just become a little bit disillusioned with it 'cause I just thought mine are never gonna be anything that I could present to anyone or that people would find interesting. As time went on, I just practiced in my own time. Then I went to Japan on holiday, and they're obviously known for stationery and technology so I got a stylist there. I just played around with it on the flight home on Procreate. I'm still, to this day, not sure why I didn't ever think of trying analog and just getting paper and pens. I think maybe I did try, but just with felt tips and biros, and then I just was a bit like, "Oh, these aren't very visually appealing." MR: Just didn't fit, right? NT: Yeah, exactly. Gradually, I just built up and just practiced. With this stylus, I did start doing some—It would take me hours 'cause I would do a lot of tweaks afterwards and start tweaking around. I suggested to my manager, but again, 'cause we were such a small business, I had to have a lot of different hats on, so I couldn't just explore sketch noting, but I said, you know, these are really kind of intriguing teachers. So, occasionally I would start one and then do a lot of it in my own time, but I started doing almost as a marketing technique. Essentially, what the software was, was like card sorting activities. You might have one on a particular moment in history and then students would have to work with them and match them up and group them together. It was all about how it demonstrated their thinking and how they'd come to a conclusion. I would just do things like 17 reasons to create your own card sort or you know, the top 10 things about collaborative learning. I'd develop the confidence to write using the stylus and it looked quite nice, but still the drawing was just not something that I was very competent in. I would sometimes get free icon libraries and just put them in instead of actually drawing them myself. They were really successful actually at getting the message across as to what the software was, and Sylvia's work in sketch note and hers was still something I aspired towards, but I became more confident to share them on our channels. MR: It's interesting that you had, I guess an inspiration, Sylvia, right? Doing this work, so you knew, it's nice when you see that. Even if you feel like I can't quite achieve it, I have a focusing point and I'm gonna go for that. You're trying all these techniques, you're buying an iPad, you're trying to use your finger, you're trying analog and it doesn't fit, and then you find a stylus in Japan. You keep on moving. There was something about you that's pretty dedicated. You were gonna get there somehow. You didn't know how you're gonna get there and you kept on fighting through it even though a lot of people might have given up and it seems like you didn't. Why do you think that was that you didn't give up? That's really fascinating to me. NT: When you've said it like that, I suppose I was quite determined. The main reason is that I just enjoyed it so much. Like I said, I couldn't dedicate much time in the professional day to it, even though there were marketing tools, but I might do the baseline in maybe an hour, and then that weekend I would spend a few hours of my own time doing it purely because I just really enjoyed it. Sylvia's sketch notes, a lot of them were based towards educators, but a lot of them were quite general. Some of them she did were around mental health, which is something else that I'm really passionate about. That mental health sketch notes are probably one of the biggest things I do now since I'm not in that role anymore. The sketch notes that I do have completely changed. That's how I first started learning them. I think the reason why I stuck with it is because I saw how impactful Sylvia's were on me. I remember printing off a couple before and keeping them up. She did one on the iceberg effect, things that you see on the surface versus what's actually going on underneath, and I just found them really inspirational. MR: I'm sort of putting pieces together. On the one hand, you enjoyed it, so I there's one component. I find, like when you have multiple components that you're more likely to stay driven. You had the enjoyment part of it. You had enough success that you thought maybe I could do some portion of it. You talked about you like the writing, but then you would use icons so that is part of it too. But then on top of it, you could see the effectiveness of the sketch notes she did from a marketing perspective. You know what works in marketing, it's obviously impacting you. You're starting to see it probably in other places. Like this is an opportunity and I can see how it could work, but there was still a gap of getting to where you could do them to communicate and that just took time, right? NT: Exactly. Exactly. MR: That's interesting. NT: I think it must have been around two years ago that I came across your book, Sketching Army, and that completely revolutionized the whole thing again. MR: Oh, wow. NT: I just came across this whole community that I didn't know existed. I knew Sylvia had a sketch noting book, but it was specifically for educators. I'd been beavering a way of doing these things in my own time, but without much guidance or training. I think I did find Doug Neill's YouTube channel. MR: He's Great. Yeah, Doug is great. NT: Yeah, absolutely brilliant. I did a lot of his tools. I remember there was simple tips on how to practice so he had, I think I call it the dictionary game. Basically, you get a dictionary, open it to a random page and sketch note a word. MR: That's a good one. NT: Yeah. That really helped just gradually dipping my toes in. It's only been the last couple of years that I've actually shared them on my own channel and done them on things that I'm directly passionate about. MR: Cool. It's been a progression, right? You've been slowly building up your skills and now you're at the point where you are doing your own sketch notes and you're sharing them on your channel, and you've built those skills up through practice. That reminds me to say to people who are new to this, they'll come to me when I do little workshops and say, "How can I do this?" Like, "Well, it's not easy, but it's still fun. You can have success to a certain degree, but to get better at it, you're gonna have to practice. I don't know how to tell you that there's a substitute, there's no magic pill you can take. There's no, can't jump in a time machine. You just have to do it." What I'd identify in your story is this idea of overlapping. I keep coming across this when I can do one thing that overlaps with something else that I like that's more successful. If I can layer in a third thing, the success rate goes up, the more I can integrate several parts of my life or my interests. If you're a gardener, let's say, if you're passionate about gardening, well, planning your garden like as a sketch note might be really fun on multiple levels so you're more likely to do it and really get into it and maybe build a technique that you could then maybe you could actually teach other people how you approach that, right? NT: Yeah. MR: That's pretty cool, and I see that in your story. That's really fun and it's really satisfying for me to hear someone who's dedicated and committed to following the passion and multiple passions to arrive where you are, which is really cool. NT: Thank you. I do absolutely love sketch noting. I think that's the main thing is that I just really enjoy it and I would see some sketch notes and think—when I discovered the community on Instagram and looked at your sketch notes and sketch notes in the book, it was a case of, "Wow, these are absolutely fantastic. I might not be there now, but I can keep practicing the exercises in your book and Doug's channel." I've got another book that's just purely doodling different objects. When I had to self- isolate with COVID over last new year, I think it was, I spent hours just doodling and practicing. MR: Well, that's good. You probably accelerated your skills there. Like taking a bad situation and making it into something worthwhile, right? NT: Yeah. MR: I got COVID, and all I got was better at drawing, or whatever. NT: Yeah. It's a nice positive spin on something not good. MR: Yeah, exactly. You make the best out of what you've got. NT: Yeah. MR: This is really fascinating. I love hearing the origin story, my favorite part of the podcast because I think it's interesting for me to hear it, but I can imagine there's people listening, I don't even know who they are, who feel like, "Oh, you know, I'm a marketing manager, I can't sketch note, but Natalie's a marketing manager and she's sketch notes and that's her story. She really had to work at it, and it took a long time. Well, I could do that." You can relate to people because there's such a variety. We try to find such a variety of people that hopefully it inspires anybody who listens that they can do it. It takes work like anything worthwhile, it's gonna take work. You said you're a writer, like the only way you get better at writing, is to write. There's no substitute, and reading, of course. Reading to get inspired by like, "Wow, look how they turned that phrase or the way they structured that thing. I wanna copy that." NT: Exactly. MR: It's definitely a form of—imitation is really important. Imitating, what other people doing, but then—I think that Natalie or Austin Kleon often talks about this idea that copying is helpful because as much as you try to copy that other person, you're not gonna get an exact copy. Eventually, your personality's gonna come through on it and you're gonna add your own little tweaks and twists and it becomes your own without you really realizing it. There is definitely a benefit to copying people to get better and figure out where you're going. That's very helpful. NT: Yeah. Definitely. MR: For you, Sylvia Duckworth, I guess is probably one of those key figures that you were trying not so much to copy, but to emulate and to follow and produce something on the level of Sylvia that would communicate the way you saw it impacted you, which is really, really fun to hear. NT: Yeah, exactly. I really love her work. MR: I'm really curious about what is some exciting sketchnoting-related project that you're working on. You mentioned mental health sketch notes, is where you're at. Is there one that you're doing now or a series or something maybe that's coming up that you're excited about that you could share with us? NT: Yes. In general, I love doing sketch notes on mental health. I think that came about with if I was having a particular struggle, I would just Google that struggle. It might be overthinking, for example, which is one of my more popular sketch notes, and I'd just put into Google ways to stop overthinking. Rather than just read that article and come away with maybe a point that I was gonna try that week and then forget about, I would start sketch noting that and sketch note podcast and books to actually learn from that. Then the bonus is that then helping other people. I've got a project coming up with a lead in mental health psychology publication that I'm gonna do a collaborative post with, and that's gonna be on four ways on how to be kind to yourself. MR: Oh, wow. NT: It's in the similar realm to the overthinking one that I've done. What's interesting is sometimes, I've noticed my friends who are very supportive and family, they'll come up with ideas and say, "Have you thought about doing this?" One thing that I'm doing at the moment is baby sketch notes. I've got quite a few friends who are having babies at the moment. One of my friends said, "Have you thought about doing a baby sketch note about the day they were born?" I took that idea and thought of different ways to make it a bit more interesting. It's like what song is number one at the time, the horoscope, the Chinese zodiac, and actually, getting those printed and framed for friends and people who'd like them. That's a very recent thing that I've started to do. I've recently done some work with an ADHD podcast who they thought it would be really interesting to sketch note one of their podcast episodes. That's been fascinating as well because I did the sketch note and my style, it is a little bit more wordy than some people's and there can be a lot going on. When she shared it on her channel, there was a lot of really positive feedback of those people saying—I remember one comment that said something like, "I'd absolutely love a whole book like illustrated in this way on ADHD because it's exactly how my brain works." But then there was a few comments that said the complete opposite in that it's just too overwhelming and there's too much to take in, so it's interesting how it works in that way. For some people it resonates and some people it just doesn't work for them in completely opposite extremes. MR: Right. I've got kids that have ADHD, and the two boys that have it, the way they react to it is quite different. They have different experiences. I think within ADHD, you could have someone with ADHD who thinks, "This is amazing, this is the way I think." Then somebody else who's got a slight variation of it would be overwhelming to them. Just people, in general, that can't maybe get into it. I think that's the nature of just humans. NT: Yeah, exactly. MR: If I go to my Amazon page and look at the reviews, there's quite a few good reviews, but there's some bad ones too. I'm a fan of Seth Godin, and he says, "Once you release your book into the world, you just stop looking at the reviews because the book now belongs to the public and you can't really do anything. It belongs to them. Looking at reviews doesn't do you any good." So, I don't. NT: That's really good. Well done on the self-discipline there. 'Cause yeah, I can imagine it's tempted to rake through them and then you've got to try and train your brain to focus on the positive ones, I guess. MR: It was probably harder at the beginning when there was very few 'cause I felt like we had a technical issue with the Kindle version that a lot of people complained about. If you look way back in the—all the one-star reviews are Kindle failures which we had no control over. It just must have been so a technical accident. We eventually sorted it out and got it solved, but in the meantime, there's all these one-star reviews, which you can't really remove. That feeling like you have to answer like what happened over and over again, and there's nothing you can do, but at some point, you just kinda let it go. The book's been around for 10 years, so that's more important than if there's enough good reviews on the book. In some ways, maybe that's the same thing when you do a sketch note, there's just gonna be people that don't relate to it and it doesn't work for them and that's okay. NT: Yeah. That's very true. MR: It's better to focus on the ones who it does resonate with because they will appreciate it and then you can make them the audience that you are thinking about as you're doing your work. Those people will really like it, and if someone else doesn't, there's plenty more on social media to look at. You don't have to look at my thing. NT: Exactly. They're also different on them with sketch noting styles. I find it fascinating and I don't think you necessarily—I mean, I didn't kind of set out with a style in. Especially, probably the last year, I think a particular style, but when I look back at the ones when I started sketch note and maybe seven, eight years ago on my little iPad they're just completely different. MR: I just happened to pop up Instagram here and head it up so I could be aware of your stuff. I happen to look at six reasons to visit Maple and Doe, which I assume is a little shop that you like. It's just really straightforward and simple and fun. There's six really simple. I think the thing too that sketchnoting does, just by the nature of how it works, is you typically have everything on one page. You don't have to look through multiple pages. You can just get everything on a page and look through it. I can definitely see, if I scan back through your stuff, as you keep on improving, you keep on trying new things and that's really good to see. It does make sense now that you tell me that your background is in writing and that's a real strong thing for you. Me too, for my book, I wrote the whole manuscript before I drew a single thing. I think in words too. Sometimes I have to remind myself, "Okay, you can draw something, Mike." I can do like lettering and text and still have fun with the layouts and stuff and just little images sprinkled in and that's okay. It's nice that there's that variation. You could be really visual and do lots of drawings and very little text on one side and then on the other side you could be very textual with just drawings as little sprinkles, and anywhere in between there, which it's great that the sketch note community is so varied that everybody can come at it and express it in their way, which is great to see. NT: Exactly. That's really interesting that you said that you've have tended to think more in text form as well, and visuals and illustrations are brilliant. I would never have thought that it come from the other way around, if that makes sense. MR: It surprises people. A lot of times for me to solve a problem, I might write out the problem first. Then it enters into my verbal side, to quote Doug Niell. Then once I understand it verbally, because that's how I was trained as a kid, then I can engage the visual side of me, which I probably did more drawing before I knew how to write and read. Those then kick in and layer on top of it. It's pretty fun. Well, that sounds like a really fun project. I can't wait to see when it comes out. As later on in the show we'll send you to Natalie's social media connection so you can go follow her work and see when those pop up. Let's shift into tools. Now that I see some of your work, I would love to hear, what are your favorite pens? Do you have favorite notebooks? Then, of course, second would be your digital tools, how you use digital tools. NT: I mentioned earlier, I got into sketch noting via the digital side. It was only through the podcast and when I ordered your book that I realized a lot of people start off on analog. I was still doing them digitally even though I knew that, 'cause I couldn't get my head around how—'cause I'd started digitally, I couldn't get my head around how you would know how everything would fit onto one page. I'd start off and then I'd make it a lot smaller and push it to one corner. I was like, "I can't do that on a piece of paper." It was on a whim that I was out trying to find some trainers, I couldn't find any. I went into this shop called The Works that we have in the UK. I think they have it in the U.S., but it's not as much of a big thing in the U.S. I don't think. It's books, stationary. It tends to have things really good discount. I got this little—I know you won't be able to see it if you're just listening, but just like a really small one. Small little sketchbook. MR: That's a square sketchbook with a hard cover and spiral binding, I guess, is the word. NT: Yeah, exactly. It's got slightly thicker than printer paper. I thought I could just start doing some little mini-ones. At the same time, I picked up some brush pens, and I started writing with the brush pens and they were absolutely brilliant. I thought actually I could start doing that. I don't think the sketchbooks got a particular name. The brush pens that I first started using are called Crawford & Black really cheap in The Works here in the UK. Then as I progressed with the paper side, I found this old sketchbook that I'd had—like I said, I've not called myself an artist. I wouldn't sit and drawing a sketchbook, but I kept holding onto this book. I think I was thinking I might use it as a scrapbook. I'd had it for years. That's very similar to the one I've just mentioned, but it's much bigger and it's also square, so it lends itself really well to Instagram post. For the actual pens, just a few months ago, Sharpie gel pens, their 0.7. Yeah. I found they're really good for doing a lot of the actual words on the sketch notes. Then Staedtler, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right. Staedtler brush pens. I got them in lots of different colors. I use the thick side of that to do titles. Then I'll use the Sharpie gel pen to do the actual text and little drawings. I've got a bigger pencil case, but then I've got like a tiny really thin one that keeps maybe three or four pens. I'll try and keep that tiny one and then my little sketchbook in my bag wherever I go. I've got it in my bags. MR: Rough and ready in your go-bag, which is cool. NT: Yeah. MR: That sketchbook is the one you have with you, right? NT: Exactly. MR: That's good. You mentioned the Sharpie gel pens. I've been really impressed with those as well. We have them in the States and tried them in the past and really like the ink that they've manufactured is really smooth and dark. Seems to dry pretty quickly. I've been really impressed with the, I think it's labeled the S-gel here. I don't know if that's the same there, but it's Sharpie gel. NT: Yeah, it is. MR: If you're listening and you haven't tried the Sharpie gel pens, give it a try. They of course make alcohol-based permanent markers of all kinds that you can pick up, but they will bleed through most paper unless it's thick. They do have a alcohol scent to them. That's something you consider. The gel would be scentless. I think if I'm right, the gel pens are also water resistant at least or maybe waterproof, I'm not sure. I think once it goes on the page, if it gets wet, it's not gonna wash away like say a regular felt tip marker that's not permanent. I think both those are permanent markers. That's interesting you mentioned the Staedtler brush pens. It's the two-sided, right? So, there's two ends, right? NT: Exactly. Yeah. I forgot to say that. MR: Those are nice pens. I've seen those around. I've not tried them much. I need to go to the Office supply store and load up on some new things. NT: Yeah. That's the thing with this podcast, you're just like, "Oh, I wanna try that and I wanna try that." MR: Spending your money. Spending your money. NT: Exactly. MR: Talk a little bit about your digital. You said you started with digital. You hinted at Procreate. Is that the tool that you still use? Have you found any other tools and then tell us about this Japanese stylus or have you upgraded to an Apple pencil, or what's your digital status? NT: With digital, I don't think I mentioned earlier, but a huge part of the sketch note journey for me and starting to share sketch notes was getting an iPad Pro 'cause I did find it very difficult with this stylus I had, it was a stylus that has a little plastic circle on the end. MR: Oh, I know. I had this one, yeah. I know which one you're talking about. NT: It wasn't very precise. I found it quite difficult. It was the second main COVID lockdown and had a lot of time on my hands. I was sketch noting more, but they just took quite a while and the surface was quite small in the iPad mini. My manager in my previous role nominated our team for this special award thing. We won that so we each got a 300-pound voucher to use on a variety of—you could just spend it on clothes, holidays, et cetera. I thought, "Oh, this might be my excuse to get an iPad Pro because I'd wanted one for so long. MR: Covered a good part of it, right? NT: Exactly. It was COVID and I wasn't going on holiday, I'd managed to save a little bit of money because obviously, we weren't going anywhere. That was a big part of it, but when I chatted with friends and family about, "Oh, shall I get this iPad Pro?" I made a pact with myself. If I was going to do that, then I would have to share some of the sketch notes. I made a little pack with myself to do that. It was when I started sharing the sketch notes that I think I must've started using #sketchnote and I'd click on that, and I think that's when I came across your work, Sketch Army. Obviously, I came across things like the Visual Jam, Sketch Effect, Sketch Academy, all of these things, and I was like, wow. Yeah, it's called still Procreate. Again, I thought if I'm getting the iPad Pro, I'm gonna get the proper pencil. One thing that I do use, because I don't use an Apple phone, I don't have an iPhone, but I love my iPad. I wanted somewhere of things transferring across easy. I use a combination of Evernote and Noteshelf. You can get Noteshelf only of the iPad, I think, but then Evernote you can sync it so that anything you do on Noteshelf syncs. Ofter, 'cause I use sketch notes and I don't necessarily share, but in kind of planning and productivity and so, I'll sometimes plan my day out in sketch note form. I have done that on my iPad. I want it on my phone so I've got it when I'm going around and I can't really drag the iPad around. MR: Then that syncs over. Now it's on your phone wherever you are or on your desktop I suppose, if you've got Evernote there. NT: Yeah, exactly. MR: That's a smart idea. I think there's lots of these integrations that often to get overlooked that could make the connection between, like, I like this tool but I wanna use it this way. There's likely some kind of connection or there's a way to do it, I suppose. That's pretty cool. NT: Yeah, definitely. MR: It'd be interesting to see, and I haven't explored Evernote for a long time, if Evernote's in improved their drawing tools in that you could technically draw on Evernote on the iPad. I suspect there must be an iPad app of Evernote, but I don't know what kind of drawing capabilities it has. Maybe it doesn't have very good ones and it would be more frustrating. Helpful, right? NT: I can't remember why I didn't just use Evernote as the actual tool 'cause I use Noteshelf and it syncs to Evernote. I think it's 'cause NoteShelf was like a one-off fee of maybe 10 pounds and maybe— MR: Yeah, it has a subscription. NT: Whereas Evernote has a subscription, but you can use the free version to sync. MR: Got it. NT: It does have some nice tools. I'm not sure why I haven't really used it more. MR: I know Noteshelf's really powerful. It's a tool. I think that's what I use to present from when I editing presentations. NT: Oh really? MR: Because I can move the pages around, I can present, and then the way I teach sketch noting, is I like to draw right on the presentation. The cool thing is when I'm done then I can just export that to a PDF and send it to the students and it's all bundled up. It's the thing they saw, it matches the recording if they see the recording, and it's a really convenient tool. I find Noteshelf really great. NT: That's brilliant. Yeah, it's really good. MR: I did not know that it synced with Evernote. I'm not an Evernote user, but that's really good information to know in case I run into it Evernote user, and tools are pretty helpful. I think all those note-taking tools, their tools have gotten a lot better. That's really great. NT: Definitely. When I listen to the podcast and people recommend new tools and Concepts as the sponsor, I always wanna try these things, which sometimes I just don't get the time to sit and explore. I think especially 'cause doing it analog is quite new for me. That's an avenue I'm exploring. I think one of the other reasons I started to explore analog is because Procreate had an update and the pens just became too complicated and it just wasn't working. Now I've found the right brush again on Procreate, so I'm doing a mixture. There's a nice feature where you can favorite the brush thickness, which is really, really useful. MR: I've used that too. Very useful. Now we're getting nerdy, but on the Procreate size control, if you press and hold in a certain location, you can lock it and a little mark will appear there and then you can jump from mark to mark. NT: When I come across that, I thought, this is amazing 'cause I'll have one for the headers and one for the sub-headers or even just the little doodles. It's so much easy 'cause before, I think that's why I was making some things massive, something small and I just lost track of what was meant to be what. MR: Then you're using the same brush and you're just changing the size of it. You just touch the size you want and away you go, which is nice. NT: Exactly. MR: Cool. Well, now we're at the point where we talk about tips. The way I frame it is someone's listening, they're a visual thinker of some level, whatever that might mean to them, and they're excited, they like the community, they like doing sketchnoting, but they feel maybe they're stagnating or they're in a plateau or just need a little inspiration. It's wintertime here in the north so maybe they just need a little inspiration like spring is coming, whatever, but what would be three things you would tell that person to encourage them? NT: I'm not sure if I've got four or not. MR: Or you can do more than three if you wish. That's fine. NT: I certainly thought of lots of tips. The first thing I would say in line with, I'm not saying everyone needs an iPad Pro but just investing in what you love. If you love sketch noting and it is investing and that might be in time or courses. That's really helped me is just dedicating a bit of time and sometimes money to get a really good course and it can really elevate your sketch notes to the next level. It'll just get you back into it again. Often the course is a collaborative so you meet different people as well, which is helpful and learn from others. That's one thing I would say. But then equally, as much as it's invest and improve, I wanted to say recognize what your strengths are. For some people, they might be held back because there's the comparison thing, like what we were discussing earlier and you see some sketch notes that are very visual and these amazing illustrations that I love looking at. I've had to reframe that 'cause I've had sometimes, moments of lack of confidence thinking, "Oh, mine are quite wordy. I'm never gonna be a natural illustrator." I've had to think, "Well, my strength might be more in the sense of listening to a podcast and picking out the key points. That's something that I do in my professional role as a market manager is I might have to take it an academic paper and try and present it in a nice way. That's something that I've had to think is, what are my strengths are. I would say to people focus on your strengths as well as try and improve your weaknesses 'cause everyone's sketch notes are different. MR: That's a great tip. I love that one. NT: Thank you. Another tip is to share your work. I know it's not for everyone, but if you are sometimes stuck in a rut, it can help to share your work and break that barrier. 'Cause I kept my sketch note secret for years, the ones that I did on mental health and things. Some of them that I've shared I did maybe four years ago and just didn't post, but that can really help get you work out there and get feedback. Also, if you're sharing them on social media, it helps to connect you with people. MR: I suppose you could even frame that as maybe sharing, doesn't have to be with the world, but maybe it's a small group. If there's some chat or something where you can share that work. That's considered sharing. If it's two tens of your best friends, you're still announcing to your friends and they can give you feedback. NT: Exactly, and that's actually what I did first. I just started sending them—During COVID, I'd send them in WhatsApp group chats and people are like, "Oh wow. How have you not shared these before?" It's kind of like deeping your toes in it first. MR: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You go to the friendly audience first because social media cannot always be friendly, right? NT: No, exactly. That's very true. MR: Interesting. NT: Another one is just to write down your ideas. Sometimes I find if you're out and about and you're out in nature or you're away for the weekend, I think you sometimes get inspiration for sketch notes, but if you don't write them down and I'll keep them in—I've got Google Keeps, I'll just keep a little ideas list and just throw them in there. It means that when I am sat at home with my sketchbook or some time and my iPad Pro, I can actually bring that idea to life rather than thinking, "What was that again?" That's been really helpful. MR: Some kind of reference. Some kind of a spark. That's Good. NT: Exactly. I dunno whether I'm onto fifth tip now, I'm not sure. MR: I only count them later. NT: One is just get involved with the community as well. That's a tip that I would recommend. There's been a few that I've been involved with lately, monthly hangouts and your layouts workshop. I think that's just really helpful, and again, it's learning from people. You might get tips that you've not thought of that might take 10 minutes. I think one of your previous guests, I think it was Reverend Geek, said he had a 30-day challenge where he would just sketch out a word for 30 days, but sometimes he'd get those ideas from other people and communities that you're part of. MR: We have that. If you want an easy one, Sketchnote Army has a Slack channel you can join. NT: Oh, really? MR: Yep. Every day there's someone in one of the channels who posts the prompt and you can be challenged to draw it in. They challenge you to draw it in 30 seconds or something, so it builds your thinking skills. We have that channel. Also, probably the other benefit of that channel is any kind of events that happen. Lai Chee Chui, who's one of the members, she's like a hawk. She finds every of cool event and she publishes it in the events announcements channel. You'll find out about workshops or the Visual Jam we'll post in there so you get a sense of like what's coming, which is great. NT: How brilliant. That sounds great. Yeah. I'd love to join that. Thank you. MR: If you go to sketchnotearmy.com/slack, should take you to the page and you can sign up for free. It's all free. We just— NT: Brilliant. I'm just writing that down. MR: We don't save any of the back channel 'cause we're just doing the free one, but it's more spur of the moment, the interaction between people in the community, which is pretty cool. Anybody that's listening, including Natalie are welcomed to sign up and hang out in there, there's a really cool bunch of people in there. Your public sharing could be in the Slack channel with friendly sketch noters who will give you encouragement, which we aim to have our community be an encouraging community. I think that's a good place to start if you wanted to follow that tip that Natalie just gave. NT: Brilliant. MR: I'll be sure to count up the tips and I'll give them numbers to them in the show notes. Of course, we'll have show notes for all the things we've talked about. We're near the end of the podcast. Can you believe it? Like, suddenly this time has just flown by. NT: It has. MR: I would love for you to share what's the best places to go. Are there certain social media where you hang out? Is there a website we can go to to find out all the work that you're up to? NT: The main place that I share my sketch notes is Instagram and that's @natalierobertat. I also use LinkedIn, but that's Natalie R. Taylor. I did set up an actual LinkedIn page, but I just tend to not post on that end. I don't actually post my schedule notes very much on LinkedIn, but I do use it. I set up a Twitter, but again, I've posted it a few times and not really used it a lot. So, I would say Instagram. MR: Okay. Got it. We'll make sure we put a link to that. I'm on your page now and it looks like you've got a campsite bio page with some specific things that you'd like people to check out first. That's nice that you got an extended list of things for people to dig into. That's really good and you can see her work there. Well, Natalie, this has been so much fun. Thank you for joining us on the show and sharing your experience and encouraging people. I think it's, again, another great episode that will encourage somebody out there who we can't even imagine right now who's listening to this episode and being inspired and trying something out, which is what this is all about. Thank you for making time to be here. NT: Thank you so much for having me. I've absolutely loved it and I love the idea that it could help someone, so thank you for saying that. MR: I think so. I think it definitely will help someone. I'm often surprised, I think I do these podcasts and often you don't really hear much back and that's okay, I don't do it for that reason. But occasionally I'll talk to someone and say, I've listened to every one of your episodes. It's happened like four or five times recently. All the effort that you put into it, you think like, "Is anybody listening to this?" I see people downloading it, but you don't hear anything, and then suddenly four or five people say, I listen to every episode. Like, wow, okay, well I guess we're gonna keep doing that. It's really encouraging and it's definitely gonna be encouraging to someone and many people potentially. That's really great to hear. NT: Thank you. I've absolutely loved listening to the podcast when I discovered it and it was lockdown as well, so I'll go for these long walks and I've listening to maybe two, three a day just thinking, I was like, "Wow, there's eight or nine series of this?" MR: You're like a super fan, Natalie. NT: Yeah, I am. They we're kinda packed into a certain time. I think I'm up to date now. There might be a few I've missed. MR: It's quite a back catalog. Well, thank you so much and I think for everyone who's listening, that's another episode of the "Sketch Note Army Podcast." Until the next episode, we'll see you soon. | |||
| 02 Jan 2024 | Season 14: All The Tips - S14/E10 | 00:54:36 | |
In this final episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast season 14, we’ve gathered all the tips from 9 fantastic visual thinkers to inspire you! Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings — any time you like. You can nudge the curve of a line, swap out one brush for another, or change stroke thickness and color at any stage of your drawing — saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need — large or small. Never worry about fuzzy sketchnotes again. Concepts is a powerful, flexible tool that’s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
Links
1. Dr. Bryan Vartabedian’s Tips
2. Ingrid Lill’s Tips
3. Jono Hey’s Tips
4. Elizabeth Chesney’s Tips
5. Luke Kelvington’s Tips
6. Lena Pehrs’ Tips
7. Rev Andy Gray’s Tips
8. Ashton Rodenheiser’s Tips
9. Gary Kopervas’ Tips
Credits
Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 18 Apr 2023 | International Sketchnote Camp 2023 in Leiden: Key to Discover New Horizons - S13/E05 | 00:39:20 | |
In this episode, Lai Chee Chiu and Ferry Timp — two members of the organizing committee of ISC23NL in Leiden, The Netherlands — talk to us about the event that will hold September 1-3, 2023. Hear details about the full organizing team and a bit of the history of ISC. Learn how they decided on Leiden for the event’s location. Get a sneak peek of what to expect, what to do, and places to visit in Leiden. Prepare yourself for a festival vibe in this year's ISC! Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings — any time you like. You can nudge the curve of a line, swap out one brush for another, or change stroke thickness and color at any stage of your drawing — saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need — large or small. Never worry about fuzzy sketchnotes again. Concepts is a powerful, flexible tool that’s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
Tips
CreditsProducer: Alec Pulianas Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with my friends Lai Chee and Ferry Timp. How are you guys doing? Lai Chee Chiu: We're good, thank you. And you? MR: Doing well. Ferry doesn't know what to say. He's too— Ferry Timp: No. I was trying not to speak, the both of us at the same time, but I'm okay too. Thanks, Mike. MR: You're so welcome. The reason we have Lai Chee and Ferry on the call is they are some of the organizing team, there's more team than just them, organizing the International Sketch Note camp happening in Leiden in September of this year. We're super excited. I am attending the event. My flight is purchased, my hotel is booked. I'm excited to get back to the Netherlands. I think I was there in 2014 in Amsterdam and really had a great time, so, I'm excited to come back. And we thought it would be helpful on this episode to talk a little bit about the International Sketch Note camp. We can talk a little bit about history. Specifically, we'll talk mostly about Leiden and how the team was formed, why they decided to choose Leiden as the city, some of the benefits of Leiden, the things that they're excited about, and maybe some tips. I think we understand Ferry's got some tips around places to see if you are in the city. FT: I have the shirt already, so. MR: He's got the shirt, he's ready to go. For those who are listening, he's got a beautiful Leiden football team sweatshirt that he's wearing, representing the city. Let's get into it. Let's first start with—people may remember Lai Chee from a previous episode where she was focused on, but we may not know who Ferry is. Let's start with Ferry and then we'll go to Lai Chee, and tell us who you are and what you guys do. FT: Okay. Well, I'm Ferry from the Netherlands. I'm educated as a certified public accountant. I've worked for 12 years at PWC in the Netherlands. And after that, I decided that it was time for me for a next step so I started to work for the City of Leiden as an internal auditor, and I did that for seven years. Why did I end up at ISC and stuff like that? That's because in 2018, it was, I guess, I was looking for this powerful tool to communicate all my findings, because yeah, auditors are good at one thing, it's writing reports that no one can read. All these difficult sentences. I was really looking for how can I do this differently. I tried to find some nice images on Google, but if you find one, basically, something is missing in it. Then I discovered this amazing tool, and it was holding a pencil, start drawing again. It was really helpful in making simple and clear images of key messages. What I found out was that it was really nice to see how the other parties, like I was in the council, and they were trying to read my reports, but when I came back with just drawings, they were enthusiastic. They got immediately what I meant and it was very nice. That's why when I started with drawing and I never stopped. MR: Really great. FT: Just to keep it short because I don't do short very well. MR: Well, it's good to hear an accountant who's excited about using visualization. FT: Exactly. MR: The longer I'm doing this, I see more and more variety of people doing this work, which is exciting to me because when you do the principles and you put them out there, you don't know who's going to pick it up. You just assume for me, other designers just make sense. But beyond that, maybe teachers, but now I've got physicists and accountants and business people, and all kinds of other people, because I think we're visual creatures. I think it really helps. It provides another way to look at something, especially if the stuff you're doing is really important. If people are blowing off your reports and not really understanding them, they're losing value that they could gain so that's, you're helping communicate those ideas. FT: Exactly. MR: How about you, Lai Chee? LCC: I have a background in drawing, but I didn't do anything after school. At some point, I was looking for a team event and we figured out that I was drawing for business and pizza and beer. That was the perfect team event. That's what we did. And that was around 2016, I believe. And then we didn't do anything about it till I came across the de tekenende actors from the de betekenaar, where Ferry works at this moment. And I met Ferry there because we were taking the online course and joined the community together. We've been talking and drawing together ever since. He started to draw for work, and I started to draw for work. I'm currently a freelancer and drawing is a communication tool for me. I'm not a graphic recorder. I do graphic facilitation, but not recording. And it's just a way of taking notes. That's what we call sketch notes. MR: Exactly. Exactly. Well, that's really great. I wondered what the connection was between the two of you, and now it makes so much sense. LCC: We go a long way back now. Yeah. FT: We go a long way back, yeah. MR: That's pretty cool. LCC: But we also did face-to-face courses together. FT: Yeah. It was visual facilitation, four-day course. LCC: Yeah, visual facilitation. MR: Super nice. Tell me now a little bit more about the remainder of the team. I think there's three or four other people, I can't remember the number. You have a pretty relatively large group for an organizing team, which is great because you spread the load. I know the French team was a larger team. And I think that really helped them compared to, I think the first team in Hamburg was four. And then Luis had a partner that he worked with in Portugal. His advantage is that was his business, running workshops. He had that advantage. But if you're a team of people and you can spread it out across a lot that helps. Tell us about the other team members. FT: Shall I do it, Lai Chee? LCC: Yeah, sure. FT: Okay. We are in total with seven people, so besides us, it's five more. To start with there are two members that were originally the initiators of ISC23. Those are Claudia Unseld and Henk Wijnands. They started to look for others to join. I believe that Vincent Kober, he was the third one because he also attended last year in Poland, the ISC. He had asked for something like, "Is there a program, or how do you start such a thing and organizing?" He had asked Chris Wilson this question, like, "Is there something you can hand over?" And he was like, "No, there isn't." But the fact that he asked was for Chris, something nice to tell to Claudia, like, "Okay, Vincent is also looking for maybe the possibility of organizing." After that, I believe Lai Chee who also was there, was asked to participate. And Corine Matser, my colleague from De Betekenaar, she was also there in Poland. Then there was a group of five, and they thought, "Well, that's not enough. We need a couple more." And then Ingrid Nouwens, she's in the south of the Netherlands and New Henk already. So, Henk asked her. Corine came to me and said, "Ferry, we have this great idea, just a small project. Do you join us?" And I said, "Well, of course, I'll join. And then we had this team of seven. I don't know what you want me to tell more. I could go on for hours about that. MR: Well, I think it's good to state the names of the other team members. Everyone's working together. Again, I think that's great that you have a large team. It probably makes communication more challenging. Anytime a team gets larger, that just is a natural challenge, you can't avoid it. But the benefits are that you can spread the load which is really important for a big event like this. It's good to hear other names. Thank you everyone on the team for what you're doing because I know it's a lot of work. I've spoken to lots of these teams, and I know how much work it is. Maybe let's shift a little bit toward how did you decide? Was it Henk and Claudia, who made that first move? How did this all come about? And secondly, how did you choose Leiden? Because there's lots of cities in the Netherlands. Amsterdam being one, although probably expensive. Talk to us a little bit about that too. What led you to Leiden? Maybe we'll talk a little—let's let Lai Chee take this one. LCC: We all look in our own neighborhoods, and because Ferry worked in Leiden, he knew Leiden pretty well so he came up with Leiden but I, of course, was with them and who came along. Claudia and Vincent don't live in the Netherlands. Those are the cities that we choose from. And then of course, we looked at the cost, but also what happens when we don't sell the tickets, so till when can we cancel, those conditions. The PLNT in Leiden was so enthusiastic, and they really, really convinced us, and the price was good and also the services and the whole team is thinking with us. There was just actually a no-brainer too—it was quite simple, right? FT: Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. MR: It sounds like Amsterdam really never was an option. Is that mainly because of cost? I mean, you get the advantage. The beautiful thing about Leiden, from my perspective, looking from the outside, is it's just a train ride from Amsterdam. So, I can fly into Amsterdam, I can get good rates on my flights, and then simply hop on a train or whatever, and then make my way to the Southwest, and here I am. To get the benefits of Amsterdam without the chaos of Amsterdam, maybe, I don't know, or the pricing. FT: Yeah, I guess that's— LCC: But it's also practical that you have someone who knows the city very well. MR: Yes. Yes. LCC: Of course, we've been in Amsterdam, but we know our own city the best. FT: I get lost in Amsterdam. LCC: Yeah, me too. MR: Well, that's good to know. And I think that's an interesting pattern as well. Thinking all the way back to Hamburg. Not all the team members were from Hamburg. I think they had two who were local. Who knew the city, they knew they could talk to venues, they knew the place. They found this really cool place that was reasonable. All those things had to line up. Same thing with in Portugal, Luis knew places that he could go. Same thing with Paris. Many of the members on that team were with BNP Paribas. They found out that everybody's on holidays in France in August. We have this beautiful meeting center we can get access to. Again, I think that's really important. Is there someone there locally who—'cause there's also logistical things, right? Like, who's gonna order the bread to show up at three o'clock? Or who's gonna make sure the coffee is there or the whatever. I'm sure there's all these questions, and having somebody local who knows the city and knows people there, it's really important. So that's good to hear. Maybe what we could talk about now, and I'll point this one at Ferry and then Lai Chee, is what has you excited about this version of the ISC in Leiden? What's the thing or things that you're most excited looking forward to? Is there some part of it that you're excited about? We'll start with Ferry and then we'll go to Lai Chee after that. FT: Cool. It's cool. What's not to be enthusiastic about at the moment? Because at the beginning when you start organizing this, then it's all like these things, like, okay, are we a team? And the second question is, do we want to go for this? Do we have dates that we're aiming at? After that it's like, can we do it? Can we find a venue? Can we find a caterer? How does the budget look like? Do you think we can do it? Those are all very important questions, but it's also like, yeah, it's tough to get there and it's also I think, the most boring thing. Right now we are on this train. We have all these ideas about how do we want to organize it. You see at our backgrounds if you're not just listening to us, but see us on the screens, on YouTube, then you can see like we want to go for this festival vibe. And I think that's something really cool because for me, ISC, I've never been there. I was planning on twice. The first time that I wanted to be part of it was the online version in Brussels, but then life happened. The last time, I was all set up to participate and something happened. I don't want to talk about it right now, but yeah, that's what happens. For me, it's like really to meet all these like-minded people, to learn together, to be inspired, to get new ideas. That's what I like about it. This year in our team, we are all really an enthusiastic about what can we do next to it. Because a lot of us have attended to previous editions and they're very enthusiastic about what you guys did there. But then it was also like, "Okay, can we do a next step? How can we make the connection more or professionalize a little bit?" I think Lai Chee is going to mention something about that later on. For me, this festival thing, to do it slightly different. To ask Mike Rohde to come to it and to let us present him as a rockstar. And now we have a second rockstar, Ben Crothers is going over to the Netherlands. That's so nice. And just to get the excitement about this and all these ideas that start to pop up, because it's in Leiden, it's in the Netherlands. We want to go outside when we're there because Leiden is a rich city with a lot of ancient buildings. There's an old castle on a hill in the middle of that old ancient city center, so let's go out. But then again, it's the Netherlands, because, you know it's September, it could rain. So like, festival vibe maybe have some ponchos over and pimp your poncho workshops. I don't know, we go crazy like that. But in the end, it's not all just about having fun, it's about connection, it's about learning new things. Also, the rockstars we get, we want to see if we can deepen more on the field of visual thinking, working with a pencil, sketchnoting. That's for me. Lai Chee. LCC: One thing that we all had in common is how can we go to the next level. Many of us are already couple of years. Even if you are a newbie, you watch some videos or things. You have an idea what this is about. But what we all felt a little bit is that often people think it's some sort of a hobby that we have, and don't even realize that we have really jobs next to it. Some of us are accountants or consultants or teachers or whatever. And if you bring a group together like that, then you have massive brain power. So why don't we use it and why don't we see how can we help each other? I know a couple of people, Ferry knows a couple of people, or you probably know a lot of people, but do we also know who can complement us? So, if I need someone or certain skill, I know what Ferry is capable of so if I miss that skill, I know I can come to him. There are so many sketch noters. I don't know what the talent is for people. So, we came up with a theme. So that's the past, the present, and the future that will go through the whole event but also nourish and flourish. Even if you're a newbie, so what do you need to nourish your skill and what is the future? Especially with the AI and all the technology coming up, so what does that mean for our things and how can we embrace it? This is also why our theme is also key to discover new horizons because the world is changing and it's changing very, very fast. What does that mean for us? Not only for sketch noters but also all the occupations and professions we have. That's a little bit what we are trying to do. So, the past, present, and the future. MR: I really like this idea. I would describe it as a holistic festival. So, you're not just doing one thing, like a narrow thing just for professionals. If you're not professional, don't come. Like, it's not that. It's, we have a professional thing. If you're doing it for fun thing, we're expanding your thinking. We're having you think about the future, we're not forgetting the past, like all these things, we're having fun. That's exciting. That makes me wanna come even more. That it's gonna be a fun event. LCC: I hope so. MR: Being part of it, right? Honestly, you think about what we've been through with the pandemic where we've had to go online, you need to think about events, like if you're doing an in-person event, you need to think about it in that way, that it has to be multi-dimensional. It has to have multiple angles that will attract someone. As with many of these events, you might be really excited about one part of it and totally get into that and maybe you're not as interested in say the professional thing, I don't know. Or maybe you're really interested in the professional thing and you don't wanna do some other thing. You've got that option. I tell people you know, in many of the past events, all I did was just sit around and talk to people for the whole time. I never went to a class. I would do my keynote and I would just sit around and I finally get to talk to Ferry. I finally get to sit down and talk with Lai Chee. I finally get to sit down and talk with whoever, right? That was my whole time was just—and I loved it. It was great just talking with people the whole time, understanding them, seeing what they're doing. That was a great result for me. And then hanging out with people at the end at nighttime or whatever. Some of my best memories from the past events were not only the event, but then we would go wandering around Hamburg or something, and looking for a place to eat and having fun as a group. I think a lot of it even is just providing the environment in which things could happen. It's almost like being a gardener in some ways. Like if you prepare really good ground, you can grow anything you want to. That sounds a lot like what you're preparing from my perspective, which is a really exciting. LCC: Yeah, exactly. That's the whole festival feeling, so you're not stuck to one lecture or whatever. So you have to move. That's the whole point. MR: Yeah. This is really great. We've talked a little bit about what's exciting about it. We talked about the history and how it came about. Talk a little bit about the city itself. You sort of hinted at this before. What is a city like? What I know about the city is it's a university city, I believe. It's southwest of Amsterdam, so it's a train ride or I guess a taxi ride if you had to go to Amsterdam. FT: Yeah, train and taxi. MR: What else can you tell us about the city? Sounds like it's old. I'll stop there and get some— FT: Yeah, it is old. Yeah, it's old. MR: Which is cool. FT: That's where it starts. Leiden, it is a city. It is a truly Dutch city. We have canals that you also find in Amsterdam, the famous canals. Also, the buildings next to the canals, like the different kind of houses that you'd like to see the staircase, the shaped roofs. Yeah, exactly. Leiden is everything that Amsterdam has, but just a little bit smaller. A lot smaller, I guess. It's like really this typical Dutch vibe. If you live abroad and you think of Holland, you always see pictures of us wearing wooden shoes and living next to or in a windmill. But a windmill is also there in Leiden. If you step out of the train station, you walk towards the city and you look to your left, there's a windmill. So, if you're a tourist, you want to see that. Leiden has it all. The fun thing is, like you said, it's very close to a lot of large cities in the Netherlands. It's located at, I think it's slightly more than just 50 minutes from Schiphol airport. It's where you arrive. It's one-stop with the train. It's really easy like that. Amsterdam is close, and on the other side, if you go a little bit to the south, there's the Hague and Rotterdam. Those are all also very large cities in the Netherlands. Leiden, it's like ancient. There's a lot of culture. There's an endless list of museums. That's also nice. We can fill in the whole program of the festival also by visiting several museums with a lot of topics that we could choose. So that's nice. As you mentioned, it has a large university, and it is the oldest university we have in the Netherlands. It was the first one. I think it was the Spanish possessor that started this university. And it has a rich history, of course, but it's also, therefore, Leiden is a city of students. There's a lot happening. If you want to grab a beer somewhere or eat something, there are a lot of clubs. There are a lot of restaurants next to the canal. There's choice enough for everyone to blend in, to get a really good taste of the Netherlands, but also being among young people. That's also very nice. Also, Leiden has one of the biggest bioscience parts in Europe that's also there. Science technology is also richly there. A lot of the great national and international companies are situated there. It's also an international town, so they are used to people walking around in the city during daylight talking French or English. It's also not just a city that's like, "Oh, oh, is that a foreigner." No. You hear English a lot on the street. That's very nice. This culture thing, I can go on forever, as you have noticed. It's also the city where [unintelligible 24:35] was born. If you have painters and look at his paintings, it's a lot of inspiration from that side. Okay, last thing is, Albert Einstein lived there. Not his whole life, but he visited, I think it was—I wrote it down because I thought, let's try to give you some factual data thing. He came first to Leiden in 1911. He was so enthusiastic about Leiden that from 1920, every year he lived one month totally in Leiden because he loved it so much, and he worked on the university there. There was a fun fact that when he needed some rest and some time off, he visited the Observatory of Leiden. Leiden has its own observatory. You can just reach the stars and go outside. Is this enough about Leiden? Or do you want more? MR: That's great. It sounds like anytime I hear a university city or college town, that always has big advantages. Austin, Texas is one of those. University of Oxford is there. If you ever go to Austin there's lots of options for eating and drinking and activity, and it's usually pretty reasonable because students have to pay for it so the cost is low. You have all the advantages of Amsterdam without all the hassles of Amsterdam. FT: Exactly. MR: Not that there's a lot of—I mean, when I was in Amsterdam, I had a great time, but it is big to navigate. I think I rode a bus to an event and it took a little bit of a ride across the city. Probably in Leiden, I would just walk there because it's not so big. FT: Yeah. That the biggest advantage of Leiden. You don't need to worry about, "Oh, can I get a taxi cab from my hotel to the venue at PLNT where we are hosting this? It's at walking distance. Almost everything is at walking distance. And also, if you stay a little bit longer, you come over a day earlier, maybe it's also a bus ride away from the beach. Leiden at sea, it's not the name. It's Katwijik aan Zee but they call it Leiden at the beach in Leiden. This is also nice if you want to go out, you're just a bus ride away from the beach. MR: Lots of options and lots of variety of— FT: Lots of options. Yeah. MR: It fits everybody. FT: Come over for two weeks and you'll enjoy yourself. LCC: Exactly. MR: For a holiday. Make it a holiday. Well, that's really great. I'm excited to see what you have planned. I didn't mention before the idea of pushing it further. I'm a push-it-further kind of guy myself. Always experimenting and trying new things. So, when you say that, that really attracts my thinking, that means we can do some new things. I think a lot of times—and I like reason experimentation is we have so much opportunity and flexibility and capability available to us that we don't use it. We just do the same thing over and over again, and there's opportunities to do really cool new things if we just give it a try. Especially, I think there, it's like, "Well, what if I fail?" Well, so what? The experiment didn't work. You learn something and you'll do it a different way next time. I think hearing that is pretty exciting to hear that there will be some things pushing the boundaries a little bit, and we can have some fun. Thank you for sharing this sense of things. I'm gonna go back to Ferry one more time. And this is for those who are coming to Leiden. We asked Ferry if he could give us what would be three things you should make sure that you should do when you're in Leiden. You can go more than that, but three is only required. FT: Okay. Well, first thing, of course, you need to come to ISC. But that one doesn't count, because that's too easy. MR: That's assumed. FT: That's assumed. I think first thing that you need to do is take along the right shoes because you need to go for a walk. There's this nice park around the canals. It's all the way surrounding the ancient city. You can walk really like in a circle. It's new since, I guess for two, three, maybe four years or now. It's a really nice walk around town. We also make sure that we will arrange with the tourist bureau because they also have guided walks. We will provide all the participants with those tips. But this is really nice to walk around visit the castle on the hill, like I already mentioned, is you have a great view of Leiden on the rooftops and see that. I think that's the first thing. There's also this really cool, but small I think it was some sort of museum, but like on Rembrandt vaan Rijn. You can do also things like that. I think for us, sketch noting, and if you want to draw something, but really like, get inspired from his kind of style, that's also something really nice. I can mention all the museums, but pick one. There are multiple museums, so we will make sure—we have support from it's called Leiden Convention Bureau. They have created a landing page, especially for us, for our participants. So, if you click on it, and the link is on our website so everybody can see. There's a rich amount of museums with tips. You could go here, and this museum is about this and stuff. You could go on a canal boat trip for some people who like to just really sit down, have a glass of drink, and just without having to walk, you could just see a lot of the city. And of course, you're in the Netherlands, and we all ride bikes. So, we have possibilities to ride bikes explore the city like that. So that's also an option. Of course, when you've done all that, there are multiple, like pubs, restaurants. There's a theater, I don't know. They have also a small like theater where bands—it's not the large bands and large musicians, but yeah. Also, international acts, that could also be a possibility. I'm more than three, right? MR: That's okay. FT: What I'm trying to say is like the festival vibe you have on ISC, you could easily take it with you if we close down, like say at the end of Saturday, take it with you, and go into the city and we'll have more fun like that. Yeah. That's great. That's great. Well, I think this has been helpful. Tickets as we record this, are about to go on sale. We don't know what sales will look like by the time this releases. We encourage you to go take a look and find out for yourself if this is encouraging and exciting to you. We suspect there's people who've already booked their tickets who are listening to this to get a more of a feel for the organizing team and the thought behind it and those kinds of things. So, whoever you are, we would love to have you in Leiden in September. FT: Definitely. MR: Any final thoughts from either of you before we wrap up and point people at the website so they can have a look at tickets and details? Maybe I'll start with Lai. Lai Chee, do you have any final thoughts, any encouragement for someone who maybe is considering it? MR: No. I mean, I'm not really objective. I am super, super excited. Last year in Poland, I was already excited because it's not only the event, but you also meet all those people you just only know online. We are gonna meet you for the first time. I know you are all ready for four years or something, but this is the first time I'm gonna see you live. That's the other thing. What we also will try to do is to make connections in the before phase. Before we go to the event that we know each other a little bit better than when we actually will meet. So, just come. FT: Yeah. Exactly. I think that's a good point, because for me, that's also, it's like the most fun thing is it's a live event and we can do that again. We haven't been able to do it a couple of years. Last time in Poland it was already happening again. I think that's nice. Like Lai Chee mentioned, I think it was our idea as well to like it starts in September, but what if we do a before phase? What if we ask Mike Rohde if we can use Sketchnote Army Slack to meet upfront online, do some stuff. We have really fun things planned out. Maybe some sketch note or no, it wasn't the sketch note. Try to make a picture together if living close and post them online like that. So the community building will start up front. I think that's really nice. This festival fight, we try to take it creatively. Sometimes we brainstorm and we get all the crazy ideas. What's the most fun part of part about organizing this, you could go crazy and think of all those things. And then, of course, it's not just two of us because we go crazy a lot, but then we have the others that say, "Okay, let's get real. Let's get real. Okay, this is not going to happen because it's too complicated. But I like this and how about this." That's also nice. Everybody should go because it's like a mini break. It's a holiday, a mini holiday break and it's investing in you and in your skills and growing as a professional and expanding your community with all these cool people, like-minded visual people, your visual friends, I guess. LCC: Exactly. Exactly. Nourish and flourish. Those are the two words you have to remember for this event. Nourish and flourish. FT: They're not on our posters, but those are key values that we try every time to incorporate in our program. If we decide like, okay, do we want this for a workshop? Then we all say to each other, okay, does it contribute to nourishing or flourishing our community, our guests, our participants? MR: Those two words are great because it focuses on improving yourself and then improving the world when you flourish. That sounds really fun. Well, thank you both so much for being on the show and sharing all your excitement. I can feel it coming through the wires. If someone is interested in checking out the event and seeing if tickets are still available, what would be the place to go for them? Is there a URL that you would recommend? Or maybe should they go to social media location first, and that we'll direct them to the site? FT: Yeah, we have a website. It's www.sketchcamp2023.nl. This is the website that we've launched. I believe if you go to the website, sketchnotcamp.com that was what the team used last year. There's also a link that directs you to our website. For the socials, we are on two social platforms. We are on Instagram and we are on LinkedIn. We are not on Twitter at the moment for this year, but we've posted there also a message that "Okay, this year we're not there, but we'll hand over the Twitter account to the organizing team of next year." MR: Good. We'll, of course, put links to those things so you can just look in the show notes and click away wherever you're at. That'll be the easiest way to jump in and check things out. We'll make sure that's taken care of. Well, thank you two for being on the show. It's really good to hear your excitement again. Especially, Ferry with so much experience being in the city itself makes me wanna visit. It's like the way I am with Milwaukee when people tell me they want to come here. I can spend an hour telling them all the great things and where they should go and what they should do. I feel that same thing from you. And then Lai Chee, I feel the excitement for you around the programming and the experience as well, right? LCC: Yeah. MR: Being from another city, you can appreciate all the benefits. Probably, the last thing I would say is don't discount the value of relationships. That you might come for the programming, but the relationships—like some of my most treasured friends I've met at ISCs and was an opportunity, and led to in some cases work opportunities or support opportunities where they gave me advice or help me out with something. Networks are valuable and you should always build them before you need them. So, this is your opportunity to build your network. That would be my pitch. FT: Amen. LCC: Yes. MR: Well, that wraps another episode of the "Sketch Note Army Podcast". Until the next episode, this is Mike and Lai Chee, and Ferry Timp signing off for now. See you soon. | |||
| 27 Sep 2021 | Ari Alvarez overcomes burnout - SE10/EP04 | 00:50:38 | |
In this episode, Ari Alvarez, a visual thinker, design thinker, and teacher from Mexico City, Mexico, talks about her shift from being an industrial design professor at university into full-time visual thinking and teaching. She shares how experiencing professional and person burnout led her to this radical change into full-time visual thinking. This is an inspiring discussion you won’t want to miss! Sponsored by the Sketchnote IdeabookThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by The Sketchnote Ideabook, the sketchbook designed for sketchnoters. Equipped with a no-bleed, now show through paper, The Sketchnote Ideabook can take almost any marker or pen you can throw at it. Save 15% on your entire order of Sketchnote Ideabooks and Autoquill Pen sets at the Airship Store when you use code IDEABOOK15 through December 31, 2021. To claim your 15% off visit airship.store today! Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 05 Apr 2022 | Kris Neckelmann - SE11/EP08 | 00:48:13 | |
In this episode Kris Neckelmann shares how getting fired from a bank job inspired her to go full-time into visualization. You’re going to love this passionate interview! Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 26 Oct 2020 | Jay Hosler - SE08 / EP06 | 01:01:02 | |
In this episode I talk with Jay Hosler, a professor at Juniata College in Pennsylvania. He’s a scientist who has found a way to represent science with comics! Hear how Jay came into this space, and the relationship he sees between comics and sketchnoting. SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by The Sketchnote Ideabook, the sketchbook designed for sketchnoters. Equipped with a no-bleed, now show through paper, The Sketchnote Ideabook can take almost any marker or pen you can throw at it. Learn more at: RUNNING ORDER
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 02 Apr 2024 | Claire Ohlenschlager’s varied talents drive her visual creativity - S15/E05 | 00:50:08 | |
In this episode, Claire Ohlenschlager, an avid doodler, shares how she developed her sketchnoting practice, found a thriving sketchnoting community, and awakened her passion for teaching. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike Rohde, and I'm here with Claire Ohlenschlanger. Claire, it's so good to have you on the show. Claire Ohlenschlanger: Thank you for having me. It's a very honor. MR: Well, I've been trying to get you on the show for a while, and just timing and other things haven't worked out, but we finally have you, and I'm excited. You're someone who's been involved in this community for a long time, and it's always good to hear the perspectives of people who have been in the community for a while. And it might be interesting for us to chat a little bit about that in our discussion too, and see, how does the community remain the same and maybe how has the sketching community changed a little bit? Obviously, we have new people coming in all the time, so that changes the community, which I think is great. But before we get into that, let's first start and let us know who you are and what you do. CO: Well, I'm Claire Ohlenschlanger. I live in the Netherlands in the Hague. A very small country. I work at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, where I work at the Teacher Training College, languages department. I've been a teacher, I think this is my 34th year. Secondary education and now higher education. MR: That's really cool. CO: Yeah. I think it's the best job. It's hard work, but very rewarding. MR: Oh, yeah. That's true. CO: Yeah. MR: I really admire teachers. The more that I teach, the more I admire teachers because I see how hard the work is. I enjoy it. It's really satisfying, but it's really hard work, and when you get a really good teacher and you see it, I appreciate it. I know how hard it is to do it well. So, thank you for doing all this great teaching for many years for many different people. I'm sure that people appreciate you for that. CO: I think it's a very—it keeps me young. I was just saying that to my colleague because you work with young people, it kind of keeps me young, I feel, but it's very nice to see people grow and to help them progress and help them when they're kind of stuck. In the pandemic and the years after, a lot of kids have been stuck. MR: Yeah. CO: And so. It's extra challenging, but it's very rewarding at the moment. Very frustrating sometimes as well. MR: I suspect. Yeah. CO: Yeah. MR: So, I'm really curious how—so we know that you're here, you've been teaching for a long time. You've moved all the way through secondary to higher education, but how did you begin? As a little girl, you know, on your own—you do sketchnoting and visualization, right? Probably in your work, but also personally. How did you get here? Starting as a little girl, were you drawing all the time? what's the story and how did you end up where you are? CO: Well, I wasn't really drawing. I was always writing. So I was always making sure that I wrote in nice letters. And of course, I'm from pre-computer, so we had to do all the writing. And I also, as long as I can remember, I would always want to write with fountain pens and not with ballpoints or felt tip pens or maybe sometimes pencils. What I would also always like doing is add color to what I was doing so that what I wrote also looked nice. But not like we sketch these days, but I did spend a lot of time making things nice to read again. I would also do a lot is doodle. I'm not a very good drawer but am an avid doodler. So Lots of my notebooks, I still have a lot of them, have all these little doodles all around what I wrote. Actually, when I started, I couldn't stand messy pages because I would always spend a lot of time on making it—that's what people always say, "How can you write things down straight away, so neatly." But I think that's from when I was very young. I've always been like that. I've never been a drawer. I've developed into a sketcher. MR: Interesting. CO: Very simple. MR: Definitely an interesting perspective. Tell us a little bit more about that. CO: How I came to sketching is I think somewhere around 2010 or so. You know, every so often you have a seven-year itch. And I think I was having a seven-year itch, and then I decided to go back to Uni to start studying again. So I went to do an educational master's. And as it happened, on one of the first evenings after class I was walking home and I passed our bookstore, and our bookstore had a workshop on mind mapping that was just about to start. So I figured I'd sit down. And it was a very practical workshop. So we got a large piece of paper and some pens, or actually I probably had a pen. I always have pens in my bag, so I think I probably had the pens. And then he was telling us about how to mind map, and at the same time I was mind mapping. And that was actually my first-time taking notes of what I was hearing. And that worked so well for me that everything I did in my master's, I started off mind mapping. I mind map everything I heard on my lectures, but also the books and the articles I read. And gradually I found myself needing pictures and visuals. And then of course, I started because I was intrigued by the fact that it was helping me so much to, you know, remember and to retain the information. And while I was getting feedback, people telling me, "Oh, it looks so nice, and can I make a copy of it?" Et cetera. And so gradually, I found myself needing pictures. So I started looking into it, and that's how I came across your book. And then I thought that was really interesting. So then I looked into that, and then gradually I turned my mind maps into sketchnotes. So actually, quite often when I sketchnote, it has the order of a mind map that works from the top to the bottom back up again. And I noticed that the mind maps, how I started this is, I can still find it in my notes. I use a lot of colors and a lot of arrows and what you would do in mind maps. I think it's probably originates from that. When I did Uni, that was also when I was introduced to social media because I'd never even heard of social media. So I had to make a Twitter account to have a personal learning network and, you know, broaden that. So when I found your book, I started looking for you. And then of course I came across hashtags. And that way I got sucked into the community. Today's Doodle, I think Sketchnotes in Real life or Today's Doodle in Real Life, that's how I met Rob, Rob Dimeo, who started off and showed me you could make sketches in actual pictures. In the meantime, I bought an iPad. So I was kind of playing around with that. And that's where I met a lot of the Sketchnote community. And I was also intrigued by that because around that time, a lot of people my age were saying, "Oh, what are you doing on social media? Social media is scary. Lots of ugly things happen on social media." And I was just getting inspiration after inspiration. So that intrigued me as well. And then I started traveling. I like traveling. Then I started thinking, well, I'll just ask who in this community lives in whichever city I was going to. And then I found out that you could also meet up with sketchnoters that you met on internet in real life. And they were actually very nice. And that's right. Where I sometimes try to tell my friends that if you chat with each other and you have a common ground, like sketchnotes in our case, then eventually you also get to know people, you get to see their sense of humor, you see sense of humor in how people draw. Talking about something that you have in common also is binding. So meeting someone in real life then is as if you've known that person for a while. MR: Yeah. CO: That's what I really love about our community. It actually feels like I have friends all over the world. I've met some. You know, I've met you, I've met people at the International Sketchnote camps. I've met people outside of the camps, but in the cities, they live in, or shown people around the Hague here in the Netherlands. And you always have something to talk about. If you don't feel like talking, you always have something to sketch together. That's how one thing grew to another, because at the same time I met McKayla. The McKayla Lewis in London, and somehow James Sorreta in Australia. And we started talking to each other and I started saying, good morning, and good evening, because of course, there's such a huge time difference on my way into work. And that grew into me sketching, because what I always do on my way, on my commute is I also found myself—I have about a 40-minute commute to work by train, and there's a very small lapse, I think it's probably only about a minute, where we're kind of in internet digital no man's land and you don't have internet connection. I honestly think it's only about 10 seconds. But I found myself every time I got into that area, and my phone would not connect, I'd get this kind of feeling stress. And then I thought, that's not really very healthy. So I started taking these little, I don't know whether you remember them when we were in Lisbon? I had these little Usem note cards. MR: Yes. CO: The size of the business card. And I started taking them to school, and I started drawing on those. That's how I got into drawing a doodle a day. I always kind of tend to go overboard. I think I did that for about five days—five years. I switched from the Usem cards to Hobonichi because that paper is fantastic. MR: Beautiful. Yeah. CO: Yeah. So I started sketching my morning, evening for Mackey and James, and I think I also did that for three years every single day. And that turned into a huge box of things that I couldn't never throw away. So that's when I switched to making them digitally because then you can have a digital cupboard. And I did a couple of those with the community. So a couple of times I got to my 1000, or my, I don't know how many and then I thought, "Hey, how cool would it be if we could make one?" I think we even made something for you once. MR: Yeah. CO: I think we even drew you. I really love the way we can connect together. And I really love the idea that we can be all over the world and still be focused on doing the same thing and then make one thing together. That's very, very interesting. And I think it's very motivating. I get a lot of energy from that. So I've done a couple of those kind of projects. Yeah. We drew you in little kind of pixel boxes. MR: That's right. CO: I remember that now. Yeah. And then we made morning, evening together. And I had people from all over the world sending me. And of course, every time I did that, I regretted that I started it because there's always more work than you anticipate when you start off. The idea is always fun, but actually getting it to work is—but then that's a good thing of working at the Uni full of people who understand digital things much better than I do. So I always have someone, a student just who can help me out with all those kind of things. What also happened is, I think also those sketches, because I started drawing on those little, Usem papers, I'd go to conferences or talks or whatever, and then I'd wanted to sketch, and I usually only had those papers. And so, I'd have to sketch very small. And then obviously you can't use too many words. You need the little icons? And then I'd give them. Afterwards I'd take a picture for myself, and then I'd give the cards to whoever it was that was presenting. I also sent a lot of my Usem cards all over the world. I'd make a little happy birthday card, and then I'd tell people, "Give me your address and I'll send it to you." And then I'd get their email address, and I'd have to explain, "No, I mean, snail mail, and I'll send it to your home address." And not many people send you actual cards or anything written in the envelope with the stamp on it these days. So it brings me a lot of positive energy. MR: And I think the people that you share with get positive energy too. CO: Yeah. That's why I hope, yeah. That's why, I hope. And of course, you know, in Uni where I tried to explain—'cause all those mind maps I made during my master's, eventually I laminated them all and I put them together with a binder and they're always at the office. And then every so often when I see kids studying in my hallway feeling slightly frustrated, I take out my binder and I show them and I tell them, "You know, this is also a way for you to retain and to also make it fun. And drawing it makes you remember." You'll always remember, "Oh, yeah, I think it's probably in pink on the right-hand corner." And then you'll also remember, because you thought of an icon, the icon will trigger your memory and it really helps you remember. And yeah, quite a lot of my students try, not all of them persist, but quite a lot of them try and regularly I hear that it really helps them. So that's good. MR: Even if, I would suspect if they still say, type notes, but maybe they use drawings as a support mechanism, that could even be a win as well, right? CO: At the moment I don't teach that much anymore, but when I still did teach, I would actually tell them they had to have a notebook and they would have to take actual old school pen to paper notes. But I don't really like it MR: How did they react to that? I think some have notes. CO: Well, in the beginning, you know, when you start as a teacher, of course kids don't know you, but when you've been somewhere long enough, people already come in with their notebooks because they know. MR: Yeah. Reputation. CO: Yeah. And what also happens is it needs persistence. I remember one of my students a couple of years ago, and of course my students are already around 20 or so, so they're not very—they're still young, obviously, right? MR: Yeah. Yeah. CO: They're not really kids. And it took a lot of patience on my side and persistence. And then I think into the fourth week, he came to me and with a very proud facial expression, he showed me the notebook he had bought and the pen he had bought. And no, that's what he used. Then what I hope is that if they catch the hang of it, then it really helps them. MR: It does seem, you know, I was talking with somebody else about that too, that when you teach any kind of thing, some people will incorporate it into their lives more than others. Some not at all, some quite a bit, and some people in between. So that's just the normal thing, I suppose. CO: I don't think it matters because everyone has their own way, and what you have to do is at least give yourself the chance to find out what your way is, and not find yourself stuck in the computer because that's actually what they start off with. But to give yourself the chance to try out what works for you. MR: Yeah, it's having an option, right? Presenting an option. And maybe that doesn't fit for everyone, but for some people it's perfect, right? So, if you'd never— CO: And then it's up to—yeah, you can go. MR: I was gonna say, if you'd never been exposed to it, you wouldn't know if it works, right? CO: Yeah. That's what I was about to say. I think it's up to you as the teacher to show the different ways that they can actually try to study. Sometimes you tend to get stuck into your own way, into what works for you. But I think as a teacher, you're obliged to show them different ways because you have different kids there. MR: Yep. CO: Yep. MR: An interesting side note that I hadn't planned on, but I'm curious about is, and I have a theory around it is young people, at least that I encounter, seem to have a fascination with old analog things, record players. My son bought himself a turntable and he's buying records. I have a nephew who's really into Polaroid cameras. So, being on a college campus, do you sense any of this sort of an attraction toward analog things? And my theory is that because, you know, our generation, we grew up with all analogs. So digital was really interesting to us 'cause it was a new thing. But I think about this generation sort of steeped in digital stuff, that analog is now the fascinating thing. And so, that becomes attractive for them. Can you speak to that at all? CO: Yeah. I think I noticed that as well. What I also noticed at the moment here in the Netherlands there's this movement that kids aren't allowed to take their mobile phones to school, or at least not use them. What we're hearing back is the kids admitting that it gives them peace not to work with their mobile and not to have it in the vicinity. And that they're finally talking to their friends again and actually also starting to pick up books. I mean, it's still very early, but it's quite interesting to hear youngster saying these things because, you know initially when they started, of course, they were all stressed out that they would be shut outta the world as they know it. And so, it's actually very interesting to hear youngster saying that. MR: Interesting. CO: Yeah, it's interesting. What I do know is that in education, people are promoting taking notes again with pen and paper more so than they've been doing in the past decades, I think. So I think that's a good sign because research shows that that's the best way to remember and to learn and to study. I'm a language teacher, in COVID time, of course everything was digital because we were teaching through computers. And what happened was that when the kids came back, they couldn't write anymore. So they were having a lot of difficulty actually writing their essays because they didn't have the time. And of course, always in a test you have a set time and they weren't used to writing and then having to correct and having to rewrite the whole thing again. Because of course, obviously on the computer, you can copy paste or throw away or add. So that was also very interesting how quickly you also forget. MR: Yeah. It's a lot of practice. CO: You need the practice. So one of the tips I would give is practice, practice, practice. It's not about doing it right straight away. It's copy that makes sure to develop your own style. MR: Interesting. CO: Yeah. I have my stick figure and my stick figure is my stick figure. I think people recognize that it's mine, but it's a stick figure. So it's not really anything very special except my own style is in it for you to recognize it. That's why sometimes you have all these companies that do sketchnotes, and what you see is a lot of the same thing. So here, you know, you have a lot of stick figure for visual note taking, and it's very difficult to see the style of the person who wrote it because it's set in standards of how you draw the stick figures, the coloring, et cetera. And I think in my opinion, the best thing is to do is to develop your own style because the moment it's your own, it's more authentic and more real. MR: Yeah. It's part of you. It's an extension of you. CO: It's part of you. Yeah. It's like you do your pizza or your Packers or whatever you do, you recognize your style is the same, the approach is the same. You know instantly which of you drew the sketch that you're looking at. MR: Yeah. That's pretty fascinating. CO: Yeah. It's like handwriting, but then in sketches. MR: Yeah. It's extended. CO: Yeah. MR: So you mentioned doing Morning and Evening. It sounds like you're not doing that now, or maybe you are, but digitally is there a project that you're working on right now that you would like to share and talk about? CO: No. Well, the little drawings I do, they help me relax. What I notice at the moment is I'm doing a lot of Zentangle things because I'm extremely busy at my work. And it really helps me unwind at the end of the day. It helps me focus on something completely different and it really relaxes me before I go to sleep so that I don't go to sleep with all these hectic work-related thoughts on my mind. MR: Yeah. Yeah. CO: I'm busy. I've got another project going with all kinds of different Zentangles. So it's something completely different. And I think the interest is, you know, when I contemplate on what I do is I'm not a specialist in anything. I tend to do lots of different things. I always like projects and I try to look at different things to do. So I'm an extremely creative person in a huge variety of creativity. MR: Interesting. CO: I do a lot of picking up, you know, Mackey would say rubbish. Picking up rubbish from the ground and then I make something. I make a little figurine from that. In COVID time, what kept me going was going on walks. So I'd pretend to go to work at the beginning of the day and pretend to go home at the end of the day. And then I take pictures and that developed into all these pictures, and then I make collages of whatever it is I see. Sketchwise, I think at the moment it's the Zentangles that I'm doing. You have Inktober, so I like to do something for a whole month, the same kind of thing. And then it gives you a nice collection. MR: Yeah. CO: Yeah. MR: Interesting. I know a little bit about Zentangle. I think it's fascinating. And we'll put a link in the show notes for anyone who's never heard of it before to look at it. It's really cool. It's really cool. CO: It's very meditative. Yeah. MR: It's some crossover between sketchnoting—it is a visual practice, but it's very personal, I think. And the way to kind of get thoughts out of your head as you talked about. CO: Yeah. And the personal thing is somehow in everything I do, all kinds of art things, I always need words. So I always think of words and I like incorporating words or a sentence into whatever it is I'm doing. And this morning I was thinking, I'm going to try a Zentangle that incorporates a word into it or something. I think that's probably also my personal thing because otherwise Zentangle they can look alike. So I'm looking at how can I make my own Zentangle signature or something like that. MR: Something of a crossover. CO: Yeah. Yeah. MR: Interesting. CO: Yeah. Yeah. MR: Well, you know, one of my memories doing something creative with you, you mentioned Lisbon, is when I reached out to you and said, "Hey, let's do a workshop on lettering." CO: Yeah. MR: And that was so much fun, right? We got a little projector and we each kind of presented our different ways of doing things. And encouraging people to say like, "You know, Mike does it this way, and Claire does it this way. They're just inspirations for you to do it your way. These are some starting points." CO: And we did them on the Usem cards. MR: On those little cards. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. CO: It doesn't have to be huge. It can be small and it can be yours. And we did coffee, we did the cards with the coffee and told people to make their own cards around coffee. MR: Right, right. We'll have to link to those cards too, for someone to find them, so. CO: Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned the international camp, and of course, the international camp is also great the way that came into existence and how people meet there as well. MR: Yeah. Yeah. If you're listening and you are curious about it, we have interviews, I think with every organizer of the event past seasons. But basically, it was four women in Germany who decided— CO: Yeah, Exactly. Yeah. MR: - they wanted to make something happen, and they just—that's the way the community is. Someone just decides we're gonna do it. Kinda like Claire and I decided, "Hey, let's do a thing on lettering." Like no one gave us permission. We just decided, right? So I think that community mindset is all through, and anybody that comes into the community feels that, and I think that's really empowering to feel like you can do it. CO: It reminds me of in COVID time we did the sketchnote on location museum visits. MR: Yes, I remember that. CO: Yeah. That was also so cool. And sometimes, I mean, I don't want a pandemic ever again, but somethings that happened in the pandemic were very cool. MR: Yeah. It showed that you can be creative. Yeah. CO: I remember here we had the first signs of COVID happening in Italy. And I thought the Marro and Mario, and I felt sorry for them. So I sent a couple of the community members a message saying, "Shall we send Marro and Mario a positive message every morning?" And I gathered all these messages not knowing that we were actually going to be in the same situation as they were, because I just thought it would stay isolated in poor old Italy and not to reach us. But then of course it did. You can send out a question like that and people actually want to participate and then they also participate. If you have a lot of people, some people had to wait for 20 days, and then they actually wait, and on their day, they post something. MR: They're excited. Yeah. CO: Yeah, yeah. I really like that. I really like that. It also brings me to, at the moment, with everything that's going on Twitter, I feel like our community is quieter. MR: Yeah, I think so. CO: At least. Yeah. Yeah MR: It's spreading out a little bit. You know, we have a Slack channel for Sketchnote Army, which you can of course check out. I know there's other people that are creating private chat areas and I think probably individuals are probably chatting with each other, but I think there is—maybe that could be an encouragement for this year is find some way, some public place. I think it's maybe moved to Instagram to some degree, but, you know, it's more visual there, it's not— CO: It's a bit different. MR: Yeah. It's different. CO: It's not about the conversations. On Twitter, you could wake up in the morning and you had 89 messages or something like that. In Instagram you don't have—maybe you have—also, I'm on Slack, but— MR: It's different. CO: You also have that on—it's different somehow, but, and maybe it's also digital fatigue after pandemic. MR: Could be, yeah. CO: That's also quite possible that people need detoxing from the digital world. MR: Yeah. There's quite a lot of dynamics involved probably, I suspect. CO: Yeah. Yeah. MR: You know, talking about the International Sketchnote Camp, it's happening in 2024 in Texas, the details aren't available yet 'cause Prof. Clayton, who's organizing is still working out details. But he's a professor of a university in Texas, in San Antonio. It would be centered around San Antonio. An opportunity for maybe some Europeans to make it to the states and see that and have some great barbecue of course and tacos and the things that are unique to San Antonio and Texas. So as we get more information, we'll of course post that. If you haven't been to one of those, especially if you're in the U.S., this would be a great opportunity for you to come to it. CO: Yeah, I think especially if you're in the U.S. because they've all been here in Europe. I can imagine that people in the U.S., It's a lot of money of course, that you have to spend. If it's in the U.S., it's closer to home, but it's such a nice experience. It reminded me of, you know, when I was at school as a kid, he would go on weeks with your class and you'd have fun— MR: School trips. Yeah. CO: - doing silly things and laughing your heads off and having, you know jaw pain and stomach aches because you laughed too much. MR: Laugh so much. Yeah. CO: Yeah. Yeah. MR: You don't want it to end, you know, at the end of this time. CO: And sing together and dance together, and when you get older, maybe sometimes you feel like you can't behave that way anymore, but it's— MR: We do. CO: I remember when we were here in Leiden, the last day we danced and sang and it's so much fun. It's so much fun. I mean, I always think never grow up. And sometimes it's good to have that feeling and to just laugh out loud. MR: Yeah. places where you can be yourself. CO: Yeah. Laugh out loud to silly things that you can't describe to people who weren't there. Very difficult to describe to people who weren't there. So I would tell my colleagues and you know, people who haven't been there and who don't know that, I think they don't understand why it's so much fun, but it's a lot of fun. MR: Yeah. It is. Definitely it is. CO: Yeah. It's hard work for whoever organizes it. MR: Yeah. But, you know, it's for the community, so there's satisfaction in delivering it to the community. That's what I've noticed in all the organizers when they're done, they feel tired but it's like a good tired when you do something of meaning and you're tired for a good reason. That's the kind of feel that they often have. CO: Yeah. And definitely, I mean, how cool is it to see people enjoying themselves over something that you organized. MR: Yeah. Super satisfying. CO: Yeah. yeah. MR: So, we'll have more information on the Sketchnote Army page when that's officially announced, which I think should be relatively soon. I won't speak for Prof, but maybe by the time this recording comes out, it'll already be announced. I dunno. We'll see. CO: Yeah. MR: So you mentioned you mentioned these little cards, and that reminds me to talk to you about your favorite tools. You mentioned too that you do digital. But let's first talk about analog tools since we're old school and we love our analog tools. What are your favorite pens? You talked about these cards. Are there notebooks that you like? Any other stuff that you use that you can share with us that maybe might inspire someone to try something new? CO: I'd say Hobonichi is number one. Hobonichi paper is perfect. I always like the small sizes, so the A6, Techo. These days I use Talens. It's a Dutch brand. Which is very nice paper, but not so much if you're writing with a fountain pen, which I like. And then Fountain pen-wise I like TWSBI. TWSBI has a very nice pen point. And I really like extra fine. I don't really like the medium. I always like writing an extra fine. And then the extra finest is a Sailor Fountain pen. So fountain pen. And then I use I think it's—now I can't remember the—but anyway, the watertight ink in the converter in my fountain pen. I don't remember the make anymore. Diplomat ink. And then for using fineliners yeah, recently I've been using Art Line. I picked up an Art Line, I think on—I'm not sure, at a sketchnote camp sometime, maybe even in Portugal. So I don't remember. And they're very—now, I used to use Uni Pin, I think it was called Uni Pin. MR: Yep. I've used those. CO: Actually I'm using Art Line a lot. And they're very water tight. They're actually really black-like. MR: Nice. CO: And some of the pens, if you press too hard, the tips kind of disappear into the pen. MR: Squish. CO: Yeah, yeah. That doesn't happen with those. And then I like using colored pencils and then have to think what's—oh yeah, Carand'ache. MR: Okay. French. CO: And then the watercolor pencils because you can— MR: You can put some water on them. CO: Watercolor pencils are really good colors. If you press hard, they're actually very dark. I don't know how you say that. MR: Yeah, intense. Yeah. CO: Intense colors. Yeah. MR: And then I think you can use water to spread them too as well. CO: You can use water. Yeah. And so, those are the things I use most. And then you have the Usem cards. The sad thing is the guy who made the Usem cards and sold them, et cetera, he passed away last year. So they're looking for someone to take over his business. So it's down for the moment, but I'd still share the—because they're working on, you know, someone else doing it. MR: Keeping it going. CO: It probably be up again. Yeah. I like using small, and so like what I'm doing now is, what I do is I have these little— MR: Oh, I can see them. CO: A little gift tag. MR: Yeah, like a price tag or something. CO: Yeah. And then a little gift tag. And then I tie them together, and then I put that in my coat pocket. And then sometimes I just take them out, and then I always have a pen in my coat pocket and a little packet of those. And then I just sketch or Zentangle, or write a word that I want to remember or whatever. And on my holidays, what I've been doing is these little wooden pegs, and then I sketch the name of wherever it is I'm visiting, and I put those in all my pictures. MR: Oh, nice. CO: That's how—yeah. And then digital. So I have an iPad Pro. I tried working with the Remarkable for my notes at work but it didn't work. I need paper. I need to feel paper, I need to feel the flow of my fountain pen on the paper, and I need to be able to color in with red or wherever in my lettering. And Remarkable doesn't do colors so Remarkable was a bit boring. And iPad is too smooth to do that. I tried the sticker thing on top, but also so— MR: Still wasn't enough. The paper— CO: Still it wasn't enough. I like writing on paper, but when I do my sketches—so I do a lot of sketching for all kinds of educational things here in the Netherlands, and I do those on my iPad. And when I'm sketching as a sketchnote, I usually use Adobe. I think it's called Fresco. MR: Yes. CO: It used to use Pro, but it changed. I'm still kind of getting used to Fresco because things work a bit differently. And when I'm doing a more kind of artistic look to it, then I use Procreate. MR: Okay. 'Cause of the brushes they have available of course. CO: Yeah. They have different kinds of brushes and blurring and they have so many possibilities that I think Fresco's a bit harder. It looks like writing on paper more than Procreate. Can also look that way, but it also does a lot of as if you're using a brush or whatever. MR: It is interesting that these— CO: In the more artistic way. MR: - tool has a field to it, right? You know? CO: Yeah. MR: Great. Does feel like it's made for making art. CO: Yeah, exactly. And I used to do a lot on my phone just with my finger, and I used to draw on my phone, but since I have my iPad, I usually have my iPad in my bag. Also, I have a far too heavy bag. I'm always carrying around everything. And then I have, you know Diana's little pencil case? MR: Yeah. Yeah. CO: And it always starts off relatively flat and empty. And then within a week it's far too full. And then my bag gets heavier and heavier and I have to empty and sort it all again. MR: Reset. We have to reset. CO: And then I'm sure you recognize I have far too many pens, but I'm still always able to find a pen that I really need and I can't do without, and then I just have to get it. So, when I was in Jordan a couple of weeks ago, and we arrived on the December 31st at 11:00 p.m. And right across the street of our hotel was a little pen shop— MR: Oh, nice. CO: - which was open on December 31st at half past 11 at night. So I had a stroll around that. And of course, had to buy two little pens, which I really needed. MR: Of course. CO: Probably not, but still. MR: You can rationalize anything, right? Yeah. CO: Yeah. Yeah. MR: That's great. That's great. Well, we'll have to make sure and put links into the show notes, especially Diana's pencil case. The standup pencil case. So we'll find that link as well. CO: Diana pencil is really good. MR: Yeah. So now let's shift into the tips section. So this is where I frame it as, imagine someone's listening or watching, they're visual thinker of some kind. Maybe they feel like they've reached a plateau, or they just need a little bump of inspiration, what would you tell that person in three tips? CO: Well, I think I'd start off with practice. And because with practice, you develop your own way of visual thinking. 'Cause It's about paper layout. When you start, you want to have an idea of how you're going to place things on paper, which also I think brings me to that white spaces don't matter. When I started, I would put everything together. And it would kind of intertwine 'cause sometimes you want to add a picture or a word, or you want to tie it together with a border or with a color or whatever. I think another tip would also be don't be afraid of white spaces because in the end, what you do is you finish it off and you'll notice that those white spaces won't matter. You also need a bit of peace and quiet in your sketch. If it's too full, it's too much. And if you're able to work in quiet spots in your sketch, I think it's also good to have a bit of peace of and quiet on your paper or in your notes. And I think with all the talking about tools, et cetera, It's not really about the tools because like I was saying about my students, I think you have to try, and then you try different tools, and then you work out that, you know, you prefer the 0.1 over the 0.8 pen or the other way around. And whether you prefer the Caran d'Ache over Stabelo pencils or whatever. And it's not really about the tool, so don't go around buying whole sets. Start off with one. You know, usually you can also buy one color of a certain pen or a certain pencil. First try it out before you invest in lots of tools that you're not really going to use. And that's why I also think of buying a whole box of pencils or a whole box of felt tip pens or whatever colors, there's a lot of colors you're never going to use. MR: Right. CO: Yeah. So it might feel like it's more expensive to buy the single pencil, but in the end, if you're only going to be using three of the colors of a whole box in these days, you know, you'll have to think about not wasting too much. Yeah. MR: Cool. Those are— CO: That would be—I don't know, did I say things in pictures? I'm not sure whether I said that already. MR: That can be number four, I guess. Yeah. CO: I do drawings for educational meetings. And then they'll have a theme. And then I always find myself saying is if they have a theme for one of their evenings, they have a title. The title is usually very general. So I find myself always asking them, what kind of words do you think of within your theme? And those words will help you find the icon and the pictures and metaphors will help sometimes as well. And that reminds me that a good link would also be is the Noun Project. MR: Yeah. CO: Yeah. The Noun Project is where, if you have a word, you can type it in and it gives you all kinds of digital drawings that people have made little icons, and not that you use them, but they are good for inspiration for what you can use in your drawing yourself or in your sketch. So I use that a lot as well with the Noun Project. Yep. MR: That's great. Those are great tips. We have four good tips and solid ones that you can apply right away. Thank you. CO: Good. MR: So tell us, Claire, what's the best way to reach you? A website, social media, if someone would like to follow your work and reach out and say hi. CO: I think I'm most active on Instagram. So that would be #claire_ohl. My name Ohlenschlager, that's far too long. And that's where I post a lot, it's not everything. And of course, I don't post the notes I take at work anymore. MR: Right. CO: In my profile, I have the link to a WordPress called Claire's Creativities. I haven't updated those. But if you look in that, then you see—well, I just described that I'm very diverse. I'm not a specialist, so I do lots of things. And then you'll see all kinds of things I do that aren't necessarily sketch noting, but still recognizably me. So, yeah. MR: That's great. That's great. Well, we'll definitely put that in the show notes as well. So if you wanna see her work or reach out and say hi, you can certainly do so. CO: Yeah. I'll let you know the names, I'll send them to you just to be sure, the names of my pen and my notebook. MR: Yeah, for sure. We'll get that to make sure we put those in the show notes. Perfect. CO: Yeah. Well, Claire, thanks for being on the show. More importantly, thank you for being part of our community. Thanks for being a leader, for being so welcoming and caring and connecting. You're another part of this community that's connected us together. So thank you for your contributions. I really appreciate you and the work you've done, because you've made a lot of people's lives better. Thank you. CO: Thank you very much, Mike. Very kind words. Thank you. And thank you for inviting me, and thank you for being my inspiration, because that's what you're, and I'm sure you're to many other people in our community. MR: Oh, thank you. I appreciate that as well. CO: Yeah. Yeah. MR: Well, for anyone who's watching or listening, it's another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Until the next episode, we'll talk to you soon. | |||
| 19 Dec 2023 | Ashton Rodenhiser brings visual clarity with graphic recording and facilitation - S14/E08 | 01:05:14 | |
In this episode, Ashton Rodenhiser shares her mission to teach sketchnoting skills to students and professionals so they can use doodling and drawing as their best thinking and learning tools. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with Ashton. Ashton Rodenhiser, how are you today? Ashton Rodenhiser: I'm doing so well, Mike. Thanks so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. MR: It's so great to have you on. We've had fits and starts trying to get this recorded and we finally did it, so I'm excited. And so looking forward to talking with you and sharing your story with everyone. So why don't we just jump right in? Tell us who you are and what you do. AR: Yeah. So I am based in Canada, on the East Coast of Canada. You know, being a mother is pretty important to me, so I always like to mention that. I have three small children between the ages of 5 and 10. I felt like growing up I really wanted to be an artist, but it was like never an option 'cause there was just so much negative rhetoric in my home, in my community about, you know, the lack of art opportunities out there. I put that in a diplomatic way. And so, I really struggled even though I did really well in school, I really did not know what I "wanted to be when I grew up." And I fell into a role as a facilitator. I did that for a couple of years, and that's how I learned about graphic facilitation and kind of where I am today. That was 10 years ago, this month, fall of 2013. It's really easy for me to remember because it was the longest I'd left my six-month-old at the time. It was a whole day to take a graphic facilitation course. I had never even seen it before, but I was like, "This is the best thing ever," where I was able to take my experience as a facilitator and my love for all things creative and mash them together. And then I was facilitating a group at the time and luckily, they were just so great and easygoing. I just threw some paper on the wall and started drawing and I was like, I don't know what I'm doing. It was horrible. But I still have that picture to this day and share it often actually as like, "This was my first one, look how bad it was." And you know, I put it away for a few months and then I brought it out after a while and I looked at it and I was like, "Whoa, I can remember so much from this." It took it from, oh, this is kind of fun and cool and neat to, whoa, this is an actually a powerful thing. This is a way to help navigate that learning and that experience. So doing it in the moment was fun and great, but it was more so about that like after effect for me when I brought it out later and reflected on it and was like, this is more than what I thought it was, in a way. Then it was at that point that I was like, I might like this. This seems like actually helpful. So maybe I will do this more 'cause it's a good time and it's actually helpful. So, fast forward a little bit. I did, you know, a little bit for those first few years and I actually attended the IFVP Conference in Austin, Texas in 2015. And I was a scholarship recipient for that. There's no way I would've been able to go if I hadn't received that. So, very grateful to that opportunity to this day. And I went with a mission in mind. I was like," I'm gonna go and just try to soak up as much as I can. And when I leave, I'm gonna make a decision." Like this is gonna be just like a side hobby that I'll do when people ask me to. Or I'm gonna take this like seriously as a business and I'm gonna try to do it. And obviously, you know, the answer to that question. But yeah, it was a few months after that, after I had my second child that I started building a business around graphic recording, graphic facilitation, live illustration. Yeah. MR: You know, it's interesting you said that it took you a while putting away the work to see your own value in it later. You looked at it like, "Wow, this is really helpful. I remember a lot of the detail because of the work I did." So I think what you were sort of seeing was, I think was a delayed reaction to what the people in the rooms saw. AR: Right. Yeah. MR: 'Cause You know, a lot of times we look back at the work we do and we think, "In light of what I do now, that's so terrible. It was so bad." But then, you know, to the people in the moment who experienced it, for them it was, you know, mind blowing because they'd never seen anything like that. And it was helpful regardless of what it looked like. It brings you back to like, it's a lot more of the action of the doing and a whole lot less on the beauty of it. Functionality of it is way more valuable now. Of course, it's good if you can make it look really beautiful. I mean, that's always nice. AR: That's a bonus, definitely. MR: But it reminds you that the bones of this stuff that we do is really about the functionality of the work we're doing. And then if we can layer on beauty and layout and all these things on top of it, that just adds another layer to it and it makes it even more enjoyable for both you and for the recipient. Anyway, that struck me when you brought that out. 'Cause I've been thinking about that too. I've looked at some really old sketchnotes that I did way back in 2007, was like, "Compared to what I do now, these are very rudimentary and basic." But I needed to start somewhere. And even those, the bones of them were valuable regardless of if they were exactly what I would've wanted now. I mean, at the time I was okay with it, obviously. So, interesting. AR: Yeah, No, I love that. I love that for sure. MR: Well, I'm curious, you mentioned coming from Eastern Canada and you talked about the scholarship to go to Austin, which I can imagine that trip was not cheap and that scholarship probably helped. So tell us your origin story. How did you—you gave us hints to it, you went to this event and made that decision. Fill us some more detail about, how were you as a little girl that brought you to the point at Austin, right? Like, were you always drawing, like, all that stuff? Because I too faced a thing where my dad sat me down and said, "Mike, you can't make money in art. You should find another career path." And I went into printing. And through printing, I found that design was actually a path I could take, which was related. So I'd love to hear your little girl to Austin story, and then I'd love to hear more detail about building that business and how did you come to where you're now? AR: Oh my gosh. Yeah. I guess, I try to do a overview, but yeah, I can dive into it a bit more. I've always been very creative, very self-taught. I've never really taken an art class in my life. I call myself a dabbler. So name a medium, I've probably tried it. Either I tried it for a week or I tried it for a year. I sold painted rocks as a child at craft fairs. So I guess I didn't realize I was a bit entrepreneurial until I started a business and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I guess I have done entrepreneurial things throughout my life." And it was funny that I also was connected to something creative. So I've always been really fascinated in different mediums, but I didn't actually spend a whole lot of time drawing. I painted and did things like that, but I didn't actually draw pictures a lot. I had a few, how to draw cats, how to draw some things, but I didn't have a lot of patience for building the skill of drawing. The art forms that I would find were more instant gratification. I wanted to paint a picture in an hour. I didn't wanna paint a picture over a series of months. So I didn't realize until a few years ago that I think my impatience is actually one of the things that is kind of, I feel like with sketchnoting and live illustration and all that is actually a beautiful fit for me because you have the timeframe and you're like, "All right, it's a half an hour, it's done. Or it's an hour, it's done. Or it's a day, it's done." I've always been very creative, but just doing my own thing, self-taught, try different things. If anything, I learned many different instruments. Learning how to play the bagpipes right now, just for fun, you know. So I took lessons for things like that. But I think, like I said earlier, I didn't even really consider being an artist because it was just the aura. No one really sat me down, like, your experience and said, "You can't do that. That's not gonna work out for you." It was just the stories I would hear of people saying, "Oh, that kid, are you going to art school, good luck with that." And I'm like, "Well, I don't want that for me." You know. And at the time, the only thing that I had considered was being a teacher 'cause I'd always really loved kids. I graduated high school around the recession, 2008 recession. And so it was a hard time to decide what to do after high school because no matter what you did, no one had jobs. Around here anyways, at that time there was a lot of people graduating teacher college and not having work. So I felt like that was going to be a waste of time if I go and spend all this time doing this education and then it doesn't work out. So I pursued an early childhood education to work with these little kids. And that's when I got a job at a nonprofit. I moved to the city thinking that I might be a sign language interpreter. So I started taking all the prerequisites to do that. And that's what I went to the city for. Ended up there being there for a few years because I loved this job at this nonprofit where I started to learn about community development and facilitation. And that's how I got into that. But still, I painted and I did a few things, you know, throughout my life, but I definitely had, you know, dips and lulls, you know, when I was on a very strict budget trying to pay back my student loan. I had a craft budget of $20 a week that I would allow myself to go and buy art supplies. And it was like the highlight of my week, and I would just craft all the rest of the week. But yeah, it was just all over the place in terms of just the things that we would do for fun. That's how I met my husband in high school, I was knitting in the library. And then, I just felt like when I found this work, it was this beautiful coming together of the things that I loved about facilitation and the listening and the thinking 'cause I felt like I always wanted to have a job where I wanted to help people. But when you're younger, the notion of helping people are, you know, you have to be a doctor or something like that. Well, how am I supposed to help people if I don't wanna be a doctor or new nurse or something like that. And when I found facilitation and in this world with those two coming together, I was like, "Oh my gosh, I could like help people. I could help people learn and engage." And I really fell in love with group process with facilitation, creating a safe space and allowing them to feel heard. And it's not about me imposing my ideas or my knowledge, it's really about them. And I was like, this is the best 'cause You don't need to know anything. You know, I joke about that with teachers. But it's this beautiful space to be able to create for people. And then when I started experiencing doing it in the graphical way, I was like, this is really, really cool and I wanna do more of it. Yeah. MR: It sort of added that craft or that creative layer that had been missing, it seems like to me. AR: Yeah, definitely. MR: So you had all the facilitation skills and what this added was the creative part of you then could be turned on and be active too, right? And just not all business. AR: Yeah. And I think that's why—I don't know if I didn't have the experience as the facilitation person first, I don't know what the transition would've been like. I feel like because I had my listening and my thinking skills honed over a few years, the adding the visual element wasn't as scary, I think as it might be for others who are like, "Now I have to, you know, listen and think and draw. So I have to like, develop all these skills." Whereas like, I had the listening and the thinking skills, I had been developing that already, adding in the drawing, like, so then I was able to focus more those early years on the drawing part because I was the listening and thinking was a bit more intuitive. You know, 'cause the way I would describe to people is, as a facilitator, you're listening and thinking, and you're feeding back in words. And now I can listen and think and feedback in pictures, right? So, I don't think it was as big of a jump coming from that space because I'm like, "I can learn the drawing skills. I can learn over time." I didn't really put a whole lot of pressure on myself in the beginning. I just learned some basic drawings. I joke with people that I basically drew a light bulb on every single graphic I did for three years because I'm like, "I know how to draw a light bulb." You know what I mean? I think I just allowed myself to know that I would develop those skills over time if I just kept at it and that the listening and the thinking would really pull me through. Because even if it's mostly words and little drawings there, those few years, the content is always gonna be so important, especially when you're in a room with people and allowing them to feel valued and heard. If you throw a few graphics in there, you know, pretty basic when you're starting, it doesn't really matter, right? And sometimes when I'm teaching and talking with people about it, I'm like, you know, "That will come over time. Just be patient with yourself." And, you know, a lot of times people—this is still really new and they don't have anything to compare it to, which is amazing. So if you just throw some paper on a wall and do it, it's gonna be amazing no matter what. You know what I mean? MR: Right. AR: It just is opening that door and like, they don't know that other people exist in the world who have been doing it longer and maybe it looks like, "prettier." Like, it doesn't matter. And sometimes it's needs to be messy. 'Cause I tell people like, conversations are messy, so sometimes the graphic's gonna be messy. And that's just what it is, you know? MR: Yeah. Comes back to our earlier discussion about what's the most important it's the bones of the value of being in the room together, being heard, capturing something. AR: Exactly. Yeah. MR: It's a good enough graphic. You know, in my experience as designer, especially when I do concept work with people, 'cause that's really what I do, whether it's illustration, I used to do logo and icon design, the rougher the sketches the better because then they feel like they have a say in it, they have a part in it, they can see, you know, there's room to maneuver a little bit. So in some ways, the messier sketches are actually more attractive, weirdly enough, in a process environment, because the focus is on the process. And then eventually, as long as you're in a boat—you know, if you're in a sailboat, which I've been on, you know, you're not going in a straight line. You're catching the wind one way, and you're tacking back and forth, but you're going toward a final destination, right. You're not just going in a straight line like you can in a motorboat. Even in a motorboat, honestly, they're floating around a little bit too, right. So if you think about that as a metaphor, it's being by water, right? So it's like, but ultimately you're gonna get to Nova Scotia, right? You're gonna come in to that point, it's just like the way you get there is gonna maybe be messy for a while. So if you think of it that way, you know, you're moving towards a destination and you know, it's gonna have its ups and downs, but everybody knows that we're gonna end up in the right place. That that's a great feeling. AR: Yeah. I love that. That's a great analogy. I'm gonna use that. MR: You steal it if you want to. AR: Yes, I will. Thank you. MR: Well, that's really cool. So tell us a little bit about the kind of work you're doing now. What is your ideal clients and is there someone you can share, you know, that you don't have any kind of agreements with that you're, that you can talk about? And then also, you have a book you've released. I want you to talk about that book, most definitely. So let's go in that order. Tell us a little bit about the work you do and then let's talk about your book. AR: I usually spend my time doing graphic recording, graphic facilitation. The way that I like to define it is graphic recordings, more like the conference world. There's speakers. I do a lot of that. Like, that's probably the majority, right. And then there's the graphic facilitation world, which is what we talked a lot about so far, is finding myself in those situations where there's groups of people and you're helping them come to some decision or, you know, there's multiple voices. So usually let's say like one voice or multiple voices. A room full of people having a conversation or a speaker on a stage. So lots of graphic recording, some graphic facilitation, would love to do more of it, but some of that. And I started teaching in person workshops, I think back in 2018, 2000 and something like that. Like pretty early on. And did some in-person things, and just did another one last week. But I hadn't done one in three years because you know, the world. MR: Yeah. Yeah. AR: And so, it was so exciting to get back in person because there's nothing better than, you know, helping people stand at a wall for the first time and make those marks. So, some of that. And then, yeah, released my "Beginner's Guide to Sketchnoting" book here just a few months ago. Because I was finding that a lot of people were saying to me all the time, "I would love to learn this skill. I wish you could follow me around, we record every meeting that I go to." And I would say to people, you know, "It's like, not that hard. You could totally learn it." And they just brush you off. They're like, "No, no way. I could possibly." And I'm like, "But you could though, but you could." And so, I started this sort of journey process of putting this book together, which took about a year and a half and did beta reading and getting feedback from people. 'Cause with the idea of trying to make the concept of learning sketchnoting as accessible as possible. Really handholding people through that process. We can talk a little more about that if you want to, but that's generally it. And so yeah, I have a little sketchnoting community and the book and stuff. So I'm just in this space now of really trying to just talk about, you know, helping people move through learning this. And one area that I'm specifically focusing, and I'm trying to do some case studies this year, is like, with students in school and trying to get into some schools and do some case studies. And with a little bit of trouble, but I'm getting there. I'm getting there trying to build relationships and do the things there, because I think if we can—like my 10-year-old, I've been teaching her some things because I know that in her school, that's when they start teaching note taking. So I don't know what it is like for other places in the world, but grade 5, age 10 is where they start to introduce note taking. So I was like, "Okay, well if this is when they're starting to introduce it, then maybe that's the age demographic or group that I need to be talking about." Because I do have schools that have brought me in to teach like older grades, but I feel like if we could do it earlier as the foundation and then they can choose, they have multiple ways that they can do their note taking and do it right in the beginning instead of, you know, they started to have develop a way that they do it, and then a few years later you introduce this, then it might not come as naturally. So I'm trying to find that sweet spot right now and work with schools to see what that looks like trying to get that into part of their learning for note taking. Yeah. MR: Well, I would guess having a book that's published certainly helps with getting in. That's helped me for sure. Who would you say is the main ideal reader for the book? Do you have in mind a group of people that the book is aimed to? Or is it more of a broad, anybody can read this book kind of thing? AR: Yeah. It's definitely a broad, but more of someone who might have considered themselves creative at one point, maybe have a weird relationship with creativity, because I find I'm having more conversations about that these days where people are like, "Well, I'm not creative." I'm like, "But you are though. But you are. Maybe you don't draw and that's okay. But maybe you're really funny or maybe—" MR: Some other space. Yeah. AR: Yeah. Maybe you're a good storyteller, you know. So, I find it's more of the people that want to reengage with their creativity. And I feel like that's just, like I said, a lot of the conversation I'm having with people a lot lately, but they have this weird relationship maybe with drawing. Maybe they doodled a little bit, maybe they didn't, but they know that the way that they kind of learn traditional note taking just doesn't work for them. And they're trying to see what they can do to get back to adding a little bit more creativity into their learning space, right. And having to do that. MR: How can they make it enjoyable? AR: Exactly. So I find that that's the—you know, that plus trying to encourage students and kids to do as well. But in terms of my more adult audience, it seems to be—you know, so some of it's like, you know, English as a second language teachers that are trying to be able to explain concepts. And I work a lot in technology, so I end up having a lot of people in cybersecurity and things like that in my community, and they're trying to figure out how to be able to explain more technical concepts and things like that. MR: That's pretty cool. AR it is quite broad, but it's like, you know, the leap that people think is really scary and trying to make that not as scary 'cause just getting people to share their first one. Just do one, just do one sketchnote and share it, that seems to be the biggest leap for people. 'Cause once you do that first one, you're like, "Oh, that wasn't so scary." You know what I mean? MR: Yeah. AR: So it's more about like that type of person who's like, "Oh, I'd like to try this." And in my book, I don't talk about any theory, I just drop a little brain guy throughout it. Like, "Oh yeah, did you know this thing, and there's this research?" 'Cause I want it just to get right to it and get people to put pen to paper quickly as possible. Because that's one thing that really frustrates me about nonfiction books is that most of them, unfortunately, are idea books. And I didn't want it to be a book like, "Sketchnoting is good, see you later." You know, be like, "Draw this thing, do this exercise." You know. And it's big and short enough that it is hopefully not overwhelming for people, you know? Like, it was twice as long and I just cut it and cut it and cut it. And then anything that I felt was a little bit advanced, I was just cut. I just like, nope. Or when I was doing my beta reading and people were getting confused, I was like, "Okay. Too advanced, cut it, cut it." MR: Well, you know, save those things for your second book, I guess for the advanced students who move in part two, right. You can put those in a second edition. Or not a second edition, but another book for those who wanna proceed to level two. AR: Yeah. Yeah. So I really wrote it in the sense of trying to handhold people through the process and to cut down that learning curve as much as I possibly can, because I feel like I was just encountering so many people that were like, "Oh, I could never do that." And I'm like, "But you could. You definitely could." And trying to show people in a really low barrier to entry, non-threatening way that that it's possible, right? So, the first thing that I walk in through in the book is like, "Just draw a line. You did it." The book's very cheer leadery. I'm like, "You got this." You know. 'Cause I think what happens is people look at beautiful sketchnotes by yourself or me, and they're like, "Oh, I can never do that." You know, I'm like, "But you can't compare your beginning to my 10 plus years in, right? MR: Right. I tell people that too. AR: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. I love it when people can see the—like, "This was my first one. This was my first one." And they can compare from that space rather than, "Oh, well, if they look at Ashton's, oh my God, I could never create that." And I'm like, you know, I try to tell people, I'm like, "But I've been doing this for so long. And I do so many." I think I recorded over 600 presentations just last year. So like, that's a lot. MR: It's a lot of practice. AR: That's a lot. MR: Lots, yeah. AR: That's a lot, you know. If you did 600 in a year, you'd be pretty good too. Like, maybe even better than mine. You know what I mean? MR: Right. There might be something in you that we don't even know about because you haven't explored it. Right. But it's never fair to compare your first shot to my finished product after years and years of practice. It's not a fair comparison and it shouldn't be. AR: Yeah. I wish I would've read this before I published my book, or I would've put it in it, but there's a book called "Find Your Artistic Voice by Lisa Congdon. And in it, she talks about the beginner's gap. And when I read it, I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is like exactly what I've been thinking about this whole time." But she put it in these concise, beautiful words, but there's where you wanna be, right? "I want my stuff to look like Ashton's or Mike's or whoever," right? But then there's your skillset, and your skillset doesn't match where you wanna be. So there's this huge gap in between. So what happens is that, because they're like, "I want my skills to match this." But they don't, they don't close the gap. They don't do the practice and the work to get to the point where their skills are developed that it could look, you know, in their own style or in their own whatever, right. That's where see and I get saddened by when people are at that stage in the very beginning, but they see where they wanna go, and they just stop before they even start trying. You know. They're like, "I can't, I'm never gonna be like that. I want my—" Or they'll try it and they'll be so unhappy with it because it doesn't match their expectation of reality in their mind, right. Like, "Oh, I want it to look like this and it didn't, so I give up." Right. So, my part with trying to put this book together is like, how can I help close that gap just even a little bit and allow people to get a little bit of success so that they feel like then they can continue to develop their skills? 'Cause people ask me all the time, like, "How did you get to the point you are? And I'm like, "Just practice." Like, it's not a sexy answer, unfortunately. MR: Yeah. Just kept going. Yeah. AR: But I just did it and did it, and they were bad and they were messy and they were not beautiful. You know what I mean? But even though when I go back and I look at my earlier stuff and how messy, and they looked like they still served a purpose for the people or for myself. So it didn't really matter. Like we were talking about like, you know, sometimes the messier the better too, right? MR: Mm-hmm. AR: But I do teach aesthetics because people care about that. Because if I just said, "It doesn't matter what it looks." No one would do it. They'd be like, well, if it s mess—like I want it to look nice. So I definitely do teach that. But with trying to infuse "it doesn't matter" at the same time. It's okay if it's messy. Yeah. MR: Sort of like, it's good enough for where you are now, and let's keep going. So it's like you have that far away goal of it needs to look like that thing, but I know that's gonna be difficult, but what I did today is good enough for a first step and for today and tomorrow I'll get a little tiny bit better, and the next day I'll get a little tiny bit better and then I'll backtrack and then I'll get back and get back to normal and, you know. Sort of like, no, if you let people know that it's gonna be a journey. It's like setting expectations so there's not an expectation like, "Well, I'll do this for an hour and I'll be as good as someone who, you know, done 600 pieces in a year." That's not a fair comparison. So again, it's almost like resetting perspective around what's a reasonable expectation for you. AR: Absolutely. MR: That's what we're doing in a lot of ways, which is, I think it's good. That's good. Because there's a lot of places where that mindset is helpful, not just in the work we do. So, it's really cool. AR: Yeah. I'm nervous to say this to you, Mike, but I will say I almost feel like my book might be a precursor to your book. There's a few things in there that are similar, but I don't know if you feel the same way, but feel it's a bit of the— MR: Well, I'm a big believer in lots of books existing because I think there's a lot of voices that exist and not everybody is in the right place to hear just one book. And a lot of times a different person at a different time and a different way is the right solution for that person. So I'm a big believer in, hey there's a lot of people that don't do anything yet. We need a lot of books that reach in every direction. So that very may well be that someone would maybe process through your book and then "I wanna go to the next level, or I wanna just see a different voice. Oh, I like how Mike does it. For me, that fits for me. I'm gonna follow that path." Or, "I'm gonna choose this other book because that makes sense to me." And I think that's good to have options 'cause Not everybody is the same. And to expect them to be all the same and just use one resource is not realistic, right? AR: And I want the listeners to know how great you are. So I'm gonna just talk about you for a second. I was very nervous to put this book out, and I felt like I needed your thumbs up of approval because you're the dude that coined the term sketchnoting. And when I was writing this book, I was really worried because I'm like, "I didn't create this word. You know, I try to make that very clear every time I talk to anybody, I'm always like, "Mike Rohde, Mike Rohde, Mike Rohde," always talking about you all the time. Because it can be very scary to put out work like this and you don't know how it's gonna be received. And when I got on that call with you earlier this year, you were like, "The more the merrier." And I'm like, oh, that makes me feel so good because it does feel like we—you know, the visual thinking community is like, we're worldwide, but tight-knit, you know? And I've experienced that and it's the best community ever. And I think because we are so caring for each other is like, we wanna make sure we're doing things in like the most respectful way possible. And you know, I felt so—I was just like, I'm on cloud nine after I got off that call with you because you were like, "The more the merrier. I love it." You know, and exactly kind of the things you just said too. And I think that's like, having that sort of abundance mindset is just like such a beautiful thing and such a asset to this community. So I really appreciated your kindness because it definitely feels like you know, from the outside, it's like—it's a funny thing when you're putting something like this together. I'm like, "No, it's not the Sketchnote Handbook, but it's like, you know, I'm just trying to do my thing and just share what I've learned over all these years too." And yeah, it can be a funny thing. So just shout out how great you are. I really appreciated that. MR: I'm glad that I made your day that day and it is what I believe. And I think it's really important that we—I just always come back to there's so many opportunities. When you fight over one opportunity, it's like there's so many opportunities to do the work to encourage people. There's a whole population of people that don't do this. We've only scratched the surface and reached a tiny little fraction even now after 10, 15 years, right? AR: Oh my gosh. MR: And then there's more people getting born every day that don't know about this stuff. Though it is, you know, having an impact in schools. The funny story I could tell here, I don't if I've told this on the podcast before, is I have a 14-year-old daughter in middle school. Last year when she was 13, she came home and said, "Hey dad, they're teaching Sketchnoting in my class. And I told the teacher that she wrote the book on sketchnoting and she didn't believe me." And then I told her that she should go to the library because she knew that I'd sent books there. And the teacher came back and said, "You're right. He did write the book." And she was all real proud that I had a book in this school. AR: That is amazing. Oh, that's the best. That's awesome. MR: So they do get exposed to it, at least in our school. I mean, it's very spotty, all over the country. But I do know school teachers especially get really excited because , you know, when you think about what you're doing with this visual note-taking with sketchnoting is that you're encouraging kids who would normally doodle anyway in a lot of cases. AR: Exactly. MR: To do something productive with it, to use it as a way to focus your attention and to capture ideas. So that's a win. And you know, as you do it, you realize your students actually absorb and understand better and can remember more. So for a teacher, this is like the magic thing, right? How could you not wanna to do that for your students, right? AR: I know, right? How is everybody not doing this, Mike? Right? MR: Yeah. Yeah. So teachers are huge fans and I'm a huge backer of teachers. I haven't done a lot of work with school districts. Through the pandemic, I worked with on school district, but I know that they're out there and I'm excited when I do hear from them. And sometimes I get opportunities to come and speak to their schools. And that's really fun for me because then it brings it full circle to see, okay, it's having an impact on teachers which are having an impact on students and they're getting this option, right. And it's not for everybody. There's some students that doesn't fit with, I understand that. But the ones who do, that could be just a way. I get messages all the time, "Hey, I was a student in university, and using sketchnoting help me survive in my studies." Well, that's what it's all about, so. AR: Yeah. And I think, you know, just overarching, there is so much room in this community, the sketchnoting the graphic recording, the live illustrate , whatever it is, however you want to kind of follow that path, I think there's so much room, and I think you're right in terms of scratching the surface. If this is something that you wanna do or get into. Like even at my workshop, my live in person workshop I did last or I guess week in a bit ago now, you know, there was a woman there and she was like, "Is there room for me?" And I'm like, "Oh my gosh, there is room for you." Like the way that I see it is when people experience the value of it, they want more of it. And then eventually, there's not gonna be enough people who do it professionally. There's just more to go around and the more people experience the power of it, the more it's gonna be required and desired in meeting places and at events and things like that. So I think there is a lot of room for new and upcoming people in this space too, no matter how—there could be hundreds of people out there just doing sketchnoting in classrooms. We need that, we need people who are advocating for it in there you know, so that it—it's just like you said, it's not gonna be for everybody and that's okay, but just like as an option, right. And we know how valuable it is. So, you know, there is so much room in the community for sure. MR: Yeah. I think that's true. Well, this feels like a really good natural point then to shift to what are the tools that you like to use? Let's start with analog first and go to digital. You probably use both, I suspect. I'd just love to hear. AR: I definitely have a pre and post-COVID world story when it comes to— MR: Yeah. Let's tie that in there. AR: Yeah. Well, so pre-COVID, I was 100 percent paper, markers. And then I had started practicing some digital, 'cause I thought at some point someone might ask me, "Hey, do you do digital? "And I'd be primed and ready to go. And then of course, COVID is like, "You are forced to do digital, Miss." Which for me actually was a blessing in disguise because I was traveling so much, having little kids. It was getting a lot. MR: That's tough. AR: So COVID in a sense was a beautiful blessing in disguise 'cause I've still been able to retain some of those clients, and they're doing it in person, but I'm just zoomed in and they're just showing my screen, and it's a beautiful thing. So, of course Neuland, everyone talks about Neuland. The best. What do you say? You know, they're number one. Even for those first one or two years, I just used sketcher markers. That was a beautiful stepping stone. I am scent sensitive, so I think Neuland was a beautiful choice. Not just because the quality is there, but because it's scent free, and that's really important to me. Like, if not, I'd be getting a headache every day I worked and that wouldn't be a good time. So yeah, definitely, Neuland for the win. I do use a little bit of Posca pens here and there, just for highlighting on things. But it—oh. MR: Those are paint markers, right? Am I right? AR: Yeah, they're acrylic paint markers. Unfortunately, they're not refillable. I did get the Neuland acrylics. I don't know if they still sell them. I don't know. I think maybe. MR: I'm not sure. AR: But I did have a bunch of those, but I find the Posca pens just a little bit more vibrant. The consistency is really nice and smooth. So I do usually have a few of those on hand. But that makes up the majority. That's analog set for sure. And of course, like I probably own like every Neuland pen they have because of, you know— MR: They have a pretty wide variety. Yeah. AR: Yeah. And the bullet tip outliner is my favorite because— MR: Me too. AR: — it doesn't matter how you hold it, you can make a mark and it's gonna be a consistent line. I have a lot of the outliner bullet tip. MR: That's my choice in the small and the large, both sizes and so. AR: There you go. There you go. Love it. That's awesome. Yeah. And then for digital, I'm actually a Microsoft girl. MR: Okay. AR: I feel like I'm in the minority over here. MR: Yeah, it's definitely a minority. I think, you know, Android users probably feel the same way. AR: Yeah. So when I was looking for a drawing device, even though I like I said, I do own like every Neuland marker out there, but I also do strive to be a bit of a minimalist. So I was looking for a device that I could do multiple things on. When I found the Microsoft Surface, I was like, it's perfect 'cause it's my computer and it's my drawing tool. And I've never owned an Apple product in my life. So I don't have anything against Apple. I'm sure they're great. Everyone seems to love them, but in terms of like a learning curve, I was like, I just want something that can be all in one. MR: Yeah. That's the way you think. AR: Yeah. Just do the thing and not do with the apps and all the stuff. MR: That makes sense. I think that makes complete sense to me. AR: Yeah. So I started, I think—I can't remember when I got my first surface, it was like maybe 2018 or something like that. But I didn't draw on it a whole lot. Like I said, I was practicing a little bit. But I also invested in a Microsoft Studio. So it's what I'm talking to you on right now. And it's basically like drawing on a TV screen. It's very big. MR: Yes. AR: Because I was getting—the first year of the pandemic I was doing a lot and just being hovered over a small device was just not a good time. So, you know, I was trying to find something out there. I looked at a couple of different options. But when I found the Microsoft Studio, I was like—or the Surface Studio, I guess it's called. I was like, yeah. It's an investment, but I'm very, very happy that I made it. So yeah, it allows me to draw and be able to move my arm around and do lots of things, and not be crunched over a small device. MR: Yeah. It probably feels a little bit like more of a one-to-one relationship to the paper and pens that you had been doing, right? So it's sort of the same scale. I mean, it's more that scale, so— AR: It's more, yeah. It's not as big, but not as small as like a iPad or something, right. So it's probably like four iPad size or something like that. If you were to— MR: Like a 27 inch monitor or something, or 30 inch? AR: I can't remember what it is, but it's pretty big. It's pretty big. And my program of choice is Sketchbook Pro. That's the one I started with. It's the one I use to this day. I'm sure there's other out there that are just as great. But what I usually tell people is just pick one and just do it. Just get through the learning curve. If it's Procreate on the iPad or if it's Microsoft, or if you're Microsoft or Android, and it's Sketchbook. I know they do have Sketchbook Pro for iPad as well, but you know, you just kind of have to pick one unfortunately, and just get through all the little funny things about it until it gets a little bit more intuitive. Because most of my work is live, and that's just kinda how my brain is trained at this point, I don't have time to do all the fancy pens anyway. So I really use one pen, the paintbrush and the eraser, of course. And use a million layers, and that's about it. When I'm doing it live, is very minimal in terms of all these drawing programs, they're amazing and like, so robust, but I really try to encourage people to just, you know, use it minimally. Just do like one or two pens to start and use it in a minimal way. And then you can always just play around and things like that. But yeah, that's my kind of program and setup of choice. MR: Interesting. Interesting. You're the first to talk about, I guess other than the GraphicWall, which is a product that Neuland makes which is like a roll of paper that you can use. I think maybe a few in the 14 season, someone may have mentioned a Cintiq. Which is more for illustration. I think it was—her name will come to me. She's a Welsh woman who uses this at home. And she has an interesting setup with a PC and a large Cintiq, I believe. AR: Oh, interesting. MR: So it's got a stylus. So for those who don't know, before the iPad existed, the Cintiq was like the boss on the block, right. And they made different size. They kept increasing the size. So basically, if I were to describe it, it's like a screen with touch sensitivity. It comes with a dedicated pen, which has a pen tip and an eraser. And basically, what you would do with it, is you'd open up Photoshop and you'd use Photoshop and choose your brushes and stuff and use layers. And so it's like the pre Procreate, I guess, right. It's very expensive, very clunky. You don't really take it any place. It's stuck to your desk. So, you know, if that's the way you work, that's great. If you work in a studio where everything stays in place, it's great. You know, the beauty of the iPad or the Surface, and smaller surfaces and these other devices is you can pick 'em up and go to the cafe or sit in the back of a room and do the work. And it just freed up, you know, the ability to do more with this processing power and the screen resolution and the pen resolution really is matched where those things were for a couple years, so. AR: Yeah. I do have a smaller Surface, like the laptop style and, you know, came in really handy when I had to do an event last week and managed to plug me in and project it on a giant screen in the room. So that was pretty cool. And the setup was like less than 30 seconds. Not gonna lie, that was pretty awesome 'cause usually when you're doing on paper, you're like, okay, I gotta get there early. I gotta get all my board set up, gotta get it all ready. I'll just say there's pros and cons to both. MR: Right. I agree. AR: There's pros and cons to both, right. So you kind of have to weigh what those pros and cons are, and then pick what's gonna work best for your event or whatever it is that you're doing. But yeah, the portability of an iPad or a Surface or something is really beautiful. And you can just pick up and go and plug in or like you said, go to the coffee shop and do your thing or what have you, but if I'm doing like a long day like virtual event or something, it's very nice to have my big Surface Studio, that's for sure. MR: Yeah. It's nice to have options in your case, right? You've got the small portable, you've got the larger scale. You can always revert to paper if you know you wanted to do it that way. AR: Absolutely. MR: I mean, you've got three options right there. AR: Yeah. I have a document camera, I use that quite a bit for different things. So if I'm hosting a workshop online or if I'm doing stuff, I usually do it on paper with my document camera so people can see the marks that I'm making. I think that's a little bit more important when you're teaching a workshop, you're doing something like that so people can see those marks, whereas they don't see them on the digital surface. MR: Yeah, yeah. AR: So it's nice to be able to have the flexibility of both. And, you know, I didn't just wake up one day with all of these tools. I just accumulated them over time. MR: Yes. Over time. Yeah. AR: Right. One year I buy this, the next year I bought that, tight. So, yeah, don't feel like you need to have all of those things either. MR: That's a great tool set and it's good to have some variety. So if someone's listening in and maybe they think the same way you do this will encourage them to explore different directions. That's good. AR: Yeah. Definitely. MR: Well, let's shift into tips now. So every episode we try to have something practical for those who are listening. We collect 'em all at the end of the season and we put 'em in an all the tips episode, of course. What are the three tips, or you can go more than three if you want to, but three tips you might say to someone who—I always frame it like this. Someone's listening, they're individual thinking, but they feel like they're in a bit of a rut or they're on a plateau and they just don't know how to get out of where they're at, and they would use a little encouragement. What would you tell that person? AR: Right. Yeah. Well, I've been having a lot of conversations lately with—I'm just gonna talk from like a beginner perspective, maybe that isn't— MR: Okay. Yeah, that's fine. AR: You know, we'll just talk about that for a second because I've been, of course, like talking to so many people that are like brand new to this, and there seems to be a really big leap between live and not live. So when I teach it, when I talk about it, I always go in with the assumption that they're going to do it live. So I talk about, "Well, you don't have a lot of time, so do this. You don't have a lot of time, so do this." But what I'm finding is that people—that is actually like quite a large ask. Like, learn all these skills, do all the listening thinking, and do it live. Like do it right now. So I've been really working with people to encourage them to do whatever you need to do. Make notes on sticky notes, do the traditional way you would capture, type them out. Do whatever you need to do to get the information and then you can always create the sketchnote later. It's great, yeah, to do it in the moment, but if that is like too much of an ask and it feels too scary, give yourself permission to capture in a way that you feel comfortable and with the idea that you're going to create a sketchnote of it later. So maybe the purpose of creating the sketchnote is a little bit different. It's less about the immediate understanding, which is one of the things that I love about sketchnoting and visual thinking in general is that, making it so it's you have that learning in the moment. So you know, you're gonna be doing your learning maybe a little bit later when you're creating your sketchnote. But I've just been having to give people a lot of permission lately, like, "Don't worry about doing it live, do whatever you want, then create it," right? And then you can focus on the aesthetics or the things, or if you're doing it digitally, you can move things around and you can feel it. You know, 'cause if you create one and you feel good about it, you're gonna do another one. But if you do it live and it's clunky and it's messy and you feel horrible about it, you're not gonna do it again. Or it's gonna be a really difficult to kind of get back to it. You know, I think we have this idea that it always has to be live. And I think especially when people are new, that is a big ask. And it doesn't always have to be, right. Like, when I got into it, that was my default, and that's just what I do. And now I'm just like so in tuned to it that I feel like I—you know, we forget that that isn't gonna come and there's like a little too scary for some people to just learn all the things now do it live, you know? So I would say that, you know, however you need to create it, do that. Even if it's live, that's okay if it's not live. One thing that I don't know, maybe is a little controversial, but I'm gonna share this one, something that I've been thinking a lot about lately is what might be considered like cliche drawings. So I gave the example, I've got like a light bulb. And I think because I'm working with beginners so much right now, is that I've really been leaning in on the idea that cliches are okay. Like, drawing something that might be considered a cliche, I think is awesome. Because I think it's that leap again, right? If you've been in this community for a long time, you're likely challenging yourself, like, "Oh, how could I draw this to explain this concept? Or bring these ideas together into like—" I know he had Dario, he does these like beautiful visual metaphors. MR: Metaphors, yeah. AR: Right. Like how we can visualize these concepts. And I think that is beautiful thing. But I think for people that are newer, that's just like too much. They can't even think about that 'cause they don't even know how to draw a light bulb yet. You know what I mean? And, you know, the light bulb icon saved me because like I said, I'm not joking. I drew one on everything I did for years because I felt confident in drawing a light bulb. There was always an aha moment or something I wanted to stick out on the page, and that's where I would put my little light bulb. So I think like leaning in and those basics or things that might be considered cliches, I think that's okay. I think we can always be challenging ourselves and how we wanna draw things, but leaning in on some of those like rudimentary or basic drawings of how people who've been doing it for a while, I think that's totally fine. Because you have to start somewhere, right? You can't just like, oh, I'm gonna go from not knowing sketchnoting at all, now I'm gonna create these really complex drawings. There's has to be this ladder or this stepping stone approach. So if you needed permission to draw something that might be considered a cliche, I highly encourage it. MR: Yeah. Well, Dario always says that, you know, metaphors is the next level. So the audience he's going after are people that feel confident about the cliche stuff, but they wanna rise up to another level. And that's cool, right. AR: I love that. Yeah. MR: Maybe for many people, the cliches are just fine for the audience and the work they do, and they never feel the need and not doing it professionally. Like, it's fine. AR: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think, yeah, it's beautiful to have that opportunity kind of like step up your next—because I'm like, you know, I'm in a space, like I don't wanna keep drawing the same thing over and over again. Like, that's not a good time. I wanna challenge— MR: For you, it's something, a challenge. Yeah. It's good for— AR: Something that I wanna do, but yeah, someone who is more new or even just have been doing it for a year or two or, you know, it can be—you know, just remind yourself, don't make this more complicated than you need to, especially when you're doing it live. Like just, you know, building that visual vocabulary over time and starting with something that might be considered a cliche, you know. And hopefully, you get into that not comparing mode, right. We already talked about it could be a tip of course of really trying not to compare—you know, like when I went to the 2015 Austin, Texas, it was like, I really was on this really funny line of intimidation and inspiration. And when you're in intimidated, can you flip it upside down and turn it into inspiration instead. Just threw another tip in there for you too. Maybe the last thing I'll just mention, which maybe feels like an off topic from what we've talked about so far, but one thing that I tend to spend a lot of time on is letters. And if you have nice clean letters, your sketchnotes gonna look awesome, no matter if you don't have a lot of drawings on it or a lot of drawing elements like lines and containers and things. So I spend unfortunate amount of time with people to try to just help them clean up their letters a little bit. Because I always find that people have this really funny relationship to their handwriting. It's like, you love it, you hate it. It's in between. It's a funny thing with people's relationship with their handwriting. So you almost have to get people—you have to get comfortable with like, "This is my handwriting. I don't wanna embrace my own style, but I'm just gonna like, try to clean things up a little bit." Every time you make a letter, it looks the same every time. Or picking up your pen and doing like, things like that. Because there's so much content that's always captured, if you feel really confident about your letters, then everything else will just go from there. But every time you go to write something down, you're feeling not great about it, then you know, that's like—I guess like I'm just in this head space right now of how do we just encourage people to do more, have a good experience. And if you have nice clean letters, then I think you'll have a more positive experience with it too. So I think all of my years in early childhood education also primed me for this work too 'cause my letters were pretty decent going into it, so I literally had to practice them and all that good stuff. It maybe a bit of off topic from what we've talked about, but I just wanted to mention it 'cause it's something that seems to be coming up for me a lot lately with people. MR: Yeah. I think one of the practices I did, I haven't done this for a long time when we did workshops in person, was I had people do sketchnotes with no drawings. All they could do is lettering, and they could make it bigger, they could do all kinds of stuff with it, but it had to be a letter. And then you start to realize like, well actually letters are really drawings at some degree once you get to a certain scale. So you're technically breaking the rule, but you're not breaking the rule, which is fun when people realized it. And maybe that's an exercise I need to reintroduce, I don't know, but. AR: Yeah. No, it's a good one. I always say like letter or letters are drawings in the skies. Exactly, what you said basically. If you can write letters, you can draw. It is pretty darn foundational sketchnoting getting the information down and finding that speed where you can capture quickly, you know, but it's still fairly legible. It's this kind of song and dance. I always kind of end up talking about lettering and stuff a lot in the beginning when I'm with people. Which, you know, may not be the most exciting thing in the world, but it's pretty darn important. So I'm like, "Just bear with me. Let's just get through this and develop the skill a little bit before we kind of go into drawing." 'Cause I feel like people, they see it and they go immediately to drawing. They're like, "Oh, I just wanna draw stuff that's exciting." And in my book, I put little, "draw little icons," I put at the very end of the book. It was very intentional why it's at the end of the book because I didn't wanna start it with it because then you need to get some of that foundational stuff down first before you—'cause if you just learn a bunch of icons and none of the other stuff, you know, like how ideas connect together and all of that, then you know, it's not gonna be as beneficial. And you might burn out quicker because you're putting too much pressure that you have to draw a bunch of stuff. And it's not about that at all. MR: Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Another good observation. I don't know if it quite qualifies as a tip, but I guess it is. AR: Sure why not? Lots of tips. MR: Pile another one on there. AR: Yeah, that's what I got for you today. That's what I got for you today. MR: Good. Well, that's great. That's really encouraging. Well, this is the point in the podcast where we ask how people can find you so they can make connections, say hello, check out your book, look at your work. All that kind of stuff. Our community always loves new people. And so, what would be the best place, places for people to find you and to see your work? I got a few different ways. So my business is Minds Eye Creative, so mindseye,creative.ca 'cause I'm in Canada. All things Minds Eye Creative, that's where you can find me. And some of examples of my work for clients and things like that. And then Sketchnote.School is all things learning how to sketchnote. I've got my newsletter. I sent out a Sketchnote tip every Saturday. And you can learn about my book on there, "The Beginner's Guide to Sketchnoting," and you know, it's on Amazon and all those places too. MR: Cool. AR: And information about my community on there at Sketchnotes School as well. And I recently rebranded my YouTube channel. I'm gonna try to redo some YouTube things to Sketchnotes. So doing more under Sketchnotes School these days than Mind's Eye Creative. MR: Cool. Well, those are good two or three good places. We'll look for you on YouTube. If you wanna send along you know, some links to me, we'll make sure that they get in the show notes. But we all of course, do our research here and try to provide pretty detailed shownotes so people can find things, so AR: Absolutely. I love that. MR: That's perfect. Well, thanks so much Ashton, for being on the show. It's been great to talk with you and hear your story and just hear your unique perspective and how you approach things and all the way down to the tools that you use that are a little different. That's really cool. I think it's important that we see variety and that we're not a homogenous thing. We're a variety where it's a community of people and all have different perspectives. And that's great because we need those perspectives to keep growing and improving the work we do. So thanks for being part of that community and the work you do. AR: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Had such a good time. MR: Good. Well, for everyone who's watching or listening, it's another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Until the next episode, talk to you soon. | |||
| 16 Apr 2024 | Deb Aoki infuses the spirit of manga and anime into her visual thinking practice - S15/E07 | 01:01:12 | |
In this episode, Deb Aoki reflects on a childhood immersed in manga and anime and how this experience, combined with her journalism background, amplifies her visual storytelling skills. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army Podcast You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the Podcast To support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike, and I'm here with Deb Aoki. Deb, it's so good to have you on the show. Deb Aoki: Oh, thank you, Mike. It's good to see you. MR: You too. Deb and I have been kind of bouncing into each other on the interwebs for a while, and eventually, we met each other in Paris of all places. Good place to meet somebody. At the International Sketch Note camp in Paris in 2019, which I was thinking about that, today. That's pre-pandemic. So that was like— DA: Yes. MR: - the world before. The before times. So really different. DA: That's true. MR: - mindset and everything a little bit. But anyway, so Deb is just a multi-talented person, and we're gonna talk with her about who she is and her journey and sort of get some lessons from her as well and chitchat about all kinds of stuff, I'm sure. So let's start out, Deb, tell us who you are, what you do, and then how did you get here. What's your origin story from when you were a little girl to this moment? DA: Oh, gosh. That's interesting. Well, I think the best place to start is I'm originally from Hawaii. I grew up—I'm a third-generation Japanese-American, so I was surrounded by Japanese culture, but I kind of don't speak Japanese fluently. I can read and speak some. MR: Okay. DA: But, you know, the nice thing about it, about growing up in Hawaii, I was surrounded by things like manga and anime much earlier than a lot of other people. And so, the nice part about that is that as a young girl, I got to read a lot of comics for girls from Japan. MR: Oh. DA: And in all those comics, it would kind of give you this sense of, "Oh, this is the comic artist you love, and here's how to draw like her, or you can be a comic artist too." So I got a lot of great tips from that. And, you know, like, it fueled this dream of becoming an illustrator or comic artist from a young age. And when I've compared notes with other peers at the same time for American comics, comics for girls were going away or almost faded out. So I was really lucky in that, you know, my love of comics came that way and was sustained that way. So I've always loved to draw, but, you know, comics part is the part where you know, sometimes you draw for yourself, but with comics, I found out early on you're telling stories and you share those stories with your friends and they're like, "Oh, I wanna see more. I wanna see more." MR: Mm-hmm. So you keep making more. DA: Yeah. So it's kind of fun. It's a good way for people who normally don't, you know, to talk about themselves be able to kind of put themselves out there. MR: So I wanna break in for a minute and assume maybe there's somebody who's never heard of Manga or anime. Maybe they've heard them, they're not exactly sure. Like, what are they and are they the same thing? Are they different? And give us sort of a baseline to that. And then probably, I guess the last thing is obviously comic culture, manga, anime culture in Japan is very different than any kind of culture in the U.S. In a lot of ways in the U.S., comics are seen for little kids, and they're dismissed. Where I think in Japan, they're revered and it's kind of an art form, right? So talk a little bit about that too. DA: Oh, well, the simplest way to put it is manga is the comics, like, you know, the paper page, you know, panels and word balloons. And anime is the animated version, like the cartoons. MR: Got it. Okay. That's easy to remember. DA: Yeah. And so, you know, a lot of times a lot of the anime is based on the original manga stories, but there's also anime that is original, like the Miyazaki works are all original stories created just for that. MR: I see. DA: So there's no manga that came before it with pretty—yeah. In general. So, but I guess the way to think about it is one of my agent friends in Japan explained that the movie industry, the entertainment industry in Japan is not as big and well-funded as it is in, you know, the U.S. So their best storytelling talent goes into manga. MR: Really. DA: The editors the writers, the artists. And manga artists compared to, say American comic creators like a lot of who work for the big companies. And the big companies here, they work for hire. Meaning if you draw Superman's story, you get paid per page. And that's kind of it. MR: I see. DA: You know, that's someone else's character. You get to play in that playground, but you didn't create that playground and you don't own that playground. MR: Yeah, I know, for sure. DA: Whereas in manga, what they encourage is every creator comes up with their own characters and story and world, and they just run with it. From beginning to end, volume one to volume, hundreds, whatever it is their characters, their story, their vision, and usually they are. So they own it, you know, from beginning to end. One of the other key differences is that manga artists—well, not all of them are super successful. Some of them are, you know, top tax bracket people in Japan. MR: Wow. DA: So the scale of the business is so different. And that manga is for everybody. There's manga for kids, manga for, you know, business people, manga for housewives, manga that explains how to, you know, manage your money or run a business, manga about dealing with parents or Alzheimer's, you know, silly manga, funny, you know, serious stuff, historical manga. I tell people, it's like manga is like movies. It's just a way to tell stories and what kind of stories can be almost anything. MR: Hmm. That's really fascinating. And I love that it's so diverse. DA: And it's fun. MR: You know, it's almost like a whole publishing. It's like we think about paperback books or nonfiction all wrapped up. It's the same thing except as visualized and the creator own it. Yeah, in some sense. DA: Actually, I went to internet too 'cause one of the things that I found is that—I teach classes in drawing for business people. And I've done this in U.S., India, and Japan. And the thing that I found fascinating is the people I taught in Japan were so visually literate from the get-go. I almost didn't have to teach them much at all. The Indian one, anywhere may be second, but the people I teach in North America seem to be maybe the least comfortable. MR: Yeah. Interesting sort of resistance in a way, right? Yeah. Resistance to that visualization, which is, I guess sketchnoting opportunity sort of brings that to them. But it's more of an opportunity in some ways. Huh. Well, I've sort of derailed you with that, but I thought it might be helpful for someone who maybe is not into that to know, like, they've heard those words, but what do they mean? And it's kind of nice to have some context into— DA: Oh, sure. MR: - how you grew up and now you understand that culture, that very visual culture that Deb sort of grew up in. Let's continue with your story. So you're a little girl, you're surrounded by this manga and anime, and then how did that influence you? And like, were there big moments where you had to make choices where you kind of went with the flow and you ended up in a place like, "Hey, look where I ended up?" DA: Yeah. I guess that's kinda weird. 'Cause I started drawing comics—I used to just draw comics for myself and for my friends. Then I moved from Hawaii, then I moved to New York, went to art school for a little bit. And I would write home letters to my mom and I would have little drawings of the things that I would see, like the things that people would say to me like, "Oh, you're from Hawaii." You know. Or things I would run into like, "Oh my God, I can't find, you know, Japanese rice at the supermarket, or why spam is so expensive here." You know, all these things that I'd write letters and draw pictures from my mom. And then when I came back to Hawaii to finish my college education, I realized that, you know, it's, you know, taking a passive approach to my education. Like just going to a lecture, do the homework, come home. I realized, oh, actually there's all kinds of other opportunities. It's college that I could take advantage of. So I went to the school newspaper and I said, "Hey, I'd like to draw a comic strip." And they said, sure. So that was good in that I got, you know an experience having to draw three times a week, something, right? And then getting people's feedback. People saying, "Oh, I love this, or I didn't get that joke. "So that was a change. And then I met all these people who were in the journalism department. So I went to school for art. I mean, I went, did printmaking and whatever. One of the extracurricular activities I did was run the campus art gallery. So I had to learn how to write press releases. MR: Oh, wow. Okay. So writing, yeah. DA: Doing promotions, making posters, and you know, writing up paperwork to get people to be in the show and ascribe the show. So all of that led to after I graduated college, to me doing PR for art galleries, for my friends art galleries. MR: Interesting. DA: Which then led to me writing for the newspaper art reviews, music reviews. I did a comic strip. Like I said, it was—and a lot of people who recommended me were people I went to school within the journalism department at University of Hawaii. So everything was kind of like, I would make it public what I did, or what I was interested in and then people would connect the dots. They would say, "Oh, Deb, you like to write, how about this? Oh, Deb, you know, you draw a cartoon, would you like to draw your cartoon here?" So it was all kind of making it visible to others. So I would run it to people, other artists and other cartoonists who would kind of—you know, I mean, this is your 20s, right? You're competitive. MR: Yeah. Yeah. DA: And they're like, "How come you get all these opportunities?" MR: Ah. DA: And it's like, oh, that's because I put my sign out by the side of the road that said, "Hi, I do this." And people saw it and would say, "Oh, I have this opportunity. Why don't you?" But if you're just sitting in your room drawing your comics and waiting for someone to knock on your door— MR: To discover you. DA: - it won't happen. MR: Yeah. It can't happen. DA: And this is before the internet, right, where you could put stuff on Instagram and whatever. So that was one of the key lessons. And then having a journalism background, you know, learning about how to write a new story and do good interviews, ask questions, and be curious. So when I did finally move to New York to the mainland, I got work doing writing. You know, more like I was like an admin assistant at a game company. MR: Okay. DA: Where I was a temp at an ad agency. Then it kind of led to—I moved to Seattle, and this was at the time—it was like I'd say late '90s. MR: Right. At the grunge music period just started to happen, right? DA: Yeah. So then I got a job at Microsoft working at MSN, where a lot of other former journalists where working. So I wrote headlines for the news, for the homepage, all kinds of stuff like that. I did you know, case studies for SQL server. MR: Wow. DA: A lot of writing. So that's when my path diverged a little bit, right. Where most of the camp career was in writing. Content writing, UX writing. And then my drawing was was kind of, you know, something fun I did on the side. And then where it all converged later was when I worked at eBay and I would be in these meetings, you know, having to write, you know copy for different apps or different features. And then they would explain stuff from a technical point of view or from a business goal point of view, and I was like, "I have to write for what the user's gonna do, what the user's gonna see." MR: Right. Gotta translate. DA: So then I would just at a certain point go, "I'm not understanding, or you're not giving me the information I need." So I would grab a pen and just go up to the whiteboard and go, okay, so user comes here, clicks this, comes here, does this, sends an email, da dah, dah. Like all this stuff. And then what happens here? Or then what happens when there's an error or they fill out something wrong, or? MR: Yeah, magic goes here. DA: And then sometimes I would say, "Do they do this?" Then sometimes the product manager go like, "Yes, exactly. That's how that works." And then an engineering from the back who normally wouldn't speak would say, "No, actually that won't work out. And actually, no that's impossible." And would to the product manager and goes, "No, the database won't do this, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What are you talking about?" MR: Yeah. You're making assumptions. Yeah. DA: So I kind of got into this, I don't know, some kind of small degree of notoriety for that. MR: So you'd facilitate these discussions, right? DA: Yeah. Like you go, "Oh, you know, Deb draws." MR: Ah, yeah. That came out DA: Then what led to is I had a colleague in the user research department who was saying, "Your skills are perfect for what we need." So she would bring me into workshops where they were trying to come up with new features, and they would say, "Oh, can you draw storyboards that show how people are using this or might use this? Can you draw personas? You know, who the customer is?" So from that, the magical thing is I started getting invited to meetings earlier in the design process. MR: Yeah, because they wanted you to help them to guide them, right? DA: Yeah. And I got involved with business strategy earlier. I got involved with, you know, coming along on user research type projects where I'd get to know who the users were by listening to them and, you know, observing them. For content people, content strategists in UX design, if designers complain about not having a seat at the table or not getting respect. Content designers are even lower than that. You know what I mean? MR: Right. Because nobody thinks the content till the thing's about to launch. That was always my experience. DA: All the alarm ipsums, right? MR: Yeah. DA: And then it would just be a blank placeholder copy or, "Oh, we'll fill that in later." And then it would come to me and like— MR: Later it would come. Yeah. DA: And I'd go, "Ah, wait, why do you have this step before this step? And do we need this extra page and all that stuff?" And I bring up these things and people would say, "Well Deb, those are excellent points, but it's too late. We've built it already. So can you write around it?" MR: Oh boy. DA: So, you know, when I've given talk about my drawing to content strategists, I tell them, this is your little tool to get in the room earlier and for you to inject the point of view of the user. Because if it's like, "Oh, hi, I'm the content strategist, and this is my opinion," you tend to not get listened to as much as— MR: Right. You do backup. DA: - here's what users going through. And then you show these pictures, and then they imagine they go, "Oh." If they can put themselves in the space of that user and go like, "Oh, that would suck. Huh? Oh, we have to change that." MR: It puts the burden back on them and not on you, right? It's not your opinion. It's the user having this issue. Oh, how are you gonna solve it? DA: Right. So, I guess since then I've been discovering this intersection of visual storytelling and what the difference it makes in these types of situations. And, you know, being able to inject humanity into our product design decisions. Which tends to get lost sometimes, surprisingly. MR: Hmm. That could be a good encouragement for people that are listening who are maybe in non—like, they like visual thinking, but they are trying to find a way to integrate it into their daily life. Being the person who draws things is a huge opportunity. Anybody can do it really in any position. DA: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be fancy. I've had several colleagues that do very simple storyboards and seen it make huge differences in product direction or product implementation. MR: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could be a CPA that draws, right? Who you can visualize, you know, numeric stuff in a way that people understand it better. That's a huge value. DA: What's the guy? There's a famous economist at Berkeley. He does a lot of drawings. MR: Was his name Larry something? DA: Oh, I'm— MR: Trying to think. It'll come to us as soon as we stop recording. DA: Yeah. I'll remember. But it's interesting 'cause he does a lot of whiteboard drawing with pictures. MR: Uh-huh. DA: And so Fanta graphics, which is a comic publisher, they published I dunno, like 11 Rockets and Daniel Clowes comics. Published a book of his whiteboard drawings. MR: Really? DA: The Body Economics. They're fabulous. MR: Wow. Well, that's pretty cool. We'll have to see if we can find the name of that book and we'll include it in the show notes so we can, I'll check it out. DA: Hmm. MR: So it sounds like the work that you're doing is a lot like this, but I think you mentioned that you recently have become independent. So tell us a little bit about, you know, moving from being employed in large companies or small companies and then shifting to being a contractor and a freelancer. How does that change, and how does Deb, the person who draws kind of reputation, how has that helped you in that regard? DA: I guess, you know, it's been tricky for me. Partly because my mix of skills makes it such that there isn't ever a job for me that asks for that, right? MR: Mm. DA: I usually get in as a content strategist and they find that I can draw and that's a bonus. MR: Got it. Yeah. DA: It's kind of cracking the egg and you get two yolks kind thing. MR: Yeah. DA: But the stuff I was really enjoying was the drawing stuff. But there is almost no job like that. Specifically, that. MR: Right. DA: So what I've been since—and you know, as we were talking earlier that there's been a lot of tech layoffs lately in Silicon Valley where I live in the San Francisco Bay area. So with the last round of layoffs that I went through, it's gotten harder and harder to find the next job lately. And in the interim, I've been doing more consulting work or more like one-off things. I teach what I call simple sketching for user experiences or storyboarding to various tech companies on a consulting basis. I do it through a company called Tangible UX. So I've done that. And then I've done things like, I did picture books for Juniper Networks to explain network computing and network security and AI. So that was fun. I get little interesting challenges. But the other thing that has happened lately that has brought me back full circle is that manga now is the number three bestselling comic book category in North America. MR: Wow. Wow. DA: Since the pandemic you know, people started staying home and binging anime on Netflix. That led to people buying more manga, and manga sales quadrupled in the last two years. MR: Wow. So it's been discovered in some sense by the West in a way that it hadn't been in the past. I know it's been around, I've seen it around for a long time, but it's kind of a niche, you know, thing. DA: Yeah. So now it's gotten super—and then there's a live-action one-piece TV series on Netflix that was super successful. So all of a sudden, people are paying attention to Manga. So over the last six months or so, I've gotten a lot of people reaching out to me wanting me to explain manga to them. Or, you know, to like—I'm working with a company to make their online manga app and website more sticky and more engaging. So that's a UX thing. But I've also been working with—I have a podcast myself called Mangasplaining. It's basically four friends, and one of my friends, his name is Chip Zdarky, he is a comic book creator. So he writes Daredevil and Batman. MR: Wow. DA: And so he's a very much a Western comics guy. And during the pandemic, he said, "What's this?" Before the pandemic, we all went to Japan together, and then we all dragged him around to all these manga places. And he was like, "What is this?" And like, "Oh my God, there's so much of it." And, "Oh my God, I feel so small." You know. And so, when we came back and the pandemic started, we started this weekly book club for him where we would I introduce him to manga one book at a time. MR: And he would go through it and give his explanations or his reflections on it, I guess. DA: Yeah. And he would sometimes pick up on things— MR: Ask questions. DA: - that surprised us completely. Like, "Wait, what?" Or he would respond to things that we wouldn't expect. You know, there's a manga called Akira which almost everybody—it's a big epic sci-fi dystopian. MR: Nikita. Yeah. DA: But then they thought, "Oh, no brainer. He'll love this." But then he ended up liking a really slice of life stuff. Like one of his favorites was The Way of the House husband, which is about a Yakuza hitman who retires and becomes a house husband for his wife who works in marketing and all the things he goes through to, you know, cook and clean. MR: And prep the dinner. Yeah. Yeah. DA: And deal with his mitch and it's cats and the nosy Neighbors. It's really funny. So it's been a delight to you know, have this with him. And then we started publishing some manga. Like we published a book called Okinawa by Susumu Higa. And it's a bunch of short stories about Okinawa before, during, and after the war, but from a very human point of view. It's really interesting. I mean, I'm half Okinawa myself. I've never been to Okinawa. So that's been really rewarding. The book came out this fall and it's been on a bunch of shortlists for books over the past couple—from, you know, like even the Washington Post and things like that. MR: Wow. DA: Won a couple of awards. So, you know, like, that's been really neat. And then the other thing that came up is I'm now teaching once a week at California College of Art. MR: Okay. DA: I'm teaching a class on manga history, context and creation for their master of fine art and comics. So, what's been interesting with that is that I have to use my facilitation and design sprint training— MR: Everything. Yeah. DA: - to try to come up with exercises for these students to help them, you know, understand how to think, how manga creators think about story and character and page layout. 'Cause these are all things I feel instinctively. MR: Right. How do you describe them? Yeah. DA: Right. Because so kinda like when you did the Sketchnote Handbook, right, there was something you were doing and you were doing and you trial by error. But then when you have to write a book, you have to explain it. You know by similar— MR: Yeah, that was interesting. DA: How is that for you, by the way? I mean. MR: It's a lot like what you're talking about. It was like, well, I've been doing this for a long time, how do I—you know what's really funny is I'm always been a writer in addition to a visualizer. So I kind of wrote the whole thing first. Like, for me, its sort of worked in my head and I wrote it as a script, wrote it all out. And then once I saw—I let the words pour out, then I could say, "Oh, okay. I could see that visually would look like this, and I could use that sample here." And I started like, bringing all the visuals in and then melding it together. So it sort of started the backbone was words, and then I added images into it to make it happen. So that seemed to work well for me. Both of books worked the similar way where I wrote the script first. DA: Amazing. And it was so amazing 'cause I remember the book first came out and seeing how people just so resonated with it, right? MR: Yeah. DA: And so wanted to learn more, and it's led to so many things for you, so that's so exciting to see. MR: Yeah. And it's in a weird place where I guess it's sort of like a manga. I mean, it's not technically manga, but I mean, sort of explaining myself in, not frames of a comic book, but it's not so far away. I mean, if you look at it, it's visualization and words. And, you know, I'm a huge comic fan from when I was a kid. Huge Daredevil fan, Spider-Man. And so, you know, that had a huge influence on me and the way I looked at things and the way I framed things comes from that. So, you know, there's some universal stuff there, and then there's I'm sure variation between Western and Eastern comics and the way you think, which is probably part of what you're teaching, right? I suppose. DA: A little bit. Yeah, but there's a lot of commonalities. MR: Yeah, I think so. A lot of it's human, right? So it's human stories, which in the beginning, middle, and end. There's conflict, there's resolution. Those common things exist inside the story. Then it's maybe more the details of expression that change a little bit. So that's really fascinating. DA: It's kind of fun for me, you know? Because when you're—because all of these worlds for me, they seem different and I meet different people within them. You know, the comic people I meet are different than the UX design people that I meet than the journalism people that I meet than the people from the Japanese culture that I meet. But what's fun about being in all these different worlds is sometimes is seeing where the common threads and then applying things you see and observe in one world and applying it in another. Like some of the user experience, design, and innovation, you're dealing with people and products that sometimes—the world is changing around them. And they either resist or they accept and they evolve. So for example, you know, like the Kodak example, right? MR: Mm-hmm. DA: The film company. The film developing company. And they had a digital option to make a digital camera at some point, and then they refused because they didn't wanna kill their film business. MR: Yeah. DA: Right. So I see that happening with comics now. The pamphlet comics is an old style of reading and consuming comics that started with Newsstands, but now they're only specialty comic shops, so you can find them. But manga has been succeeding because manga is in a little book format, can be sold at any bookstore. MR: I see. DA: So I see manga at Target, I see manga at bars and Noble. So that's part of why it's, you know, kind of overtaking it. MR: The friction is sort of not the same. DA: Not the same. And then it's cheaper. You can buy a whole volume of manga of 200-something pages for like $10. And then you'll get, you'll get a 30-page full-color comic for $6. So like all these—and then I see like what's happening with scrolling comics now, where it's designed for scrolling. MR: A screen. Yeah. DA: And even two-page comics don't work well. So there's all kinds of—I guess, being an observer in this industry and seeing the struggles they're going through, the transitions that's happening, and some of it's relating to customers. Or their reading habits, the devices they're reading on, the stories they wanna read, making easy entry points. If you wanna start with Spider-Man, where do you start and why is Spider-Man look so different now than he did in the movies? Doesn't align. But like with one piece, it's just a big pirate comic. It's like a hundred-something volume now. If you wanna get started, read Volume One, keep going into Volume 108. And it is the same as in the TV, as in anime. So, you know, it's the kind of thing where I look at it go, "Oh, it's a usability problem." MR: Yeah, it is. DA: And most people in the American comics business are—forgive me, I love them, but some of them who are kind of in that Kodak film moment. MR: Yeah. They're kind of trapped in some ways. Trapped in amber in a way. DA: They're a little frightened by what's to come. MR: Yeah. DA Yeah. So it's fun. It's interesting to observe and see it through that lens. MR: Hmm. I would think that American, and I guess Western comic makers, now that we're really off on a tangent. They must really be seeing the success of manga, they must know the stats and why it's working. Are they just writing it off? "Oh, that's just a Japanese culture thing. That's why it's popular." But I think what we're seeing is it's coming to the West and it's popular and there are probably user experience reasons why, like, you sort of cited some. Like, it's a pocketbook that I could carry. It's about the size of a paperback. It doesn't look outta place. It's not, you know, a newsprint thing that's bigger and it's hard for me to fit it any place or, you know, the value is better. DA: It's fragile. MR: Yeah. DA: Yes. MR: Or maybe I can look it on my—I have an iPad so I can read on my manga there, right? And I think that's where maybe they're similar, right? I would guess. Western comics have adapted to, you know, going on digital devices. But yeah, I would guess that eventually they will be forced to look at manga because It's successful. DA: They're looking at it. Oh, they already are. MR: Yeah. DA: I mean actually some of the—and also kids comics too, right? A lot of the comics, superhero comics has evolved to the point where it's only really targeting you know, men 30 to 50. MR: Right. Yeah. DA: And then there's a whole universe of comics for kids where they don't care about Spider-Man or Batman. They like DogMan or they like Reyna Tel stories, so they're not interested in the superhero stuff the way that their uncles and fathers, and grandfathers were. Like you see, comics is really dear to me, and I think visual literacy is so important, you know, not just for entertainment. I see how it makes me a better communicator. You know, I tell people that when I draw visual diagrams, I get people's attention 'cause people love watching people draw. MR: Yeah. Yeah. DA: You know, it's like seeing magic appear on a screen. And then the other part is that it brings a mood of lightness into the room and fun, which most meetings don't have. But also too, it's kind of—I think the things that move with creativity and collaborative—one of the things I tell when I give them my talk on how to draw for business, I'll show them like, here's my pretty examples, here's the finished storyboards, here's all this stuff, and then I show them but here's how it usually starts. And I show my super messy, fast whiteboard drawings that I'm drawing when I'm getting in a room and people are shouting out things at me like, "Oh, and they do this, and oh, they do this." And I just have to draw fast. And I said, "Oh, the messy is good. 'Cause the messy says you can participate too." MR: Yes. DA: Or nothing here is final, right? MR: Yeah. DA: I've actually had people actually step up, grab the eraser, wipe away what I drew and draw what they want. MR: Which is great. That's like what you want. That's like the ideal, right? DA: Exactly. And I thought if I drew it pretty and nice, one, it would take me too long. So I wouldn't capture the conversation. But the other part is that then people go like, "Oh, Deb works so hard on that, I can't mess with it. It's art." MR: It becomes rigid. DA: Yeah. And it's like, "I don't have the right to touch this or mess with it." So the messy invites levels of playing field and says, "I'm not attached to this emotionally. This is a tool for us to collaborate and communicate." MR: Yeah. That's pretty cool. And I think in some ways, the messy stuff, I've been finding, I dunno if it's 'cause I'm getting older or whatever, but like the messy stuff, I'm way more attracted to than the fancy. I mean, not that I don't appreciate the pretty stuff or enjoy it, but there's something about—like, I can see in the way somebody's thinking by the rough sketching they're doing, and it's a little bit loose and it just feels more alive in some ways, right? As you do versioning of it and make it more tight and more perfect, it sort of becomes rigid and fixed. And that's what's in people's heads too, right? So if you can capture that loose, you know, sketchy nature, there's something attractive about that actually. You know, it's gotta be at least recognizable. I mean, if it's so messy that you don't know what it is, I mean, that's maybe at the other end of the spectrum, but like somewhere in the middle is a nice balance to strike if you can. DA: And it's human, right? MR: Mm-hmm. DA: It's human and it has life in it, and you can't help but, you know, find that fascinating. MR: Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Well, that's really cool. It's so fun to hear how you've sort of—I think all the guests that I have when I look, they sort of collect all these experiences and knowledge and, you know, bring them together. And a lot of times later in their careers as they become to their peak of their career, suddenly they're drawing from all those things. Learning how to write, visualization, how do you communicate, how do you convince people? How do you observe? Like all those things are coming into one activity, and that you're bringing your whole self to that situation or that problem. DA: Mm-hmm. MR: And people trust you. Like, oh, this person's gonna help you solve it because they're bringing everything they have. So that's kind of cool to see that, you know, if you're in the beginning of your career, the goal is to kind of gather these experiences and don't think about like your love of like manga as a side thing that you can't bring into your work experience. You can, that's gonna influence. And there could be a valuable place if you are creative about how you think about it, which is kind of what Deb is doing. DA: Yeah. I've given this talk to university students over the past couple of years. Like Christina Wodke, she's also a well-known visual thinker. She teaches HCI, human-computer interaction. MR: Right. She was on the show years ago. I should probably have her back on. DA: You should. She's doing great stuff. They're teaching a game design class over there. MR: Nice. DA: She invites me over once a semester to teach one of her classes that gets into storyboarding. MR: Nice. DA: And what's really fun about that is when I talk with my students, the ones that really come up to me afterward or pepper me questions tend to be people who come to me like, "I draw too. You mean I can bring this into my work?" MR: Yeah. Yes, definitely. DA: Or like, "Wow, you mean that's valuable?" And I go, "Yes." MR: Oh yeah. That's cool. That's really cool. So I wanna shift a little bit in our discussion towards your favorite tools. I'm gonna start with analog first 'cause there's so many analog tools that exist. And you being into manga and anime, you probably have some really great Japanese influence tools that you probably like for your work, which maybe people can explore. So why don't you just unleash us all the cool tools that you like? DA: Well, some of my favorites are some that are not as easy to find in U.S., but they are findable. MR: Okay. DA: One is a mild-liner highlighter pen. These are pastel light-colored highlighter pens. They come in a wide range of colors like soft pink, soft aqua, two shades of gray, a dark gray, and a light gray. MR: That would be really useful for sure. DA: Yeah. And they're water-based pens, they don't smell. And because they're highlight pens, they're light enough that you can see words underneath it. MR: I got it. DA: Like a lot of American highlighter pens are like this fluorescent yellow. MR: Bold. Yeah. DA: Too heavy. MR: In case you're blind or something, right? DA: It's hard to use for storyboarding. When I teach the storyboarding class, I say you need to have at least a gray pen or a lighter color pen. So I'll say if you can't find the gray pen, use those light blue or lavender. And that's a good substitute for the gray. MR: Mm-hmm. DA: But the mild liner pens have a whole spectrum of light colors that you can use for sketchnoting. So you can get those from—there are Japanese companies like Maido, M-A-I-D-O. They're in Kinonuniya stores. If you're near one of those Japanese bookstores, Maido is their stationary section. And they have a Maido-in-a-box thing where you can get a stationary subscription box. MR: They send you things, huh? DA: And they'll send you a new mix of interesting stationary items from Japan every month. MR: Interesting. DA: The other one is jet pens. MR: Right. They're one of my favorites. Jet pens are great. DA: They're a terrific source of these things. So they have that. And then my other one is Frixion pens. MR: Oh yes. Erasable. Yeah. DA: Erasable. And they have both ballpoint and felt tip pens, different widths. They also have highlighter pens that are erasable and they're erasable by friction, which is the heat— MR: The heat, yeah. DA: - of the rubbing. They have this little hard rubber thing on the end of the pen, and when it erases, it's not like American erasers where it's like you rub it and then like all these little crumbs come up. It's just the rubbing creates heat that erases. MR: The heat and it kind of evaporates or something like that. DA: It just goes invisible. MR: Yeah. Interesting. It disappears. DA: So they have like a ballpoint pens too. They have gray ones too which is nice. So that's really good for you know sketchnoting, I think. So I use those with conjunction with Pigma Micron pens which are pigment black pens or I use Sharpies. Sharpies are permanent markers. Because the highlighters and the Frixion pens are water-based. MR: And they don't interact with each other. DA: They're microns, you know, they don't smear. MR: Mm-hmm. DA: That's the main things I use for sketch notes. MR: Isn't the other challenge with Frixion is because of heat? Like, you don't wanna leave it in your hot car on a summer afternoon 'cause all your notes will evaporate. DA: Yeah. MR: It was also the pen that was included with the Rocketbook or still is included with Rocketbook. And I remember the very early ones, you would like put it in the microwave and you could erase all your notes and then start over again with a blank book. DA: That's right. Yeah. You gotta watch out with that. And actually, I've had the Frixion pens, some of the color, felt ones for a while, and it does die out. Like the pigment somehow dies out. MR: It dry dries up or something, or it fades. DA: Then when I write with it, all I get is clear. I'm not sure why. But again, this is like a case where I've had these Frixion pins maybe for four years and not used them regularly, so. MR: It just broke down over time probably. DA: Yeah. I don't know whether I have to—'cause you know the whiteboard marker trick, right? Where you put a string at the end of the whiteboard marker and you whip it over your head. MR: It moves all the pigment to the tip, right? DA: Correct. MR: It's centripetal force, I think. DA: Yeah. Yeah. That's a neat little trick. So I've been trying that with that. MR: Hmm. DA: Oh, the other one is I love the Neuland pens. MR: Oh, they're great. Yeah. DA: Yeah. The water-based pens. 'cause you can refill them. MR: Yep. They're permanent as well. Many of the inks are permanent. Especially the—well these guys here, I'm showing the orange ones— DA: Yeah. The black pens are permanent. MR: -the outliners. Yeah. These are great. DA: And then you can also mix your own colors 'cause they have the colors— MR: Little bulbs, you can kind of mix 'em. And they have blank pens that have no pigment in them. And you can make your own thing. Just, you know— DA: And it's really fun. MR: - measure in grams the amount of ink you use 'cause you might have to refill that thing if you need a match. DA: Yeah. MR: What about paper and notebooks and stuff like that? DA: Oh, I've been using your sketchnote notebooks by the way, on tracks. MR: Oh really? Okay. DA: They're really lovely. Otherwise, I use Moleskins. The thin ones 'cause I don't like necessarily carrying a big book everywhere I go. MR: Right. DA: The other thing I'll do sometimes is—other—oh, Muji. MR: Muji. Yeah. That's a great store. They're in some big cities. Yeah. New York City is the one I've been to too. Yeah. DA: One of my favorites is they have these notebooks with plain brown paper cardboard cover. With a little elastic around it. **MR: Oh, okay. DA: To keep the book shut. MR: Yeah. Okay. DA: But the brown paper cover is so nice 'cause when you—I travel to Japan quite frequently and at a lot of the museums that you go to or the tourist attractions, they'll have a little stamp pad. MR: Oh. And you can stamp it. DA: A little commemorative stamp where, "I went to this place." So when I had my little travel journey from Japan, I just pick up all those books and then every place that has little stamp pad, I stamp it MR: Like an art passport. DA: Yeah. They also have Travelers Notebooks. Have you heard of those? MR: Yes. I know about the Travelers Notebooks. Yeah. Those are great. DA: The Traveler's Notebooks are really from Japan. MR: Yes. DA: So they have Traveler Notebooks stores just for them. MR: If you don't know what these are, it's typically the traditional one is a piece of leather that was cut and folded. So it's like a cover. And then there's a string inside of it. And then you get these notebooks and they're staple bound, and you slide the notebook into the string and that's what holds it into the leather cover. So you can kind of swap 'em in. You can stack up more than one and you can kind of make it whatever you like. They have all kinds of inserts too, right? Like plastic things with zips. You can slide in and like all kinds of crazy stuff that you can add and make the notebook what you like. DA: Calendar insert, calendar, mini booklets, grids, dots. So you can make your own customized notebook so that you can slip things in and out. MR: Yeah. DA: It's a really nice system. And it's basically about the size of a—looks like about the size of an—a little bit bigger than an airline ticket. MR: Yeah, that's true. That's the big one. I know that they have a passport-size one too. It's a little bit shorter. DA: Uh-huh. MR: So if you need a pocketable thing, you could go in that direction as well. DA: It's really nice system. It's because it's from Japan and imported, it's not the cheapest. MR: Right. DA: I think which is cheaper, but on the bright side for all of the people who like Japanese stationary, the yen to dollar exchange rate is the lowest it's ever been in about 20 years. MR: Maybe I need to go to JetPens this week. DA: Yes. It's at like 150 yen to the dollar now. Typically, before last year even, it was like closer to 100, 110 yen to a dollar. When you go to Japan, it's like you're getting a 30, 40 percent discount on everything. MR: This is the time to book your tickets to Japan, everybody. DA: You should go to Japan. Oh, and if you do go to Japan, make sure you go to Shinjuku Sanchome area 'cause that's where they have the Sekaido. Sekaido is a five-story art supply store. MR: Oh boy. You'd never leave that place. DA: It is the best. And then otherwise, there's also Tokyo Hands, which has a mix of art supplies and stationery and office stuff, and home craft things, like all kinds of craft kits. And then there LOFT, which also has a great stationary and gift selection. So it is a stationary lover's dream. MR: I bet. DA: Please go to Japan. MR: Yeah. Spend some money there. You definitely will in those stores. DA: Absolutely. MR: Wow. That's really cool. You're reminding me—I can see my Travelers Notebook right over here. I haven't used it for a while. Kind of encouraging me to maybe get some—so what's nice about those is not only can you buy books that fit there, but you can make your own, right? If you have paper you like, you can cut it to the right size and fold it and just slide it right in and you've got a notebook, so. It's pretty cool. DA: Absolutely. It's really nice. And the leather makes it like, you know, an object you keep and get attached to over time. MR: Right. DA: But the inserts make it infinitely reusable. MR: Yeah. It's got the lasting part and then the transient part. DA: Yeah. It's nice. MR: Right. Hmm. Interesting. Well, that's really cool. And I was gonna go back and you use the thin Moleskin, I'm assuming you mean the staple-bound ones? DA: Yeah. Not the hard-bound ones. MR: Not the hardbound ones. Got it. 'Cause they can slip in a pocket or a purse or bag or something. Not so bulky. DA: Yeah. 'Cause when I'm travelling, you know weight matters, right? MR: Yeah. Oh yeah. DA: And so you just wanna be able to have something on the fly. MR: Yep. Cool. Well, that's really great. I'll follow up and make sure we get as many as we can in the show notes for people, the places, and the tools so you can go check 'em out and spend some money. Sorry. DA: You won't regret it. MR: Yeah. People that listen to this podcast, probably I spend a lot of their money. Sorry about that. So I would love to hear some tips from you. We like to make some part of the podcast practical. I frame it with, let's assume there's a visual thinker, whatever they are, comic book artist, sketchnoter, or graphic record, it could be just someone kind of curious, and they're starting to do this, but they feel maybe they he hit a plateau or they just need a little encouragement. What would be three things you would tell that person to give them a little encouragement? DA: I guess, you know, 'cause I come from writing background and I tend to see people who get really—when I teach my class, I get people who are very tight about their drawing, right? Or very feeling like they're not an artist, and so therefore they can't draw. So I end up breaking it down into you're writing letters and then you're learning how to write words, and you're learning how to write sentences. And from the sentences you get stories. And if you think about it in building blocks, right? Like your letters are the straight, the curves, the circles, the shapes, right? And then you put that together to make people, places things. That's the words. And then you add conjunctions and connectors or adjectives, right? Like, and that would be like arrows and boxes to group things. Or, you know, little line radiating license show something is new or swirly lines, you know, to show like a different mood or using different sizes of type. So that's your connector to make sentences. And then when you have all of these things together, then it becomes a story. So if you think about it like as a form of alphabet and writing system versus thinking of it as an artistic system, then it just feels more approachable. MR: Yeah. I think so. Yeah. Lowers the bar a lot. Yeah. DA: Yeah. And I guess the other thing I'll tell people, you know, we're all stuck in boring meetings a lot. MR: Yeah. Yeah. DA: So sometimes, i find that I'll practice my sketch notes in boring meetings. And I'll— MR: You know, not much to lose. DA: Yeah. It's sometimes then it's you know, like the key thing, right? You write the words and then you leave space for images. And then you know, it's just kind of even practice. Sometimes I'll draw the people in the meeting to practice drawing different facial expressions or I'll challenge myself to draw tricky visual concepts. Like lately I've had to—I had to recently do a storyboard to illustrate large language models for AI. MR: Oh yeah. DA: That was tricky. Bitcoin was tricky. It was the other one before, I think—or how would I draw AR and VR experiences? And so, what I did with that was I would draw the person with the VR glasses in green. The rest of the body was, you know, black and white. And then I would make a pointed, a word balloon, but I would make it a square word balloon pointing at the glass outline in green. So what that would indicate is that this is what they're seeing through the glasses. And then anything they were seeing the glasses I would draw in green as well. MR: I see. DA: So then in the context of like the— MR: Separate those. Mm-hmm. DA: So it's kind of like there's—especially if you work in tech or anything that's abstract, like finance or healthcare, somethings you're dealing with sometimes a lot of abstract concepts. And these will be like your greatest hits, right? These are things that's gonna come up for you over and over again. So like figure out your icon or symbol for it. When I teach my class and I teach it to different types of—I teach to healthcare companies, tech companies, some that are more enterprise or more cloud-focused, some are more retail or e-commerce focused, I teach 'em a basic curriculum and then I customize it the second half for their industry. Saying like, I'm not here to—you know, like Duolingo, right? Duolingo will teach me stuff like, "My sister teaches geology at the university." And it's like, I never use that in a sentence when I go to Japan, right? MR: Yeah. DA: I'd like to order this, but could I get it with the kimchi on the side instead of this? Or how much is this? Or where's the bathroom? MR: Practical things. Yeah. DA: Practical, right? So when I teach my drawing class, I go like, here's the basics, and here's your greatest hits for your industry. You know, here's how to draw a shopping cart. You're an e-commerce, here's how to draw your company logo really fast. Things like that, right? MR: Things you're gonna use a lot. Yeah. DA: So I'm always really focused, like when I teach, think of it as language learning. I try to think of it as, what's the stuff you need? 'Cause you don't need to learn how to draw everything in the world. Just the stuff in your world. MR: That's a great second tip. So first one is think of it as language. The second is to build the greatest hits of the things you're gonna use often using that language. DA: I think the third one is just be visual with fun low-stakes things. MR: Yeah. Good point. DA: Sometimes people get really bent like, "Oh my God, if I'm gonna do scratching on at a conference, everyone's gonna look at it and it has to be perfect, right? MR: Right. DA: Or if I'm gonna scratch work, you know, everyone's gonna see it and it has to be good. Then when I say, "Well, how about sketch notes for fun, low-stakes things?" Like a favorite recipe or you know, like a travel journal or like even sketching your favorite TV show. Like, what happens? MR: Yeah. That's a good one. DA: So think of fun way—or I think another one is, draw with young people. Yeah. If you have your kids or nieces or nephews or any young people you come in contact with, draw with them. Have fun with them and draw together and you'll find that—I mean, that's how I got started. My mom draw me when I was young. Right. So one, it invites you to enjoy it as fun. It invites you to you know, play together in a spirit of experimentation and low stakes-ness, but also kind of when you're with kids, you just kind of learn, "Oh, I don't need to worry about a lot of these things." MR: Yeah. Don't put too much burden on yourself. DA: Yeah. Or treat yourself as kindly as you would a kid who's just learning how to draw. MR: Yeah. That's a good idea. DA: I think so much of it gets blocked because as adults we judge ourselves too harshly. MR: Yeah. We too much burden on ourselves. Yeah. DA: For even a very beginner efforts, right. So, you know, there's always a time and a place to be better, but you'll never get better if you never at least go through a lot of routes of being not so good at it. And it doesn't matter that that's not so good. You're at least doing it. MR: Right. Learning every time. DA: Because we were talking about people who use AI for these kind of things. It's like, you are missing the point. The true joy of the sketching is the motor memory, the activity, the connection between your muscles and the thing, and your visual, and then that ends up being reinforcing something in your brain. So, yeah, the drawing—I've taught my drawing classes through Zoom, but I find it's so much more fun if it's in person. MR: Yeah. Yeah. DA: That's a tough one though. MR: Well, those are three great tips. Thanks for sharing those. And thank you for all that you're doing in the visual thinking community. I know attending the International Sketchnote Camp and doing the teaching that you're doing, thank you for doing that and just helping people move beyond not doing anything. That's really helpful. And I'm glad that you're doing it. So thank you for that work. DA: Oh, thank you. I'd love to go to next year's Sketchnote. I have such fond memories of that one, but is so sad I missed the last few. MR: Yeah. Well, it's gonna be in Texas. It's been announced from the 2nd through the 4th of August and San Antonio, Texas. So it's gonna be right in the neighborhood for people in the United States. So Michael Clayton is running the show and I'm helping with a few other people. So as we record this, it's early February, so pretty soon there should be more information. And of course, you probably have seen on the website announcements for it by the time this show comes out. But yeah, it's gonna be San Antonio. DA: Excited to mark my calendar. MR: Yeah. Tacos and barbecue and sketch notes— DA: Nice. MR: - you can't go wrong. DA: Absolutely. Yeah. One thing I love about—I wanna tell it to you, Mike, that there are a lot of people who create creative communities and the creative community you've created has such a nice feeling, just a nice warm vibe of collaboration and, you know, shared growth. And so, thank you for that. MR: Oh, thank you. DA: It has a great impact. MR: I'm just one piece of that puzzle. There's a lot of people that invest in that, so I'm glad to hear that. And they will as well when they hear this podcast, so. Yeah, for sure. Well, Deb, what's the best place to find you? Do you have a website we can go to and see your work and reach out to you? Are you on certain social media where you hang out these days? DA: Well I'm on BlueSky, @debaoki. My Twitter account is having problems nowadays but I am on Twitter with @mangasplanning. And then if you go to mangasplanning.com, that's where all our podcasts are at. I'm embarrassed to say that my website is down right now for renovations. MR: Oh, okay. DA: But eventually debaoki.com will be back. MR: Okay. Maybe by the time the show comes out in March or whatever, DA: That would be a good deadline, wouldn't it? MR: Yeah. There you go. I'll give you a deadline. DA: Okay. Sounds good. MR: Even if it's just, you know, "Coming soon" and it's you with a hard hat on shoveling, that would be, you know, a throwback to the '90s. DA: Indeed. MR: When websites weren't ready yet, they'd have like a little construction worker digging. DA: That's true. MR: They should do Deb digging and animate it, and that would be your website until you get it up. DA: Good idea. MR: And then they'd stop every once in a while, "See you soon.” That'd be funny. Cool. Well, we'll definitely send people there. We'll get the show notes from you and find them on our own as well. So if you're curious about anything here, just go to show notes and you'll find a link to it. And Deb, thanks for being on the show. It's been great to have you. Thanks for sharing your experience and your wisdom. DA: Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's so delightful to talk with you. MR: Yeah, you're so welcome. And for anybody who's listening or watching, it's another episode of the podcast. Until the next episode, talk to you soon. | |||
| 29 Jan 2021 | Season 9 Preview - SE09 / EP00 | 00:02:45 | |
Hey everyone, it’s time to get back into season 9 of the Sketchnote Army Podcast! I have more great guest interviews for your listening pleasure, including:
You’re going to just LOVE season 9! New episodes start next week Monday, February 1st, 2021 with Lee LeFever, so keep your eye on your podcast app every Monday morning! SEASON 9 SPONSORED BY
CREDITS
SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 14 Mar 2023 | Season 13 Teaser - S13/E00 | 00:01:54 | |
Hey, It’s Mike Rohde, and I’m here to announce season 13 of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is launching on Tuesday, March 21st, 2023. This season we’re featuring 10 amazing guests, including
and of course the fan favorite All The Tips episode for Season 13 You are going to love every episode! Special thanks to our sponsor, Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Watch this space on Tuesday, March 21st for episode 1! | |||
| 30 Apr 2024 | Julian Kücklich transforms ideas into visual narratives - S15/E09 | 00:58:43 | |
In this episode, Julian Kücklich shares his journey—from childhood, where drawing was an innate talent, to academic pursuits and his discovery of design. Julian discusses how creativity and innovation provide visual solutions that blend storytelling, graphic recording, and visual strategy effortlessly. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings, saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike, and I'm here with Julian Kücklich. Julian, it's so good to have you on the show. Julian Kücklich: Great to be here, Mike. MR: Yeah, I've seen your work so much. Again, to guests I've talked to, LinkedIn seems like the place I'm finding really fascinating people posting things. And I've asked people, and I can ask you too, is there something going on in LinkedIn or is it just that I've trained the algorithm to give me what I wanna see? Do you have a sense of what's going on there? JK: Well, I think, you know, LinkedIn has become much more popular in Europe in recent years. When I joined LinkedIn, which was 10 years ago, I was just reminded that it was my LinkedIn anniversary maybe three, four weeks ago, it was hardly used. People in Germany especially used a platform called Xing. MR: Yes, I remember Xing. Yeah. JK: Yeah. And so, that seems to have dropped off the radar and people are doing much more on LinkedIn. So that might be one of the reasons that you see more content from creators in Europe at least on LinkedIn now. MR: Hmm. Interesting. I'm sure the algorithm must have something to do with it, but anyway, if you are listening and you're not on LinkedIn or you haven't really paid attention there, go check it out. It seems like there's lots more graphics. I think in a way, it's got a nice blend of visual capability. So like visuals attract people, but it crosses over with business. So, people who are looking for either some kind of impact or I guess getting work from it, it's a natural place to be if you're a graphic recorder professionally. In my case, I just like to share what's going on, and I do some teaching so that it opens the opportunity for people to find out about classes I might be teaching. But it definitely seems to be more visual. Anyway, that aside, Julian, tell us who you are and what you do, and then let's jump right into your origin story right after that. All the way from when you were a little boy till now, tell us like, what were the key moments, what were the things you did as a kid? All those kinds of things. JK: All right. That's gonna be a long story. MR: Good. JK: Just to get us started, I've been working as a graphic recorder for about 10 years now. Well, actually it's a bit longer, but I went full-time freelance in 2014, so it's almost exactly 10 years ago. Well, you know graphic recording is becoming less and less important in my business. I do a lot of strategy mapping or strategic illustration as I like to call it. So I work with clients on visual representations of their strategy or their goals or their values. And those often have a basis in graphic recording. I often like to kick off these processes with workshops where I do graphic recording, but then I take the results of that back into my studio, and then I work on the illustration and fill up the details, and then make changes. So it's a longer and more involved process than the pure live graphic recording that I did for the first, you know, six or seven years of my career almost exclusively. MR: Hmm. Interesting. A question that sort of pops into my mind as you talk about this. So do you find, so typically graphic recording, at least traditionally is a large board, foam board, paper, something, and it's in a room, so people are kind of immersed in it in a sense? So when you go back and do the strategy work, do you find it's important to reframe it in a more consumable size? This is a very specific question. So in other words, do you come back with a report that's A4 printable or, you know, something like that? Or does it come back as a large board again, but maybe more like, you know, you boiled the stew and then now it's a really tasty kind of a thing? JK: I must say I find it really hard to produce something that's printable on an A4 paper because there's usually so much detail that—you know, a lot of that gets lost when it gets printed in such a small size. So I try to encourage my clients when they share it, either view it on a big screen or print it in a large format so detail is really there and they can, you know, focus on specific areas of what they're interested in at that moment. I think size is really an important and often undervalued aspect or quality of, you know a graphic or an illustration. It really adds to the quality if it is large and if the viewer can actually immerse themselves into the graphic. MR: Right. Yeah. It seemed to me like that would be a curious, with this opportunity to compress, there might also be a desire to reduce size, but it sounds like that's not the case. Maybe it's slightly smaller, but still, quite a large scale because I suspect in that strategy work and the amount of information you're taking in, it would be difficult to fit it in a small size. You need the space to really represent all the components and the interactions and interrelationships, I suppose. JK: Absolutely. MR: Yeah. Interesting. Anyway, so that's just a curiosity as we—I guess in this episode, it seems like I'm interrupting you to kind of ask for more details, which I guess is okay, but continue. JK: Perfectly. I guess the next question is how did I get there? MR: Yeah. JK: And that's really a very long and complicated story because I didn't start out as an illustrator or a graphic artist like a lot of other graphic recorders do. In my experience, you know, they either come from a visual background or from a coaching background, and I have neither. I started out studying German and American literature in university. And then I kind of switched over to media studies and I did a lot of research on video games. MR: Hmm. Interesting. JK: Actually published a lot of papers on video games and gave a lot of conference presentations on video games, and actually did a PhD about global production networks— MR: Wow. JK: - in relation to computer games. So, you know, that was a big part of my life up until my mid-30s. And then I had a teaching job in Berlin actually teaching game design. And then I decided that you know, academia wasn't really my thing. I mean, I liked the teaching, but I didn't like the bureaucracy. I didn't like the hierarchy. I didn't like the way, you know, you had to ask a thousand people before you could do something. MR: Yeah, yeah. JK: So I then started to look for different work. And what I found was a job in an NGO which was doing training for journalists in mostly the Middle East. But then when I joined in 2012, they were just creating a platform for North Africa, for Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. So the Arab Spring countries as they were known at the time. MR: Yeah. Yeah. JK: And so, I was able to join that team that built up that platform and work as a kind of technical editor. And I think the roots of my visual practice really are in the process that we then followed in creating a magazine. It was an online platform, a journalism platform, but we wanted to have something printed. So we started making a magazine called Correspondence, bilingual English and Arabic. And the process of actually conceptualizing that magazine is where I started taking visual notes. And you know, pulling all these ideas together and seeing how they would interact and what would be visually appealing. It was just a way for me, well, first of all, to make those meetings more interesting for me. But also, I noticed when I shared those visual notes with my colleagues they really liked them. And they really thought that the process of putting this magazine together became much more engaging in a way than just, you know, having minutes of those meetings. And then coming to the next meeting and working on the same stuff. So, you know, I mean, for me, it was really the first time that I saw that you know, my doodling would make a difference. And I did always draw. When I was a child, I used to draw in my notebooks. In school, I used to draw in my school books although I wasn't actually allowed to, but, you know, it was really what I like doing to embellish and change the pictures and find new ways of contextualizing them. So that was something that I also carried over into my academic, research practice. I always found it really useful to visualize ideas or to organize my ideas using visual tools. So in a way, visual thinking was always part of my life and of my different professional roles. But I think at that time, at MICT, when we were putting together that magazine, it was the first time that I saw that it could actually add something valuable, not only to my own process but to other people's processes as well. So that was an important moment, and it was encouraged by the organization. So I think that was also important that it was not, you know, seen as something that was beside the point, or that was really only a way of passing the time. But they saw the value in it. And the expression of that was that they also asked me to do graphic recording at their conferences. The first conference that I actually did a graphic recording for was in South Sudan because that was one of the countries that the organization was working in. It was a very new country at the time. It only became independent in 2011. And so, you know, it was exciting to go there and see what it was like after a brutal civil war and lots of very unfortunate events in the history of those two countries, South Sudan and Sudan. And we asked journalists from both those countries to come to Juba, to the capital of South Sudan and, you know, try to find ways to build up the media landscape in South Sudan. And I was asked to do the graphic recording for that conference, which was a challenge. I mean, it was, you know, politically very charged. And it was an uneasy situation because I think nobody was really sure that the peace would last. And as we've seen, it didn't last, but at the time when we were there at the end of 2012, it was that brief period where it was actually peaceful. But you could feel the tension in the air and it was also in the conference rooms and, you know, there was a lot of distrust between the different parties attending the conference. So it definitely wasn't an easy first graphic recording job that I did there. MR: Trial by fire, it sounds like. JK: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. But the interesting thing that I remembered when you asked me to come on your podcast was that one of the journalists from Kenya who attended the conference, he saw what I was doing and he said, "Hey, do you know this guy Mike Rohde? Do you know the Sketchnote Handbook?" And I said, "No, I've never heard of it." And so, when I came back to Berlin after the conference, I went onto Amazon and tried to find the book, and there it was, and I ordered it. And so that was the first time I actually saw your work. MR: Oh, interesting. JK: And it's interesting that you know, it came to me in South Sudan from a Kenyan journalist. MR: That's crazy. That's crazy. JK: It only speaks to your worldwide fame, I guess. MR: I guess so. Wow. That's interesting. And I'm kind of curious like you were asked by this organization to do this graphic recording. Obviously, you felt comfortable enough to do it, probably because you had knowledge of the area, you had knowledge with the organization, but had you done graphic recording ever before? It sounds like no. And also, were you like, aware of it being like a thing, like a profession or a practice before you did that work to kinda look and say, "Oh, okay, this is the way you do it. Okay, I'll copy all the things that I see and then replicate it." How did all that part of it work? JK: Yeah, I think I wasn't really aware that it was a thing. I had seen it once before, at a, well a lecture, you know, in Berlin at a cultural event. And someone did a graphic recording on a blackboard with chalk, which is kind of unusual. But, you know, I watched it and I was fascinated that somebody, you know, was able to draw what was being talked about in real-time. MR: Yeah. JK: And, you know, I saw the potential in it because it was so interesting. I tried to take pictures, but it was very dark and the pictures didn't really come out very well. And that must have been, oh, I don't know, maybe 2008, 2009. So it was a few years before I actually started working as a graphic recorder. But yeah, I mean, I felt confident, I guess, because the organization, MICT trusted me to do it and to do it well. And, you know, I started this process in preparation for the publication of the magazine. And so, I thought, okay, I have kind of like a visual vocabulary for this because a lot of the themes that came up during the conference were the same themes that had come up right when we were conceptualizing that magazine. So I thought, okay, I have a couple of icons or images that I can use and that I can, you know, change and re-contextualize to find a way to represent this conference. And I guess that for me at the time, that was enough. And I also wanted to go to South Sudan and see what it was like. MR: Yeah, of course. JK: Yeah. MR: You had sort of lived it, it sounded like by making the magazine you'd sort of lived in the space, not only the content part of it, like what you're talking about and understanding and how to represent, but also the practice of doing it probably helped you to feel like, "Okay. We just—" I would assume the notes you were taking were not large scale for the planning, or maybe they're medium scale. JK: No, they were actually quite small. They were in an A5 notebook. MR: Okay. Quite small then. JK: Yeah. Yeah. Only later I moved on to larger formats. MR: Yeah. I know that's always a challenge. I know it's been a challenge for me in some cases because I do so much in a small scale, A5, A4, U.S. letter. You know, jumping to a large board, that proportional shift you have to make can be a challenge. I found that it was just a matter of acclimating myself to the size. Like you sort of have to almost scale in your mind everything up a little bit. And then once you get into the rhythm, you're okay. But the first transition is the toughest part, I guess until you get sort of in the flow of that size. Once you establish your icon size, you then, "Okay, this is now my new orientation. Now let's continue from there." JK: Yeah, I mean that was a challenge for me as well. And I think for me it was also a matter of experimenting with different markers and different techniques. I mean, also just in terms of the medium I was drawing on. I remember the second time MICT asked me to do graphic recording, we were in a peasant hut. A Polish peasant's hut that has been transported to Berlin and its main use is to tell fairytales to children. It's called Fairytale Hut. And the walls were made of rough wood as you would expect from a Polish peasant's hut from the 19th or 18th century. I don't know how old they are, but they are traditional huts, small houses made from wood. And I thought, "Okay, I mean, I can't use paper on these walls." So I got some cardboard, but it was the corrugated kind of cardboard. MR: Oh, texture, yeah. JK: Yeah. Textured cardboard. So whenever I put the marker on it, it created little ripples in the lines. I mean, it was an interesting visual effect, but it wasn't what I had expected so I was really struggling with it. At that time when I was just starting out, I didn't know anything about materials or markers or how to, you know, make something work in a space like that because that's something that comes up a lot in graphic recording. You know, you never know if you have smooth walls or if there are— MR: Can you tack on the walls, right? They might— JK: Yeah, Exactly. Can you put tape on the walls? And you have to try to find out, but there's always surprises. So you have to kind of work around that. MR: Yeah. You have to be pretty adaptable, I would guess. JK: Absolutely. Yeah. MR: Really, and it sounds like you like these trials by fire. Your first event is in another country and you've never done it before. The second one is in a Polish hut and you're using corrugated cardboard. It sort of speaks to me the varied nature of your history, like kind of the different places you've been. Also speaks to your adaptability I think as well. So that's to be commended, I think. The fact that you were willing to kind of proceed anyway and figure it out sort of says that maybe it was a good move and a destiny to kind go in that direction, maybe. I dunno. JK: Oh, I think so. And I think, you know, I mean, that's a quality that has served me well over the years, this adaptability and, you know, the willingness to just try things and see what works. Because yeah, as I said, you know, for all those years that I did mainly live graphic recording on paper or on phone board, so many things can go wrong. And you always have to be able to adapt to that and find a way to make it work. And, you know, I always did find a way and I think it's also part of the challenge and part of the fun of doing it. MR: Right. Yeah. JK: You know, it's a live situation, all eyes are on you, so you kind of have to find a way to do it and to make it look good, make it look cool and easy. MR: Yeah. Yeah. It makes me think of the old TV show MacGyver, which as I understand is quite popular around the world. You know, where he is, you know, making things out of bubble gum and, you know, shoe leather or something like that to make things happen. So it's MacGyver's moment, I guess. But I find it fascinating that you came from, you know, very academic background, right? German and American literature. And then you jump in the game design, but from an academic perspective. So you've got this academic structure and rigor and discipline, and yet you're a very adaptable person. So I could see where at some point that structural stuff that you talked about would be frustrating because I'm sure you adapted around it as much as you could, but at some point you're like, "Okay, maybe I'm just done. Maybe I don't want to adapt anymore. Maybe I just want to do something new where I don't have to adapt so much, or I can adapt in different ways." That's kind of interesting. It seems like the where the way your life sort of unfolded in some ways. Is that a fair sort of characterization? JK: Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, academia was never really the perfect match for me. I mean, I really liked doing critical theory in university. And I really, you know, needed something to get my teeth into, you know, these hefty tomes of theory. And really try to extract meaning from it. I mean, that was also a challenge that I enjoyed, to try to read philosophy and critical theory and try to understand what it was actually about and how it would apply to my life or the life of the people around me. But I found the practice of being an academic quite frustrating because I felt like I was—I ended up almost plagiarizing myself. You know, I would write paper after paper after paper, and it felt like, you know, each paper was less innovative and less interesting than the previous ones. And so, yeah, I mean, that was the one part that I found frustrating. As I said before, working in the bureaucratic and hierarchical structure of a university wasn't really my thing either. So I think, yeah, going freelance and being my own boss was really one of the best decisions that I've made in my life. And yeah, I'm really happy that I was able to experience that life and to make decisions for myself and build up this business, which is also, you know, a source of pride for me. MR: Yeah. For sure. JK: So I don't think I would've been happy had I stayed in academia. MR: Yeah, I would guess so too. So we've got, as far as your first two graphic recordings. Talk about that shift from the company you were working with that was doing this training of journalists and traveling to countries and doing graphic recording inside Polish huts to going independent. Where did that shift happen? JK: It happened kind of gradually. The organization I was working for, MICT, they had obviously lots of partner organizations that they worked with, and they saw what I was doing and they said, "Okay, that's cool. We want that too." And so I, you know, started working for these partner organizations and oh, I was gradually growing my network of clients while I was still employed. And then at some time in 2014, it became clear to me that, you know, it wasn't really possible to develop that further while I was still employed. So I decided to go freelance and go for a full-time graphic recording career. And the network that I had built up made that possible. But what also made it possible was the network of other graphic recorders, other people that I met in Berlin at the time, who were incredibly generous and friendly and really, you know, embraced everyone joining the field. I really so immensely grateful that I was given this environment that really helped me flourish because, you know, they made sure I could go onto jobs with them, they made sure that I found new clients, they made sure that, you know, if I had a question, they would answer it. And so that was an incredible boon, an incredible boost to my career at that time. MR: Sounds more like a community than an industry in some senses, right? That when you start moving into that kind of space, those kinds of care concerns. JK: Very much a community. You know, I mean, I still think the German graphic recording community is quite friendly and tight-knit and a lot of people know each other and also are friends with each other. It's definitely become more competitive over the years. MR: Sure. JK: But at that time 2014, '15, I didn't feel any sense of competition. It was more like, there's so much work, we need more people to join this field. MR: Yeah. Yeah. JK: That was the spirit at the time. Yeah. MR: I would think the other thing too is that at that time, maybe now there's organizations that have multiple graphic recorders and facilitators and coaches and stuff where they can come into a company and have options. But I suspect in 2014, it's mostly individuals. And if you're an individual and you have two jobs, you know, you can take one job, but if it's the same day, you can't take the other job. You want to present a good reference to this client for the future, right? That they will continue to buy the services. So it makes sense that you direct that to someone you know and trust that can do the work because it keeps the flow going. You know, if you start thinking longer term, you're kind of convincing people not only to hire you, but in general that graphic recording is a valuable service that makes our meetings better, which means they'll come back to you and keep hiring you for their events, right? It sounds like that was sort of a thing maybe happening in that community as well. JK: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was part of the spirit of community and the spirit of collaboration. That, exactly what you said. If I had a client call me and I couldn't do the job, then I would try to find somebody to fill in for me because it was important to me to be seen as a professional and to be seen as someone who would try to help their clients because that would in some way come back to me and it would also elevate the entire field of graphic recording, which was still, you know, quite young in Germany at that time. So it was important to me and everyone else working in the field to make sure that the clients perceived it as a professional service that would make their meetings better and more interesting and more memorable. MR: Right. I would think that one of the goals that you wanna try and do is when you look at the budget for the event, you don't want the graphic recording at the bottom because that's the first thing to cut, right? You wanna move it up the chain. Maybe it's like, you know the punch bowl is the thing at the bottom of the list. The punch bowl will be cut, but we'll keep the graphic recording because it's so valuable, right? So with some of that as well. I'm kind of curious then, since we're talking specifically about the German, maybe even Berlin, I suppose those are one in the same in some sense, but what is the community like now? You'd mentioned that it's a little bit more competitive, I would imagine there's some firms that have started to form as well as individuals. Is there still more work than you can handle? Is it sort of settled into a pretty good rhythm? What's it like now 10 years later? JK: Oh, those are a lot of questions all rolled into one. MR: Yeah, that's true. JK: I'll start with the situation as you know, I saw it when I entered the field in 2014. It was really mainly individual freelancers, and there weren't really a lot of us so, you know, it was easy to collaborate. And I learned a lot from these collaborations. So that was also important at that time. It was very Berlin-focused. You know, I knew a few people in Hamburg and there were people in Cologne. Maybe in Munich, but just one or two. And so, that also meant that I traveled a lot. At the beginning of my graphic recording career, I was always traveling going to different places. And that has changed a lot because now, of course, there's graphic recorders in most major cities and also in some smaller cities. So, you know, there's not as much need to travel as there was10 years ago. And as you said, yeah, I mean, there are now companies that employ graphic recorders or, you know, form a network of graphic recorders and who can react to clients' needs differently than a freelancer because they can basically guarantee that they will have somebody at a given date. And that has changed the landscape to a certain extent, but I wouldn't say that it has changed dramatically. What has changed is that graphic recording is much more diverse in terms of the clients, in terms of the styles, in terms of the approaches of different people. You know, when I started out, me and the people I worked with in Berlin, we had a fairly clear idea of what graphic recording was and what it would look like. And we kind of tried to also establish that, the Berlin graphic recording style. MR: Right. JK: I mean, it was never very clearly defined, but for us it was very important to, you know, have clear lines, clear shapes, crisp colors. For example, you know, most of people I work with agreed that we would never use chalks like Pestel chalks. We were like, "No, no, that's, that's not for us ."But of course, you know, I mean, there are hundreds of different styles of graphic recording and, you know every single one of them has its use. And I'm sure that, you know, many people saw our approach as quite arrogant at the time. MR: Or at least maybe rigid, right? Like you sort of developed a standard. JK: Yeah, yeah, exactly. MR: Which I guess, you think about the context of that situation. If you're all sort of in the same community and you might swap, someone might say, "Oh, I can't do it, John, can you do it?" You'd know that their style's gonna be consistent to the standard and the client wouldn't be surprised, which at that time is important, right? Maybe now with variety of people and perspectives, you almost maybe come to someone because of their style and you wanna try something different, I guess. I would imagine. Hmm. Interesting. JK: Yeah. And the other thing I think that has changed is that the client base is very different. When I was starting out, I was working mainly for corporations. I mean, you know, in Germany we have the DAX kind of like the NASDAQ, and those big companies like Mercedes-Benz, and BMW, Bayer, BASF they would hire us to record their conferences, their meetings, their workshops. And it was very rare that we would work for smaller companies. That's something that has completely changed. And the client base is now much, much broader. And it's sometimes very small companies that need our services. And yeah, I'm kind of fascinated that, you know it's really become something that is much more well-known in the German market compared to what it was like 10 years ago. But at the same time, I still meet a lot of people who have no idea. Never what graphic recording is and have never seen it. Yeah. MR: Yeah. Yeah. I would suspect, at least some portion, maybe not all of it, when you talk about small companies hiring, would suggest that the value is apparent that even a small company's willing or wanting to make that part of the experience. I mean, some part of it might be, oh, it's trendy, right? Like, Adidas shoes are really trendy, so I wear them. There's gotta be some aspect of that, but like, if there's no value in it, it wouldn't be sustainable. Eventually, the trend would go away. So I think it seems to suggest there is a value component that's being seen and achieved. So that's encouraging actually, really, that it's moving down to small companies and not only in the hands of large corporations who could, as we said before, say, "Ah, item number 77, graphic recording, he's off." Right. And suddenly you don't have a job anymore, you know, and you gotta scramble for a new project. So that seems to suggest health in the opportunities available to the community. That's the way I would read it anyway, but hopefully. JK: I think there's a lot of opportunity and I mean, there's still opportunity for graphic recording to grow. At the same time, I find it really hard to talk about the value of graphic recording because I mean, obviously, I see it, but I feel like often especially new clients who don't have much experience with graphic recording don't actually see the value. They might see it as something trendy, as you said. They've seen it somewhere else and they kind of want to incorporate into their events or their processes as well. But then I have to explain to them what the value is. And this is a conversation that I've been having for more than 10 years now. And it doesn't really change. I mean, a lot of times I have to explain to them that, you know, whatever they talk about will be embedded in the minds of the participants to a much larger degree than if they only have written minutes. I have to explain to them that they can use this as a tool for communication. That they can, you know, use this to spread new ideas through their organization. I have to explain to them that, you know, they can use graphic recording on social media or that they can even put it in their videos. There's so many ways of extracting the value of graphic recording. And I think, you know, it's actually a value that lasts for a long time. I've had clients who came back to me two or three years later and they said, you know, "We've taken a look at this and the content is still relevant and we're still working with these images." And I think that is fantastic feedback to receive. But as I said, for new clients, it's often very difficult to grasp that value. And yeah, I find myself sometimes a bit frustrated that I still have to explain it and that I still have to explain what the quality is in a graphic recording and what the value is. MR: I would guess that you probably should probably get ready to do that for the rest of your career. I don't see that changing. JK: No, probably not. MR: And I suspect maybe there's something that the community could even do. I don't know. But taking all these, like you mentioned, there was a company that came back, two or three—that could be an example for a young company that doesn't understand. So you could actually have your previous clients give you statements as to what the value is. So it moves from you just explaining the value to your clients that you've worked with who are willing to be named saying this was valuable and here's why. And that would be, in some ways, maybe even more effectual for someone who's like, I don't know, with spending a lot of money on this thing. Like, is it really valuable? Well, BASF said it was really valuable, or this company said it was really valuable. That's the social proof kind of angle that gives you the additional, I guess, gravitas beyond just you saying that it's valuable. Like the proof that someone else verifies it as maybe useful. So anyway, that's really fascinating. Apparently, this is my tangent episode and I've really enjoyed every minute of it. I hope our listeners have too. I think, you know, our listeners are really into this space and it's an interesting discussion because we're really just talking about what's the current and the future. Like, where are we going with this and where could we go with it? That probably could be a whole discussion of its own, which we're not really getting into. But it helps you think like, you know, what is the value that I'm bringing? Like to really think about it and then defend it and promote it, right? To be proactive about it is a valuable thing to know because you're gonna eventually be called to answer that question by somebody sooner or later. So it's good to have an answer ready, and some examples ready, so you can, you know, be ready for that. All right. Well, let's see if I can hold my tangents to a minimum. Let's shift to tools now. So I'd love to hear what tools that you like to use. We'll go analog first and digital second, and that includes pencils, pens, paper, boards, corrugated cardboard, paint, I dunno. Any kind of those things that you might use. What kind of things are in your standard tool set? JK: Well, for analog recordings, I still use mainly Neuland markers on either paper or foam board. I noticed that now that I've been in this field for a while. Sometimes clients come back to me and they say on foam board, the markers fade over time. So that's a bit of a headache. I try to find ways to make them last longer, but for that reason, I actually prefer paper over foam board. Well, in recent years, I've done more kind of experimental work especially on black cardboard or black foam board. I like to use acrylic markers, and I use a range, POSCA, MOLOTOW. MR: Two good brands. JK: Yeah. And, you know, I really enjoy working with them because they have really beautiful, vibrant colors. When you put them on black cardboard, they really— MR: Pop. Yeah. JK: Yeah. So I think that's a wonderful way to work. Although of course, it's much slower than working with the regular marker, so, you know, depending on the context, you can do that. But if it's a fast-paced discussion panel that you're recording, you don't want to use acrylic markers. MR: Yeah. Probably not a good idea. Yeah. JK: Yeah. You probably want to use something water-based that flows fast. MR: Interesting. What about personally? So you said when you began this, you know, the notes you're taking for the magazine, were A5. Do you carry a notebook around? Are there notebooks you like and pens that you use in that small scale? JK: Yeah. When it comes to notebooks, I don't really have a preferred brand. I kind of use everything. For personal drawing, I do ink drawing. Japanese brush pen drawings. And for those I like to use Amsterdam notebooks because it's nice smooth paper and it's great to work on with ink. But that's really the only thing that I can mention that I really like using for that specific purpose. MR: What kind of brush pen is your preference when you do that kinda work? JK: The Pentel. MR: Oh, yeah. JK: I've bought one and I've never gone back. MR: Same. JK: It is really great. It's a wonderful tool, fantastically versatile, and the ink cartridges are easy to use. The ink is wonderful. The color, the black is just so deep. MR: Intense. Yeah. JK: Yeah. It's really a great tool. MR: Yeah. I carry one in my pocket with a gel pen everywhere I go, so I can second the motion there. JK: Yeah. MR: You mentioned digital. I assume you must be using an iPad. What kind of tools do you like to use? And maybe the along with this is, is there a call from your clients to go digital in some cases? Or do you present them with like, "Hey, we should do this digitally because of X, Y, and Z?" How does that work? JK: Well, I mean, I usually give my clients a choice unless, you know, there's really pressing reasons to go digital or analog. And I explained the pros and cons of both methods. I think, you know, both of them have their drawbacks and their advantages. MR: Sure. JK: So, you know, I mean, a lot of my clients choose digital over analog just because it's easier to handle. You just get a JPEG or a PDF at the end of the session and then you can send that out. There's no conversion needed et cetera. I understand that it's easier to handle for the clients. So I do a lot of digital work, especially, you know, since the pandemic, a lot of things obviously went online and there was a lot of pressure to do digital work. So that was really the moment where I changed over from doing mostly analog work to doing mostly digital work. And yeah, I'm really boring when it comes to tools. I use an iPad Pro and a Apple pencil. I draw in Procreate mostly. When I do vector, I usually do it in Concepts. Which I think is also a wonderful tool. It has a few little bugs that I struggle with sometimes, but for drawing in a vector format, it's really a great little app. I've been using it for, I think, yeah, close to 10 years now as well. MR: Yeah. It's definitely had some—just like Procreate, it's had improvements over time for sure. JK: Yeah, absolutely. MR: But solid tools. JK: Both of those are really up there. And I don't think there's a lot of other tools for the iPad that can compete with them. MR: Yeah. I think that's two sides of the same coin in some sense. That's pretty interesting. Well, let's shift into practical. I always ask guests to give three tips to listeners who are typically a visual thinker. Otherwise, why would you be here? Or maybe you're curious about visual thinking. What would be three things you would tell someone who maybe feels like they're in a rut, or maybe they just need a little inspiration, can be practical, it can be theoretical, whichever you'd like for those to kind of encourage them. JK: Let me think about that for a minute. MR: Sure. JK: I think for me, one of the greatest inspirations is to work with shapes. And to change the shapes of things because I feel that it often has a huge impact. So if you always draw round heads, then, you know, if you start drawing triangular heads or square heads, then that makes a huge difference. And obviously, you can also stack shapes and combine them, and that doesn't only go for people, but also other things, you know. What I find interesting is that the shapes also communicate a certain quality. So triangular is often a bit more aggressive, and square is more stable, and round is very harmonious and kind of centered. And, you know, to play with that I think is just a wonderful way of experimenting whatever you're drawing. MR: I like that. JK: So I can only encourage everyone to, you know, work with shapes and mix them up and find new ways of combining them. MR: That sounds good. JK: So that was my first tip. The other one is kind of a standard that, you know, I probably mention whenever I talk to people about how visual thinking works. It's about shifting from noun to verb. So when you're trying to draw something and you find it for some reason hard to draw, it's often easier to draw a verb that goes with it. Like, for example, if you were going to say you hold a meeting. Of course, you can draw a meeting. You can just draw a bunch of people sitting around a table. But it's not a very interesting image. And it's also a lot of work to draw, especially if you put a lot of detail into the people. MR: Yeah. JK: Instead you could just focus on hold and you could draw a hand that holds either the table or just the word meeting. And so, by shifting, I find it's a trick that I use in graphic recording often. And, you know, also when I'm trying to come up with new ideas, it's often such an easy way of shifting your mind into just a slightly different track. But it makes a huge difference. So I really like doing that and can only encourage people to do it. MR: Great. What about your third tip? JK: Well, my third tip is always to carry a pen and some thread. Because if you need to draw a really large circle and you want it to be a round circle, that's the easiest way to actually make that happen. You just attach a pencil or even a marker to the thread, to the string, and the other end to the pin, and you push it into your bomb board or your paper or the wall, and then you go around, and voila, you have a big circle. And I think it's wonderful that it's so easy, yet, you know, many people struggle with drawing big circles. MR: It's pretty adjustable too, right? Because you just wind it around the pen and get a smaller circle on. And so, you could do a target pretty easily. You just keep the pin in the same place and keep winding it up and get your radiuses down until you get it just right. JK: It's super versatile and you know, it's easy to just put in your bag with your markers. It won't add much weight. It's super useful. MR: Hmm. That's a great tip. I hadn't thought about that, but yeah, that's a wonderful one. Very practical. JK: Yeah. I like practical tips. MR: Me too. Well, Julian, this has been great to have you. Can you tell us what's the best place to find you? Websites, social media, what places do you hang out in? JK: Well, the best place to find me is my website, playability.de. And I'm also quite active on LinkedIn. If you google my name or if you just put in LinkedIn slash graphic recorder, it's a very easy URL, you will find me as well. I'm not so much on Instagram anymore, but if you want to find me on Instagram, my handle is playability_de. And those are the main places that you'll find me. My name luckily is quite unique. So if you just put my name into a search engine, you'll also find me. MR: Yeah. I suppose. Yeah, you might be the only one doing this work. So, interesting. Well, thank you so much for spending time with us, sharing your insights and wisdom and your story. Thank you for the work you're doing and being part of the Berlin community. I know several people in that community, including Nadine Rossa, and you know, others as well, who I'm sure you know well. And thank you for the work that you're doing in representing the visual thinking community as a whole in the world. It's good to have people like you doing that representation. I think it's important. And you make our lives, everyone else's lives better because of the great work that you do. So thank you. JK: Thank you, Mike. It's been great fun talking to you. MR: Yeah. JK: And, yeah, it's been really nice to be on your show. MR: Well, I'm glad to have you, and I'm glad we could share our discussion with everyone. And for those that are listening or watching, it's another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. So, until the next episode, we will talk to you soon. | |||
| 11 Mar 2020 | Tanja Wehr - SE07 / EP01 | 00:39:11 | |
On the first episode of season 7, Mike is on location at the International Sketchnote Camp 2019 in Paris, France, joined by the amazing Tanja Wehr, full-time sketchnoter and author of three books on sketchnoting. RUNNING ORDER
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| 01 Nov 2022 | The Sketchnote Handbook 10th Birthday Episode - S12/E05 | 01:30:44 | |
In this special 10th birthday episode for The Sketchnote Handbook, Michael Clayton talks with Mike about 10 years of the book with questions from the community. In the second part of this episode, Nikki McDonald, Mike’s editor on the Handbook project, talks with Mike about the making of the book and their impressions looking a decade ago. Presented by The Sketchnote Handbook’s 10th Birthday GiveawayPeachpit and Mike Rohde are giving away 10 prizes in The Sketchnote Handbook 10th Birthday Giveaway! It’s easy to enter the giveaway**: Retweet at least one Sketchnote 10th Birthday post from @Peachpit or @rohdesign between November 1-30, 2022. Here are the prizes you could win:
To see all the details! visit rohdesign.com/giveaway **Giveaway contest open to US participants only, age 18 and older. Entries must be received by 11:59pm EST November 30, 2022. Winners will be notified via an announcement on this page on Rohdesign.com on or before December 5, 2022 and will need to contact Mike Rohde with a valid email and U.S. mailing address for prize fulfillment within seven (7) days of announcement. Read Official Rules (https://peachpit.com/promotions/sketchnote-handbook-10th-birthday-sweepstakes-official-142454) Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by: Concepts: an infinite, flexible creative tool for all your good ideas. Available on iOS, Windows and Android. The new Concepts 6 for iOS has exciting new features, including a modernized canvas interface, a freshly structured, easier to use gallery that integrates with the iOS Files app, and RGB and HSL color options added to its already extensive Copic color palettes. Concept’s infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Draw and take notes with liquid pens, markers and brushes in your favorite colors. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size — with simple gestures. Drag+drop images onto the canvas, and use layers and grids to organize your creative space. When you’re ready to share, export straight to your friends or team. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
Links: Part 1Amazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
Links: Part 2
Credits
Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 17 May 2022 | All The Tips from Season 11 - SE11/EP14 | 01:15:04 | |
In this final episode of The Sketchnote Army Podcast season 11, we’ve gathered all the tips from 13 fantastic visual thinkers to inspire you! Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
Links
1. Paul Mignard’s Tips
2. Renée Stevens’ Tips
3. Andy McNally’s Tips
4. Zsofi Lang’s Tips
5. Andreas Gaertner’s Tips
6. Franziska Schwarz’s Tips
7. Adrien Liard’s Tips
8. Kris Neckelmann’s Tips
9. Lai Chee Chiu’s Tips
10. Tanmay Vora’s Tips
11. William Warren’s Tips
12. Chris Wilson’s Tips
13. Scott H. Young’s Tips
Credits
Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 23 Nov 2020 | Raffaelina Rossetti + Karl Damke: lernOS - SE08 / EP10 | 00:59:13 | |
In this episode, I talk with Raffaelina Rossetti and Karl Damke about their excellent work on lernOS to teach sketchnoting. LernOS is an open source platform for learning that relies on circles of learners to accelerate learning and provide both accountability and encouragement along the way. You’re going to love this episode! SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Paperlike, a screen protector for the iPad that makes drawing with the Apple Pencil feel like paper. Paperlike’s Nanodot technology offers the paper-like friction you want with the clearer screen visibility you need. This new surface even improves drawing precision — and reduces arm fatigue. It’s the closest you’ll get to paper on a digital screen. Buy yours today! https://paperlike.com/sketchnotearmy RUNNING ORDER
LINKS
CIRCLE TIPS
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 09 May 2023 | Mawusi Amoaku supports special education with sketchnoting - S13/E08 | 00:53:51 | |
In this episode, Mawusi Amoaku, a fashion designer turned educator shares how stumbling on sketchnoting helped her overcome learning challenges which she now shares with students that have special learning needs. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you sketchnote in a defined area while still enjoying infinite space around it — to write a quick note, scribble an idea, or keep pre-drawn visual elements handy for when you need them most. The infinite canvas lets you stretch out and work without worrying if you’ll run out of space. When combined with powerful vector drawing that offers high-resolution output and complete brush and stroke control — you have a tool that’s perfect for sketchnoting. Concepts is a powerful, flexible tool that’s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
Tips
Credits
Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike Rohde, and I am here with my friend, Mawusi Amoaku. How are you doing, Mawusi? Mawusi Amoaku: I'm doing good, Mike. MR: It's so good to have you. MA: How are you? MR: I'm doing great. It's always great for me to have someone interesting on the show to talk about their visual thinking journey and the work they do and the impact they're having. And I feel like you're someone who definitely is doing that. And I love to share those stories. I think that's the core reason why the podcast exists is to just reveal really interesting people all around the world doing great things in the visual thinking space. So, with that, why don't you tell us, give us an introduction, who you are and what you do. MA: Okay. My name is Mawusi Amoaku, and I'm originally from Ghana. Grew up in Northern Ireland, hence my accent. I work in education supporting learners with additional learning needs, and I love it. MR: As I understand, in our chats that led up to having you on the show, you've pretty recently discovered Sketchnoting. I would love to hear your origin story around that. Where did that come from? And maybe look back to when you were a little girl, like, have you been drawing since you were a little girl? And how did those two worlds and your teaching all overlap into where you are today? MA: I think I'll start by telling you a little bit about me growing up. I've always loved drawing. When I was younger, I wanted to be an artist. And I love hand lettering and I love making zines. In terms of drawing, well, I try to draw something every day. I stumbled across sketchnotes in 2020 and it really transformed my learning experience. Although I work in education, I had to do a course as part of my job role to help me support my learners with learning needs. And I was finding the course particularly difficult because when I would read my textbook and make notes, when I came to writing the assignments, I would just forget everything. And I was so frustrated. Like I started to fall behind with my assignments, which I thought, this is ironic because what I do, I support learners to get their assignments done. Here I am, I can't even do my own. I didn't wanna tell anyone that I was struggling, so I just kinda had an idea. I thought to myself, "If this was one of my students, what would I say?" Like, I would encourage them to keep going, but I would encourage them to find another way. So, one day I just thought, right, I'm just gonna Google it. I was so behind with my work, I really didn't have time to be doing this, but I thought, I'm gonna have to try and find some answers. So yeah, I went on the internet and I researched and I came up with mnemonics, memory palace, mine maps, and finally, sketch notes. And that changed everything. So, for me, the first sketch note I made was of a "TED Talk" because I bought your book and I wanted to find out like, straight away, does this thing work. Should I continue with it or not? 'Cause I need to know that I'm investing my time wisely. And I sketch noted, I think it was called The Greatest Ted Talk Ever Told, I think that's the name of it. I was like, 20 minutes long. And I was like, I don't even know if I still have the sketchnote, but I remember the video. And I sketchnoted that and I thought, "Oh, wow." And then when I read my textbook, there were certain topics that I was really struggling with. So, I decided, I'm going to sketch note this, but I set myself boundaries 'cause I used to write pages and pages of notes and never read it, even though I used different colored pens, et cetera. I thought, okay, I'm gonna limit myself to an A4 sheet of paper per topic. I went to the glossary in the—when you talk about creating an icon library, I thought, okay, so for each topic, I'll look at the glossary and write down what those keywords are to create my icon library. And then I'll read a chapter and then I will sketch note it and that's it. I did that for each of the chapters, particularly the ones I was struggling with. Then I used those notes to write my assignments. I have to say, before I started doing that, I just thought, why am I not remembering this information? Why I'm not understanding this? But then when I sketchnoted it, I was so encouraged because I realized I do know it, I do understand it, and I can do it. So, it really helped me with my confidence. And I did the work. I have to say I was really behind with my work, but I did it. I got it done, I got my assignments in on time. And I remember thinking, you know, I actually do love learning, but that experience was so negative for me that I thought, now I kind of understand how some of our students feel when they can't understand a piece of work because it does knock your confidence, it does make you feel stressed, it does make you feel isolated. For me, I was too embarrassed to tell anyone because that was actually my job was to help other people. And I couldn't help myself. When I got to the end of the course, what I couldn't understand was I—the course was not finished, but I wanted to keep learning 'cause it was just so addictive. Like to do the sketch notes it was such a fun activity to do. It was right at the summertime, so I kept learning it. I kept researching effective ways to learn and reading different books that inspired me. One of them was "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Josh Foer, I think is how you pronounce his name. He talks about using the memory palace as a way to remember information. I was just fascinated. I was hooked. And then I thought, "Oh my goodness, I wouldn't mind doing another course." From not wanting to do the course that I did, I wanted to keep learning. Well, I started looking for opportunities. Any opportunity to sketchnote. At that point, I hadn't shared my work with anyone. It was just for myself. Towards the end of 2021—no, end of 2020, 2021, my New Year's resolution, I kept it pretty open and creative, was to invest in myself. That would primarily be learning a new skill and also, trying things that I probably wouldn't normally try 'cause I would be afraid to do it. One of them was actually public speaking. You know, do a workshop for my colleagues because I am a shy person. I'm an introvert, and the idea of speaking in front of any group of people scares me. So, that January, like that whole year actually, I started thinking, what if, what if? And starting to do different things, and showing my work. In terms of the sketch notes, I didn't actually use it at work initially. I tried to fight the urge to sketchnote. I really wanted to do it, but I was kind of worried what people would think. My background is art, actually, it's fashion design. Everyone knows that I love to draw, but I thought that if I drew at work, maybe people would think that I wasn't taking my job seriously. Or like, "Why is she doodling? Why are you doing that?" One time in a class I was supporting a group of students and nearly all of the students in the class had a learning need. I used to find it really difficult to support the group 'cause the needs vary a lot. I remember observing one student in particular who really struggled to understand what he needed to do. In the class, the students would rely on me to take notes. And I remember thinking, well, my handwriting's not great, and if they don't understand the notes, probably my handwriting. But I kind of thought I'd like the students to read the notes, use them, understand them, and become more independent. I thought if I sketch note this—it was partly 'cause I was struggling to write down the traditional way, but I thought if I sketch note this, maybe they'll be so curious, they'll want to read it. I really wanted them to want to read it and use it. I started to do it. And I shared that with the teacher because I was supporting the students in the class, I wasn't the teacher. I shared what I wanted to do with the teacher. I told them that this is a new thing that I'm learning. I would like to get better at it. Perhaps could I do it in this class? Because I feel that the more I do it, the better I get. And if I do every single day, I'm definitely gonna improve. He was really supportive and I started to use it. At first, the students didn't really know what to make of it. They're like, "Mawusi, you are drawing? Oh, my goodness. Like, what is this? This is serious." I thought, oh dear, I have to tell them this is really important. You're supposed to use this. So, I give them a little speech. I said, you know, "Yes, it took a lot of effort, but I'm doing this because I want you to do well. I really want you to enjoy your learning, but I want you to use the notes, understand it, use it, but not to rely on me to learn that you can do these things for yourself as well." And so, I did it. Then the next day I was like, oh, I might have to reinforce that. I started to do my little speech, and they said, "Mawusi, we know you told us yesterday." I never mentioned it again. And so, I kept doing it. It was during the pandemic, so we were in our bubbles. That meant a unique opportunity. I got to stay with my students in the various classes that they were in. And I continued to sketch note in each of those classes. They got used to it. What happened was the teacher would deliver the lesson and I would have a clipboard sketch note the lesson, scan it, and share. We use Microsoft Teams. I would share it on Teams and all the students would have access to those notes. One of the unexpected dividends, I guess, of doing that was it meant that students who have learning needs could use it, but everybody could use it. Whether they have a learning need or not. And if someone misses a lesson, they have those notes to help them to catch up. It was tiring, and a part of me wondered why I even started because I didn't actually have an end plan for when I would stop doing this. So, I would ask the teacher, "Would you like me to stop?" I kind of secretly hoping he would say, "It's okay, Mawusi. You can stop." And he is like, "No, keep going. It's all right. Keep going. And I said, "But they're not using it". He's like, "They're using it. Walk around the class." The first student who we went to, I hadn't said anything and within minutes of me sharing it on Teams, he had printed the notes and he was looking at it. I should actually clarify that this was a media lesson and so they work on computers. He was referring to the notes and doing his work. I hadn't had to say anything to any of the students. They knew the pattern, this is what happens in class. Then he said, "Okay, keep walking around." I noticed that they were all using it, but in their own way, whether it could be on the screen or on their phone or if they printed it out, but they were just doing their work. And I was like, "Oh my goodness, it actually works." I was so happy I just wanted to do a happy dance, but obviously, I was working so I didn't. But yeah, so that's kind of how it started in the classroom. I made some revision notes because I wanted to encourage my students to revise 'cause not a lot of them would revise for their exams. The exciting thing about the sketch notes was that I later found that they were being shared by other tutors. It gave an opportunity for me to talk about my work. And actually, one of the key things was, although I made the sketch notes for the students, I didn't really know what I was doing. It was an experiment. And I asked them for feedback. And the feedback from the students was invaluable because that's how I improved it. For example, one of the parameters that I set for myself, which was limit the information to one page, didn't necessarily work for the students because it was actually too much information on one page. MR: Really? MA: Yeah. So, with each sketch note I made, I would make changes because they were giving me constant feedback. And then tutors gave me valuable feedback. For example, because my handwriting's terrible, I used to write in capitals because that's my way of writing neatly. One of the dyslexia specialist tutors said, "Well, actually that's really hard for someone to read if they have dyslexia, 'cause it's the shape of the letters that helps them to differentiate the words." Well, had to kind of retrain my brain to write in lowercase as well. It was just really useful to share the sketch notes as a way to improve, but also yeah, to share my skills. But Mike, I have to say you did influence me a lot in that because I attended the sketchnote workshop, or no, the sketchnote camp that was held online in 2021. And your keynote speech was about care and service and community. And how we as sketchnoters 'cause we are a global community as Sketchnoters can do good to our organizations that we work for our communities. We are in a very specific situation in the pandemic and it's affecting all of us in different ways. How can we use those skills to benefit others? That was what encouraged me actually because up to that point, I was doing it for myself, but then I thought, well actually there is a community of people who are doing this and I'm going do it in my workplace and I'm gonna share it. I'm not online, but I'm gonna share it in the space where I work. And I hope that it'll benefit other people. But really the driving force for me to share sketchnotes is that I was really desperate when I find it. And I was thinking somebody else might be in a similar situation and I hope it helps them. MR: It's really funny because that's my origin story. I was desperate as well. The way I was taking notes was just so frustrating and I'd forced myself like you to l to limit myself to a small notebook and switched from pencil to pen. The experiment that I first did really set me on the path to say, "Hey, this is working for me. I really enjoy this. I can't wait for the next workshop or event that I can go try this and experiment with. " So very much similar in that way. And hoping, you know, if this is working for me, there has to be somebody else who this will help. And then also, you know, sharing it with other people and getting feedback was a similar experience. It sounds like yours was even more, I guess, accelerated because you didn't have a lot of time, you just had to keep working and then taking feedback live and then incorporating it as you worked, which is probably good for you. You almost got into a mode, it seemed to me like where you were just doing the work, you're getting feedback, you're making modifications, and next thing you know, you're writing upper and lower case, you're modifying the structure and you're serving. It seems to me like you're someone who, if you're serving someone else, you're willing to kind of jump through hoops and go over fire and do these things because you know it's gonna help your students. In some ways, doing it for yourself, you sort of run into a point where like, "Uh, I don't feel like doing it anymore. Who's there to hold you accountable?" But you found an accountability group, which were your students who actually gave you the feedback and held you accountable and pushed you further to really accelerate your learning. And also, it ultimately benefited them, right? Because your sketchnotes started to align for what their needs were. Is that a fair way to think of that? MA: I would think so. I think the desperation I felt at the beginning was something for a long time that I actually tried to forget. And I remember telling my boss this, and she said something to me, which was quite profound. She said you know, "It is giving you more empathy for your students." And that is exactly it. I've always loved learning, but I've never struggled to the extent that I struggle that time. But I'm really glad for that experience, well, because I share that with the students. I tell them I struggle. But when you struggle, you always have a choice. You know, you can find another way. You don't need to give up. It's kind of like if you see it as an opportunity to do it a different way, basically that is what I learned. And that is one of the reasons why I am so passionate about this because I'm so lucky I stumbled across it. It was actually when I read a book about the memory palace, it was a free book on Apple Books. And then I found another free book about sketch notes. It was basically a compilation created by educators and they were talking about the benefits of sketch notes and they shared examples of theirs. And that's where I heard about your mini-workshop, which was on YouTube. So, I watched the video and then I was like, that is actually why I bought the book. 'Cause I was like, "I need to do this. This is it." I have to say thank you to those people for putting the art there because I would never have found it. One of the other reasons why I was confident that it would work with my students was your episode where you interviewed Laura Kazan, I think you pronounce her name. MR: Yes, yes, yes. MA: That episode actually—I have listened to every episode of your podcast. I'll just tell you that, and the reason being, I wanted to learn as much as possible from your interviews with different people of and how they've used it. But her interview really stood out for me because I thought, "Those are my students. Those are my students, and I think they will benefit from this." One of the things she said at the end of her interview was, in her three tips, she said, "Is your school special education department willing to support sketchnoting." So, your podcast helped me a lot because there was something that I was doing by myself, but in listening to your interviews with other podcasters or other sketchnoters, I kind of felt like I wasn't by myself in doing this. I was so encouraged. So, thank you. MR: Oh, that's really great to hear. You know often doing podcasts can be a lonely business because you do these interviews and of course, they're enjoyable in the moment and you publish and there's often not a ton of feedback that I receive back from the episodes, but I keep doing them because I enjoy it. I think that's the driving force. And I know that there are people, and I know that because I hear like you and others who will say, yeah, I've listened to all the episodes. I can't wait for another one to come out. So, I know there are fans out there, which is, you know, really exciting and helpful, and especially when I hear it in the context of your—I would call your experience a journey, right. You sort of definitely went on this journey where you kept on discovering something else and that led you to something else and that led you to something else. And you continued to follow the thread all the way to kind of where you're at now, which is really cool because I think so many, you know, with the internet especially stumbling onto something can lead to something else if you allow it to if you're curious and you follow that path. I think that's a good reminder for us that sometimes it's just being open to something and taking it one step further might lead to something that you could never have expected. Your story, your origin story here sounds exactly like that. That string, you just kept pulling the string and now here you are. MA: Yeah. Actually, one of the reasons why I'm excited is for quite a few years, I have been looking for a passion. You know, my background is fashion design, I like to sew, and I love education, but I was looking for something that I would be really passionate about. And this is definitely it. So yeah, I love it. MR: Wow. Well, I love your origin story. Thank you for sharing all the detail and giving us insights and where those pivot points were. I would love to hear is there a project of any kind may be that you're beginning that you're excited about that you'd love to share with us. MA: I guess I would say is I've had more opportunities to share sketch notes with my colleagues and I've been in training staff on how to sketchnote. For me, someone who I said is kind of an introvert. I find it really hard to talk to people. This is like a watershed moment. I have to say the sharing of sketch notes has just helped me develop more confidence in myself. So yeah, that's something. And this year, in particular, the college that I work for the focus is on inclusion. So, as I started to share my sketch notes, last year we had a guest speaker and he's an inclusion expert. And I decided long before the event, I am definitely gonna sketch note this. Only I didn't wanna tell anyone because I didn't wanna put pressure in myself. So, I sat at the back and I made some sketchnotes, worked on it over the summer, and then my goal was I'm going to share it with my colleagues because I wanna tell more people, but I wanted to sketchnote something that we had all attended so that it would be more meaningful. And the exciting thing is this has led to more opportunities to sketchnote for different departments. I've done collaborations with colleagues who are specialists in different fields, and we've combined our skills to train other staff. So, yeah, it's such a fun thing to do, but it's a really useful way to communicate things that might be quite difficult to communicate in words basically. It's very engaging and I'm excited that I did it and that it's being shared. MR: That's really great. I love your approach of doing something that would be meaningful to the entire group so they could benefit from it. That's a really great way of layering two things you're passionate about sketchnoting and also about this opportunity to learn. And then making that as a service to your colleagues, right? Because I'm sure that they're seeing how this is having an impact on students and how it's helping them to learn and retain. So, they definitely see the benefit, and now that's now opened up even the opportunity to teach them these concepts so they could start to think like, "Well, how could I use it in my curriculum for my students in an interesting way." Which is you're just becoming this real true advocate inside your college. Which is pretty cool. MA: I think also part of it was in terms of—I would say when someone's sketchnoting, I know this is actually a tip, but I'll just say it in advance, is feeding to your mind because when I was doing this quietly, I was reading a lot of books about innovation and sketch notes and various things. There was a book called—oh, have I written it on somewhere? I have it here. The book is called "Creative Confidence: Unleash the Creative Potential Within All of Us" by Tom Kelly and David Kelly. That book was pivotal for me as well, because they have an organization called, IDEO. I don't know if you've heard of it before. MR: Yes. MA: IDEO is responsible for promoting innovation, I guess is how to put it, by taking a multidisciplinary approach. That is what has encouraged me to collaborate with my colleagues because when we think about organizations and how we can benefit our organizations when we work together and share our different skills, we bring different perspectives as well, that is powerful. So that is one of the reasons why I'm sharing it with my colleagues because although sketchnoting is my skill, I'm learning so much from them and I hope they're learning from me as well. MR: I'm guessing, just judging by the little bit that I feel here, they're probably learning a lot from you. Which is great. I think that's so admirable for you to not keep it to yourself, but spread it further and offer it to your colleagues, which is great to hear. Well, let's shift… MA: I was gonna attribute that to you too because you have created a community of sharing. That is, for me, one of the things that drew me to sketch notes because it's such a friendly environment and people are very encouraging of one another. MR: Definitely, something that I saw in other communities that I was involved with. In the web design community, there was a very welcoming and open environment there, and I just wanted to model that. It seems to me like, because we modeled that early, that it drew other like-minded people, and we seemed to have built a community that's sort of sharing and open and helping each other all the way down. So, when new people come, the culture is just, hey, this is a space where we share and we teach each other and we help each other. I always say, there's so much opportunity to share this idea. There's no reason why we should be thinking that we're fighting over table scraps when there's so much opportunity for everyone to have a place at the table and do work and have an impact. There's just so much work to do. I'm glad that you've sensed that. It's definitely something intentional and I hope that it just continues throughout the community. So that's really great to hear. Thank you. MA: Thank You. MR: Yeah. Well, we all do it together, so that's great to hear. At this point, I would love to shift to something more practical, I guess. Not that the other stuff isn't practical, but the people on the podcast love hearing about tools and how people use their tools. So, let's shift into the tool discussion and let's shift in specifically to analog tools and then follow up if you use digital tools with what digital tools you use. MA: Okay. I would say use what you have, start with what you have. For example, well, I used to use A-4 sheets of paper because I sometimes destroy my work if it's not very good. Yeah, I have a habit of that. But I started with A4 sheets of paper and a pen although it was a refillable pen—you know the FriXion refillable black pen? MR: Mm-hmm. MA: Which it's kind of the best of both worlds. I always think of a pen as the tool that makes me fearless and the pencil that makes me cautious. But the FriXion pen is a pen, but I can rub it out. I'm kind of contradicting myself anyway. I started it with that one because if I'm in the class and I'm sketchnoting, sometimes I make spelling errors and that helps me to fix it really quickly. But lately, actually, I haven't used that as much, so maybe my confidence has grown. I like to use Muji. Have you heard of Muji pens? MR: Yes. Of course. It's a famous Japanese store, which I've been to the one in New York City, but I know it's worldwide as well. MA: I love Muji. The Knot 0.38 and the Knot 0.5, my absolute favorites. One of my colleagues introduced me to the Paper Mate InkJoy Gel Pen. MR: Oh, yes. MA: You've heard that one. MR: Those are good as well. Yeah. MA: That one's amazing. And actually, just recently stumbled across—I didn't realize that you could get gray highlighter pens, so I used the Stabilo Boss highlighter in Gray. Well, I was using the Tombow markers, but they're quite expensive. So, I like to buy a box of the Stabilo Boss. They're really good. But paper-wise, I highly recommend dot grid paper because it makes my work look neat. Some people say, "Oh, Mawusi, how do you do such straight lines? Or, you know, that's so neat." I'm like, "If you zoom in, you will see the dots." It really helps a lot. In the classroom, I use a clipboard, which is quite handy. But also, if I'm doing a finished sketch note by hand, I use a transparent clipboard. That's a little tip. If you use a transparent clipboard and then you use one of the, you know the flat LED light boxes, you can trace your work. So, it's just really handy. MR: Interesting. So, you have a light source behind this clear clipboard, and then you can lay the rough sketch underneath and then do your finished on top of it. Am I understanding that right? MA: Yeah. And those things are very cheap to buy, but perfect for what I need. The dot grid paper that I absolutely love is Clairefontine paper. It just feels really, really nice. MR: It works well with those pens that you've mentioned. A question, for those who are dot grid connoisseurs, I know that there's different levels of dot grid. Like I know some have very light gray dots and some are darker. Where is the Clairefontaine fall on that spectrum? Is it relatively light dots so that it's, you know, kind of goes invisible at some point? Or are they a little bit darker? MA: I think it's kind of light because people don't really notice it. I kind of feel like I'm cheating 'cause I'm thinking, they think I'm really neat, but I'm not. MR: Well, I suppose if you're using the Stabilo Boss gray marker, I guess you could adjust your exposure, say in Photoshop or whatever your photo tool is, and increase the contrast. Those dots would probably drop away and you wouldn't even see them, right? So, that's probably another option as well. MA: Oh, actually another tip. I find when I was sketchnoting in the classroom, I was taking too long with preparing the page in advance. What I did was I had a template, the original was dot grid paper. And because I'm in the classroom, I just photocopied that page. And so, the dot grid was even less noticeable so when I scanned it, nobody knew. So, yeah. MR: Interesting. MA: That's another little tip. MR: Cool. That's pretty cool. We're getting free tips here. This is pretty great. Now, does the Clairefontine paper come in like a block, and then you tear off sheets as needed? Or is it bound in some way? How is that paper? How do you work with the paper? MA: It's in a block and then you tear it off. They say it comes in A4 and A5. I think that's the European size. But when you tear it off, it's slightly smaller. MR: Oh, I see. Because there's perforations on the edge probably. MA: Yeah. But I think they provide the paper for Rodeo Notebooks. Is it Rodeo? MR: Yes. Yes, exactly. MA: Yeah, I think they have that same paper, but basically, I like loose sheets because I can then arrange it in whichever way I want. And it's much easier to scan your work if it's not in a notebook. MR: Good point. If I'm not mistaken, I think Clairefontine and Rhoda are both French companies, so it would make sense that they would collaborate in some way. Maybe they're owned by the same parent company for all I know. I don't know. But I think Rhoda Notebooks work in a similar way where there's a—and maybe they calculate this, right. So actually, the part you tear off is maybe A4 and they add a little bit. So, when the perforation tears away and what's left in the notebook is a little bit taller than A4. You know what I mean? Like, when you tear out the sheet, it's exactly A4. I don't know if that's true, but I've used Rodeo paper— MA: No, it's smaller. MR: Is it? Okay. So, it is— MA: It's annoying that it's smaller, but I still like the paper. It's still like the paper, but it's smaller. MR: Got it. Okay. Good to know. Good to know for those who find that important, little tip again there. What about digital? Do you have digital tools that you use? Are you using an iPad or some other tool like that? MA: I've started using the iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil. The first sketch note I did with that was one of the guest speaker because I just wanted to take the sketch notes to a more, in my view, professional level. Because when I was having to trace it for a finished sketch note, I wanted to kind of take away some of those steps and do more of a rough sketch and then do the illustration. I use Concepts. Oh, my goodness, Concepts is so good. MR: It's a great tool. Yeah. MA: And Procreate, obviously. Yeah. Everyone uses it. I have to admit, I don't know how to use both of them really, really well, but I use them enough to get the finish that I would like. That's something to explore later. I have to admit, I prefer working on paper. I just love the feel of paper. That's my go-to. MR: Yeah. I think many sketchnoters will use a paper-like, or some of other similar matte screen protector, which sort of approximates the feel of paper. I mean, it's not exactly. I think paper-like, probably achieves it the best with the best clarity, but there are other screen protectors that also do the same. Which helps, but still, it's not quite ink on paper, it's closer. MA: It's good. But I have to say by going on the iPad, it makes me more of a perfectionist and I don't like that because at least when I sketchnote in the classroom, it feels hot off the press and I haven't had a chance to make it beautiful because my objective is to make meaningful notes that are useful. So, I think when I do my digital sketchnotes, I'm thinking too much about aesthetics. I'm trying to break away from doing that 'cause it's very tempting. MR: Yeah. It's almost as though paper and pen puts emphasis on the process. Because you have less control. Whereas when you go to an iPad or something, you end up inadvertently being maybe even more focused, a little bit more focused on the output. Because you have the ability to undo or to redo things or to change things, or to move things. Heedlessly, if you allowed yourself to, and there's something about the paper that, you know, maybe the friction of the paper in the sense of if you do it hot off the press, right. And even if you redid it, let's say you wanted to do it a little nicer, like if there's some friction there, right? You've gotta redraw all this stuff on another sheet on your clear clipboard with the light coming from behind and it's a little bit of friction. You wouldn't wanna do it a third time, right? So, you would probably stop at that point. Where with the iPad, it's very easy to just keep noodling and noodling and noodling and never finish. So, I could see the definite different feel for them. And, you know, I always think of the two, sort of provide different purposes. So, I often use the iPad for illustrations where, you know, it's gonna be printed or there is some final output that's important. But I found this recently on a project, just to point out this. I was doing the iPad with—I use paper and I was doing sketches and I had sort of built a little template for myself for this illustration project. And I found myself getting really rigid and I was resisting drawing and I was taking longer on each piece. And I got to the point where I said, wait a minute, I need to just change this up. So, I got the manuscript for the book project that I'm working on, and I just got my little pen and all I could fit were in the margins, little thumbnails along the edge of where the text was. So, it was very limited space. I just started doing these little thumbnails and started drawing concept. And it was amazing how much it freed me up to just think, "Oh, a little thumbnail, big deal. You know, that one didn't work. Draw another one. Oh, that didn't work. Draw another one. Boy like that. What if I do another one?" Next thing you know, every one of these ideas I was having to illustrate for you know, I was doing three or four different concepts or little variations, right? Suddenly the floodgates opened, and I was just like moving through the manuscript like crazy. And all it was, was this shift from, you know, sort of the rigidity or the perfectionism or something on the iPad back to paper and a pen with limited space. Again, coming back to limitations and embracing them just keeps proving itself as a really effective tool for, at least for me, freeing my mind to kind of focus on the content and really get into the process and stop worrying so much about the output. So, I definitely can resonate with what you're saying here. MA: I agree. I also would say that I find that as I've—I hope I go back to how I was before. When I started Sketchnoting and I didn't have anything to go by, any previous sketch notes, basically all I thought was, I'm just gonna do it. I'm just gonna do it. Now that I've been doing it, I'm starting to be more cautious. 'Cause I'm like, what's happening? Because I'm almost scared to do it because I feel that people expect it to be good. What if it's not good? So, I just need to just do it. MR: I think it would be interesting for you to actually ask someone to do some, you know, user-testing and ask them what do you expect out of it. And you probably would find that they would think like, whatever you're doing is amazing. They wouldn't care either way. They just love that you are thinking this way if you get to the core of it. I mean, the beauty of it is we often sort of find ourselves, like the story I told you about the illustration, I sort of boxed myself into this situation. It finally dawned on me like, “Wait a minute, I'm in charge of this project. Why am I feeling as though I have to follow some rigid template that I made? Like, I can change anytime I want to. I’m just going to grab the manuscript and a pen and forget the iPad. I'm not touching the iPad.” We have the opportunity to have you know, the ability to make those changes and to try and experiment and sort of work our way back. So that's really good news that if you ever find yourself bound and/or you've painted yourself in a corner, well, you know, your shoes might get some paint on them, but you can walk out of the corner and just start over again. That's always good news is you have the opportunity to shake it up and try some new things or go back to the thing that worked for you and start again and see, what did I learn from the other one and how can I apply this now knowing it, which is sounds like a little bit of where you're at as well. MA: Yeah. I wanna say one of my daily practices for sketch notes is that I sketch note sermons online. There's a church that does a daily devotional which is like 15 minutes long. I don't do it first thing in the morning, 'cause I'm not a morning person. I do it later on in the evening. I find that those sketch notes are more real because nobody sees them except me. Actually, I've moved from single sheets of paper to a notebook for that. So, I have a whole notebook full of them. What I like about them is they're just themselves. I have not tried to make anything beautiful. I just quickly got that information done. So yeah, even if you go digital, keep drawing by hand. MR: Maybe that's your first tip since we're now sort of heading into the tips department. MA: Oh yeah. MR: And I guess I should frame it. I always frame this. Probably regular listeners like you will have heard this a million times, but, you know, give us three tips that you would say to someone who feels stuck. Someone who feels they're on a plateau. Just these little inspirations to kind of break out of maybe a rut. And I think if you wanna go further in this, what you've talked about, you know, go back to drawing by hand. This could be your first tip, I think. MA: Okay. I have many tips, and it's hard to choose one to three, so might give a few more. Is that all right? MR: That's fine. Yeah, please. MA: Okay. First, one is don't overthink it. Just do it. Just do it. I tried to talk myself out of it when I was doing it at work, but I have to say when I did it, what a sigh of relief. I really enjoyed myself. Even though I was getting paid for it. I was like, "Wow, this is fun." So just do it. That's the first tip. If you can't do something, don't worry. Find another way. Be open to trying something different. And if you're struggling with your sketch note, listen to the podcast. Listen to the different interviews with different sketchnoters, find out how they're using it, and especially make note of their tips. What are they doing that? And just try it. Next one is share your work. I am not online at present, but I will be. So, share it at work. Share it with friends or even just sketch note in a diary or something. But yeah, share it with other people. Experiment especially with the layout of the sketch note. Find what works for you. Actually, this is way more than three. I'm gonna give you a few more. MR: Okay. Go for it. MA: Collaborate with your colleagues. That is golden. Collaborate with your colleagues 'cause then you get to make really meaningful connections with colleagues. I know working with people that I wouldn't have an opportunity to work with or our path and way not have crossed, but sketch notes has kind of opened the door for that. So, collaborate. Ask for feedback. Another golden one. Because that is how you're going to improve. If I had sketchnoted and sketchnoted and sketchnoted and nobody saw it, how could I improve? I might have improved, but maybe a lot slower. So definitely ask for feedback. Tell someone your goal. If this is something that you wanna start doing, share that with someone. Because what really helped me, what was so pivotal, was that teacher. He encouraged me because, you know, my very first sketch note, I have it in the classroom that I did it, it's not wonderful. I thought he was gonna laugh, but he just encouraged me. And that kind of helped me to be accountable because I've told people, this is something that I wanna do. So be intentional and tell people about it. If it's a New Year's resolution say, you're more likely to keep it if you've told people you're gonna do it. I'll give you a bonus tip. Don't give up. Be patient. Be patient because when you sketch note, say for example at work, people may not understand what you're doing at first, they might think it's a bit strange, they might wonder why you're doing it, they might actually tell you to stop doing it. Nobody told me to stop doing it. But just say somebody might, don't let that determine whether you do it or not. Keep going. Do not get discouraged. Just do it. MR: Well, those are fantastic tips. I'm glad that you added some additional ones because it seems to me like this is a great series of tips that you've shared with us and directly from your own experience. I can tie them all back to the story you told of how you began sketchnoting at work and, you know, with your students in mind. And next thing you know, you're collaborating with colleagues and sharing information with them and having an influence, right? This one little experiment led to influencing your whole college, it seems like, and probably leading in that direction, which is pretty cool. So, thank you so much for the tips and offering them to us. MA: Thank you. MR: This is the part where we typically ask where we can find you. And as we chatted just before we began recording, you're in the middle of developing probably a website and working out social media stuff. So, if you don't have anything yet, that's okay. We will put that in the show notes if it's available when we come to this. Maybe in lieu of doing that since we'll just do that in the show notes. If you're listening, just peek in the show notes, and if Mawusi's got some information, we'll put it in there for you so you can find her. I just wanted to let you know that I'm so impressed with your story and how you've just moved yourself forward with a servant attitude serving your students and how this led you to where you're going and you continue to serve. I think you just a really great example of our community. You really represent our community, and I'm really proud to have you as a representative where you are and so encouraged by your story. Thank you so much for taking time and spending time to share it with us. And I'm so excited to hear how this will influence the next person who hears it and all the influences you're gonna have in the place where you are. So, thank you so much, Mawusi. MA: Can I say a big thank you to you? MR: Sure. MA: You have encouraged me so much. You didn't know that I was listening to all of your episodes. You didn't know that I attended your workshop online. When I went to the sketchnote camp that was online, you could only see my illustration. I wasn't visible. I did all those things quietly and, you and your community has encouraged me so much, even when I was doing this by myself. So, thank you so much. MR: Well, thank you. MA: I'm forever grateful. MR: Well, it's an honor. It's an honor to serve, so thank you. Sounds like we're in a good place and we continue to have our influence. Sometimes it doesn't seem like you are, but you are having an influence. So, keep going. Just as Mawusi said in her tips, keep going. Well, this has been so much fun. It's been so enjoyable to talk with you and hear your stories, and I'm just excited to see where this all goes for you and how you're gonna fit into our community. For everyone who's listening to the podcast, this wraps another episode of "Sketchnote Army Podcast”. Until the next episode, this is Mike and Mawusi signing off for today. Talk to you soon. | |||
| 19 Apr 2021 | Brian Tarallo is making online meetings better - SE09 / EP112 | 00:47:27 | |
In this episode, I talk with Brian Tarallo — author, graphic recorder, and meeting facilitator — about his new book, Surviving the Horror of Online Meetings. Hear how Brian came up with the book concept while he was stuck in a traffic jam heading for a graphic recording session and how his years of learning how to make online meetings less scary will help you raise your game in your own online meetings. SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Neuland, the innovative maker of visual thinking tools. Every Neuland product is designed with passion to be durable and sustainable. Now you can get your own custom printed Neuland Markers! Neuland prints your company’s logo, slogan, URL, or an individual message on markers – even in small batches. These markers are the ideal gift for workshop participants and customers. Save 15% with code neuland@sketchnotearmy-2021 at Neuland.com until May 30th, 2021 RUNNING ORDER
LINKSAmazon affiliate links below support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 03 May 2022 | Chris Wilson organizes his sketchnotes with Obsidian - SE11/EP12 | 01:08:35 | |
In this episode, sketchnoter and teacher Chris Wilsontalks about language learning with sketchnotes and his use of obsidian to connect his sketchnotes together in an interconnected way. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 05 Dec 2023 | Lena Pehrs sketches success as a change management consultant - S14/E06 | 00:39:46 | |
In this episode, Lena Pehrs shares how she explores and co-creates change management solutions with her clients with visuals. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with Lena Pehrs. Lena, great to have you on the show. Lena Pehrs: Thank you, Mike. Very excited to be here. MR: I'm excited to have you because I've been following and chatting with you on LinkedIn for, I don't know, about two years or something like that, a year and a half, something like that. LP: Yeah. MR: And we have been having a good discussion, and I just thought you're just a great person to have on the show. So here we are. LP: Thank you. MR: I'd love to hear more about what you do and how you think about visualization in your context and the people that you work with. So, let's begin first by you telling us who you are and what you do. LP: Well, I'm a management consultant. And I live in Stockholm, Sweden. Well, I do what normal management consultants do, but I do it with a lot of visual thinking and visualization. MR: Great. So is that your secret superpower for your clients, would you say? LP: Yeah, I think so. And I think that the analysis is really the image, so it works together that when you start thinking with visual thinking, you start to analyzing things in a different way. you start to see the world in a slightly different way. And I think it's really a means of getting better understanding and cooperation towards the goals you want to achieve. So it's really fundamental for change. Yeah, that is the secret sauce. MR: I assume that you probably work on some paper or whiteboards or something like that. Is that the typical tool that you use with your clients? Or are you using iPad? What is the tool that you would use to help them and guide them? LP: That would be a mix. I really prefer what happens in the room when you co-create together. And then I think that big white papers on the walls and pens, and like this tactile thing as well, really helps because for me it's important that the image, this visualization, it's not mine, it's the client's. So I really need their buy-in. It should be their pictures, their thoughts, their visual thinking really. So when you do it on paper, that really helps. I always know that when two clients are standing in front of the wall and discuss, "Okay, this is the problem and this is how we're going to solve it." I know that, you know, it's their picture, but of course during the pandemic this wasn't available. So working with digital tools are a good way to—it's very practical. You don't really get the same creative buy-in, I think. But of course, you need to combine these. So for all these Zoom meetings, digital tools are good and they do the job. But if I can choose, I go for pen. MR: Yeah. In person, maybe it adds a little something. I would think the other benefit, and correct me if I'm wrong, is by focusing on the paper and drawing your image, that the focus becomes on the paper, and maybe not even on yourself, you can become a little bit separated from the thing that you're doing. Rather than being about me, it's about the problem we're solving. And that changes the relationship, I think, to the problem solving with clients with you. Or it opens it up for you to speak into that when they now detach themselves from the problem. The problem is there and we together try to solve it. LP: Yeah. MR: Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. LP: And I think that in all these kind of discussions and workshops, it's always a challenge that ideas kind of fly up in the air. And when you manage to get them down on paper, then people can more build on each other's ideas. Which makes problem-solving so much better. So that is also like the process. MR: Interesting. So basically, if I were to encapsulate what you're doing, you're bringing clients in maybe one or multiple, and then you're basically facilitating and guiding them to the wall to visualize their problems and then guiding them towards potential solutions to their management issues, whatever it is. LP: Yeah. MR: I think you mentioned when we chatted that you're heavily into change management. Am I right about that? LP: Yeah. MR: Which is difficult at best, right? Moving through change is really hard. LP: Yes. MR: So that's really fascinating. Maybe we can get into that a little bit more when we talk about projects you're working on. So I'm really curious now, how did you come to the place where you are now? When you were a little girl, did you love drawing? Were you able to keep drawing through school where maybe others stopped drawing? Like what is your story, your origin story for that? LP: Yeah. I loved drawing when I grew up. So I would spend a lot of time drawing and painting and all kind of creative stuff. Just, you know, spending a lot of time in my teens just sitting at home and drawing, drawing, drawing. I really enjoyed it. And then I chose to go to university to have a master of science in industrial engineering. And even though I love that, I love maths, I actually love like solid mechanics and this kind of subjects. But it was a world with a lot of right and wrong and linear thinking. So after five years at university, I couldn't draw anymore. That had killed my creativity in drawing 'cause then I try to draw something that was perfect and correct, and that's not just possible. So I stopped drawing and I did other kind of creative things like photography or baking or gardening and all those kind of things. But I didn't draw for almost 20 years. MR: Wow. Wow. LP: Yeah. And then I had a colleague that said like, "Well, Lena, why don't you join me for this? There's something called graphic facilitation, and I think since you like to draw, maybe should join me." And that's like 2014, I think. And I went to that course and I was like, "Yeah, wow, this is something. This is interesting." But I thought I was a really a long—I didn't see how I would be able to incorporate that into what I was doing. How am I going to use this like in project management or change management. That was a big mental step for me. But I started drawing then and trying more and more. And then also outta LinkedIn, I kind of found Dario Paniagua— MR: Oh yeah. Of course. LP: —in Milan, and I was like, "Oh, someone doing this in Milan. I like Milan. I could go to Milan, we could have a chat." And then he was like, "Well, you know, Lena, I do these training courses." And I was like, "Okay, he might be skilled at this." So I was like, "Well, I'll give it a try. I can always learn something. "And then when I came to Dario and had like a two-days one-to-one training course, that was just amazing. MR: Oh, I bet. LP: Yeah. MR: I would take that. That would be fun. LP: Really a big eyeopener. Yeah. It was fun, and it was very challenging as well 'cause It's so much about—a lot of people talk about deschooling and, you know, change the way you think. And I think that is really the hard part of it. You need to start to think in a new way. And you don't do that from one day to another. It takes a lot of training and it takes a lot of quite a hard work. MR: So that really was the part that opened you up to doing this graphic facilitation. So at that point, after you took Dario's intensive class, so was part of that having Dario help you think about how you integrate this visual thinking into your already a normal practice? LP: Yes. So I've started—I see myself as really exploring the field and inventing it as I go and trying out different things. And sometimes, a lot of the times, the first years it was really the customers who invented the service 'cause They would come to me and say, "Oh, we have this problem and I know that you draw. Maybe could you help us facilitate this IT strategy?" I was like, "Yeah, we can give it a try." And then quite often it's amazing that it turns out really in a mix of creative and very efficient. You get like fast forward in some processes and you reach decisions really much more quickly. And in the same time, like with this IT strategy process, well, it was so fun and people didn't want to leave. And you know, the workshops normally you kind of lose energy during the day, but when we were drawing, this was so fun. It's like, okay. So, I don't always know beforehand what it will be like. And then sometimes it's turn out fantastic and sometimes it's turn out just like more normal. MR: Normal. LP: Yeah. MR: That has to be exciting. Like, I've spoken to people before when I do sketchnoting, when I do any kind of live thing or speaking, like for some people, the possibility that it could go wrong is really scary and it pushes them away from doing it. But I encourage them, like, that's the exciting part that, you know, you could fail and then you actually deliver makes it a lot more satisfying, right? Or it forces you, puts you in a corner to deliver, right? And then your training comes out— LP: Yeah. I think it's been very hard. I sometimes people tell you that, you know, speaking in front of people is one of the worst things, you know, people are having anxiety about. And I'm like, well, that's just because the option to draw in front of people aren't like on the list of things you can choose. Because for some reason that really scares us so much. MR: Yeah. LP: And it's silly. Why? 'Cause I mean, the purpose of it is for us to understand each other better. Actually a lot of the time, it's good if it's not perfect. Because if it's not perfect, people feel invited to be part of the creative process. They feel invited to contribute. And if it's too perfect, it looks like it's something finished. So I found like for change management, it's good if it's like a drawing by hand and by pen. It's not perfect. It's not polished. It's something manmade and it makes people want to communicate which is really the base. I mean, if you want to change, you need communication, and that's it. You need a goal and you need good communication. MR: I wonder sometimes if part of the fear of drawing in front of people is "They're gonna discover my real self." Like I'm revealing something that I can't—you know, like with words you can sort of hide a little bit, right? With drawing it's harder unless you practice— LP: Since our brains are really wired into understanding and thinking in pictures. I think it's something with the connection between how we think and what comes out. So we have this picture in our mind, and if the thing on the paper doesn't come out as the picture in our mind, it's easy to think that it's something wrong. MR: Yeah. LP: And we don't have that connection with words, so we don't expect it to be perfect. MR: That's true. LP: And also, I think images are such a powerful tool for communicating. And when it's powerful, it's also more difficult to manage because it can go what we feel is in the wrong direction. MR: Right. Right. That's a good point. So now what you're doing as your primary work is this kind of work where you bring clients into a room, ideally, with papers on the wall, hand them markers, and then you begin to draw the problem and then work through solutions with them. LP: Yeah. Basically. So it can look a bit different. Sometimes it's a long like change management kind of program with the management team and the organization. And sometimes it's more like with a team and, you know, a two-day planning session for the year to come or something like that. But the base of it is creating visuals together. MR: Where is a collaborative experience. LP: Yeah. MR: So one last question about this. Specifically, what happens to the drawings after you're done? Do you capture them in a document? Do you sit down and—or does everyone write down these solutions and then get out the calendar and plan when things will happen? I would think that you'd want to capture that moment and then immediately turn it into action, right? I would suspect that's really the end point is getting it into an action state of some kind. LP: A lot of the time we would have like a structure and an idea for the final image. So the end result of a two-day workshop will be like a roadmap for the year to come. And a lot of clients would put that up on the wall in the office. And then of course, also having it in a digital version that you can have in your PowerPoints or wherever. MR: Interesting. So then they would just always—like, if it's in the office where they are and they come in the morning with their coffee, they look on the wall and "There is the thing that we all worked on together." And you can see like your progress, right? That's pretty cool. LP: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can add some post-its when you have finished things off and you can, you know, change and work with it. MR: That's different than I think one of the challenges of graphic recording, you know, where you're capturing what someone's saying. A lot of times, like I've heard stories from people on the show where they found that all their work was like rolled up and in the trash, and they had to pull it on the trash, right. So, it's sort of like this thing, which was nice to have in the moment and, you know, it was just there as an entertainment or something. So really, I think for visual thinkers, the stress is on how do we move it from just being this nice to have experience in the moment to actually being a map that you can look at and drive the company from, right? And make sure you're on track. Sounds like that's what you really do. LP: Yeah. And I think it's important that it's something you need to solve an essential problem for the customer. That's when it gets to be something important and to make them part of it, the drawing so that they really feel that it's their drawing. And then I've had sometimes, like early like one of the first jobs I did when I started to use this method, I was just, you know, with the management team, we had interviewed them and I was just drawing the summary instead of writing it. And after this—and the drawing wasn't even, it wasn't good, to be honest. MR: Pretty rough. Yeah. LP: I don't think so. It wasn't just a rough drawing. And then we showed it to the management team, and some weeks later, the communication manager asked the team, "So what kind of material do you need now to go out to talk to all the staff? Do you now need brochures or do you need PowerPoints? What do you want us to provide you with?" And one of the managers who had like the biggest division, he was like, "I just need Lena's picture." "Okay, but what do you need? Like PowerPoints?" "No, no, no, no. Can I just have that picture? I can take that picture and start to talk about this." And then if I had known that they were going to use this rough drawing for two years, I would have put in a lot more effort. But it was really something—because it was theirs. It was theirs thoughts and expressions and metaphors so they just took it and used it. MR: That's interesting you've mentioned that. I've forgotten about this, but I had an experience like this many years ago where I sat and I sketchnoted someone talking about their vision. And I shared it with them, of course. This is when I was user experience designer, and they were talking about a vision for this medical product. So I sort of just listened and captured what I was hearing. And the guy came back, I don't know, a month later or something like that, and his book, he had photocopies that he had printed and he carried them around everywhere. And he was referring to it. Like, that was the map. This is what I talked about. It's all captured, it's all right here. And he was using it just like that, right. It was the thing could speak against and say, well, then we're gonna—like, everything was mapped the way he was thinking, I just happened to listen and capture what he said. So that was a really impactful for me. Like, wow. I just thought it was just, you know, throwaway. It was just me listening, right? But for him it's really meaningful, which is really cool. That's sort of woke me up a little bit in that moment. Like, okay, the things that I'm doing here are really powerful and useful. And I should remember that, you know even the most rough thing that I think could be pretty valuable for somebody else. Assuming again, that we're capturing their thinking and their ideas. LP: Exactly. MR: You're just being the scribe in that case. In that case it gets really, really super powerful. LP: Yeah. When you kind of manage to mirror their way of thinking, that's really a useful tool. It's very powerful. MR: And I do that for myself. So, as an example, I did a workshop last year, and in my bullet journal, I went to my favorite cafe. I got my favorite drink, and I sat down and I opened a blank spread and I just dumped everything I was thinking on that two pages and poured it all out. And that was basically the basis for the workshop. I basically laid that spread open, and did all my preparation and the other, like, I write a script and make a list of things and to-do lists, like everything was—but that was the basis, that two-page spread in my notebook, so I could see it and practice even in my own life too. So I can see how powerful it's for others as well. LP: Yeah. MR: That's a good reminder— LP: Yeah. And it's also what I think that I'm like, "Why didn't I know this when I went to school? If I had known, that would have made life so much easier." MR: Yeah. Yeah, I think so too. And that's a lot of the reason why I am so involved in educational spaces. Teaching this to teachers, integrating it into curriculum because kids naturally kind of do this, this is the way they express. So really, it's less about teaching the kids how to draw. I mean, that's one part of it, but a lot of it is protecting them to keep drawing. So they make it as a tool, right? And then if they can hold onto that through university into work, that's really powerful. Something we didn't have, but we can then give that as a gift to the next generations behind us, so. LP: Yeah. And it's also quite common that I have customers that are like, "Well, we have this strategy document and it's like 35 PowerPoint slides. We think we would need it as one picture. Can you do that?" And I was like, "Yeah. It can be done." MR: That's what I do. Yeah. So on that point, I would love to hear just something in the moment, what's something you're really excited about working on now? You don't of course have to say the company name or any of that, but more like, what's the project that you're working on that you're excited about? Maybe it's this 35-page PowerPoint that you're converting into a single image or something. What would be something that's happening right now for you? LP: Well, currently I'm working on writing and drawing a book about change management, and really trying to make the pictures, holding a lot of the message to really, I think—I'm very inspired by a book I read some years ago, "Art Thinking" by Amy Whitaker. MR: Yes. I have that one. Yep. LP: Yeah. And I think like it's time for art thinking in leadership, and that's somewhere I want to like, explore more, how can we really—I think there's a huge—we have so much change that we need to do in this world now so change management, we really need to get so good at this. And I think also that we need a lot of clarity of mind and we need a lot of cooperation. And I think visual thinking is really a very powerful tool in this area. So that is what I'm trying to get together in a book about how to manage change and how to do it with a lot of visuals. MR: I would love to read that book. LP: I will send you a copy. MR: Yeah, we'll definitely we'll have to mention it to all the sketchnote people on the site and in the slack as well, so people can go check it out. That's great. LP: Mm-hmm. MR: Well, I wish you well with that. I know how difficult it is to write a book, how much work it is. It's a lot of work. LP: Yeah. MR: And then when you're done with the book, you're only halfway done because now you have to convince people to buy the book which is its own challenge, but I think you're up for the task. So I'm excited about that. Great. Well, I think what I would love to do now is switch into what are the tools that you like to use? We'll start first with analog tools. And maybe this can probably pretty focus on your client work, I suppose, although personally I'm sure you use some things. And then we'll switch into digital tools that you like after that. LP: For workshops, I'm a big fan of Neuland. So I use a lot of their pens and paper. And that's basically it. Well, post-its and stuff as well, but a lot of Neuland markers. And the refillables, it's really good. For personal, I'm a big fan of pens and books. I buy loads. At the moment I'm really enjoying drawing with a fountain pen, an ink, and combining that with watercolors. And since I read your book again this spring, I started to buy these Moleskine books and started sketchnoting again with Neuland pens. And then I swapped over to more the fountain pen, and I use basically whatever. I think that is a good way to get new energy to buy a new pen. MR: Yeah. That's a good point. "I must use this pen." So you'll find a reason to use it, right? LP: Yeah. MR: In a lot of ways. With your fountain pen, I'm assuming you must be using some waterproof ink if you're doing watercolor with it. I suppose, right? LP: Yeah. Yeah. MR: Is there a specific ink that you like better than others for that? LP: No, I just bought some. I don't remember the brand actually, but I checked so that it would be waterproof. MR: Okay. Yeah. I think one that I've heard of and I've not tried yet is Noodlers Ink. Which I guess has a variety of colors, but is waterproof? So that's one that I, I'm pretty aware of. What about which fountain pen have you settled on? Or are you still using a variety of them? LP: I have just started this—so I bought a Pilot fountain pen, and I love it. So I'm thinking that I probably need several. This was— MR: Of course. LP: Yeah. I bought a fine tip, so it's really, really fine. And I'm like, I might need a medium one soon. MR: Yeah. Is that the— LP: But I love the— MR: —is that the vanishing point? The pilot vanishing point? I think that's the one where the tip is more covered by the barrel, if I remember right? LP: Mm-hmm. MR: But I'm sure they have more than that pen in their collection. LP: Yeah, I just bought it. I don't really know which one it was. MR: So Lena, when you find out which pens and inks you have, you can just email me and I'll put it in the show notes because others might be thinking, "Oh, now I need a Pilot fountain pen and Ink," so that then they can get the same one you have and then they could benefit from your learning. LP: I shall do that. MR: Great. It sounds like you do watercolor. Is there any markers that you use with your sketchnoting as well? Like, do you grab Neuland markers and use those for sketchnoting? Or do you have some other tools when you're working in the Moleskine book? LP: Yeah. No, that would be mostly Neuland. MR: Okay. Those are raw. LP: And then for my book—yeah. The fine ones at the moment. MR: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. LP:: Yeah. But also working with my book, I bought like this markers on the gray scale, so I have 10 different versions of gray to work in black and white. MR: That's great. Now what about digital? I assume that you must be doing some kind of digital work, but I don't know what all you might be doing. Are you using an iPad or some other tool? LP: Yeah. I have an iPad Pro that I've had for six years. So I would draw some on that one, either with a pen or inspired by Dario, where I would like draw with my finger. But I also have a Microsoft Surface Pro that I draw with. I actually prefer the Microsoft Pen 'cause the nib is like slightly with a feather, so it's more— MR: It's got a spring on it, I think. Right? LP: Yeah. Yeah. MR: Spring loaded. LP: Yeah. So I work with that with like a sketchbook app. MR: Yeah. That's a really common one. Been around for a long time. LP: Yeah. Yeah. MR: That's great. I played around with Microsoft Surface in the past and I kind of liked it. It was a nice environment, I think at the time because it was early in its life. There weren't really many tools available. I don't even know if, I guess Sketchbook probably was available for that, and that was probably what I used. But I felt like there was a limited choice of tools on that platform, which I'm sure is not the case anymore. I'm sure there are many other drawing tools for that. I know Concepts I think works on the surface as well, which is a vector-based drawing tool, but does offer lots of control. LP: But to be honest, I kind of, sometimes I work just with PowerPoint. I find PowerPoint a really useful tool. So if I'm just doing something, you know, for a presentation or something as simple drawing, I would do it right directly in PowerPoint. Yeah. MR: Yeah. I would think that the built-in tools on the surface are also probably improved a lot too, so that you can write in the Office stuff, right. PowerPoint and whatever. LP: Yeah. MR: That's really— LP: But if I want to make a drawing that it's more complex, I would actually do it on paper and then use my scanner. MR: I see. LP: And then maybe add something in the sketchbook. But otherwise I think pen and paper is really easier for me, quicker. MR: So now is there a tool on on the iPad that you prefer when you do use the iPad? LP: I think I've been using like Procreate and also Adobe Draw. MR: Okay. LP: Or Fresco is the new name for it, isn't? MR: Fresco, yeah. I think so. Yeah. LP: Because sometimes then I think it's a bit of a problem for me that I change what app I use and I forget how to do it. And then it's like, "Okay, you need to do this because we need it vector based." And then I use another app, so I'm all over the place there. MR: So almost need to like pick one and stick with it and know it really well, I suppose. LP: Yeah. Yeah. MR: Interesting. So now that we've done tools and it sounds like you've got quite a variety, let's talk a little bit about tips for listeners. Usually, the way I frame it is, imagine someone's listening, they're a visual thinker of some kind, maybe they're in a place where they just need a little encouragement. What would be three things you would encourage them with in their visual thinking work? LP: Yeah, I think, and of course it depends on who it is and where they are in this journey to really work with visuals. But I think for me, one really important key is metaphors. It's really the way we understand the world and it affects so much on how we're thinking. So if you want to explain abstract concepts and different like specialties, metaphors, or really where you need to work and if you want to—'cause I think this is a part that has been really hard for me, I've had to put a lot of energy into really start to think in metaphors. And I think if you want to improve that and want some new energy in that like you can take a creative writing class 'cause they use this a lot. Or you can actually like start to read poetry. And of course, you can also, like Dario has this excellent online content with ideas and methods on how to develop metaphors. So that I think is really key to make your visuals explain things and to tell a story. And I think also really, a key thing in change management is to tell a story. So explore metaphors. And then I think this spring, I've spent a lot of time online where I think there are such a lot of great thinkers that share a lot of good material. And I think another key is to get good structure in your drawings and in your discussions. And I think that like Dave Gray, with his visual framework. I think that is just amazing and so useful. So if you want to get inspiration on how to structure a problem and then structure a drawing, then definitely check that out. And also if you're stuck, and I must say, because this was so fun when I started to look at your YouTube videos and workshops ,I think to change the format. 'Cause I also think that the format is really a base for how we think. This format you choose supports your thinking. So swapping format can be really energy boosting. So when I went from large papers on the wall and I started like, okay, I'll buy a Moleskine and do the sketchnoting kind of approach, I was amazed that something happened with my brain. I was like, "Wow, this is so fun and this is so—and I can do this and that." So to try and change formats actually, I think can do wonders. MR: So of remap yourself to a new format. It's a new challenge too, right? Because you have to take the things, you know, and the other thing. Like, for me, it would be the other direction, right? So, whenever I have to do large format, which I did last spring, it was a real—it was a fun challenge. Like I was excited, like how will I solve this, right? I'm a problem solver. So when I go into this, like I've got this big board, like I have to rethink all my orientation and my proportions, everything, which marker I'm using, how many times do I need to draw to get the stroke as wide as I want, right? Those are new problems, but it's fun to see it. You know, we have this immediacy in the work we do that you can immediately see whether it's working or not, and then tear off the page and then start again and learn from it, right? So same thing in the other direction, right? You probably had to take all these large format ways of working and then you press them onto the page, which is probably fun in a different way. PL: Yeah. Yeah. And liberating in some way to take away some pressure, I think there. MR: Yeah. Have some fun. PL: Yeah. That is also always essential and really a key to be able to be creative, have some fun, but sometimes when you're standing there and you're at the client's site, it's not easy, but absolutely. MR: That could be your fourth tip, have some fun. PL: Yeah. Yeah. That always. And also I think another good tip there is go play with children. I think that is a great way to have some fun and boost your creativity. Draw with them. They're fun. MR: Yeah. It's fun to draw with kids. I draw with my kids. Probably not as much as I should, but I always enjoy drawing with my son especially, we make comic books together, so it's really fun. He'll do part and I'll do part and we need to do that again in summer, so. PL: It's great. Mm-hmm. MR: Well, Lena, it's been so good to have you on the show. Already we've gone through the show and here we are at the end. I can't believe that the time has gone so fast. But thank you so much for the work you're doing and how you're impacting the people who are around you. We so need you in the world to do that. Thank you for your work and for your sharing here, so others can be inspired and maybe get some ideas for ways they can change or improve the way they work. PL: Well, thank you, Mike. It's been really a pleasure, and I'm really a huge fan. MR: Well, thank you so much. Thank you. And next time I'm in Sweden, I will certainly reach out and we'll have a coffee at least. Maybe do some drawing together. That would be fun. PL: That would be amazing. MR: Yeah. Well, for everyone who's listening or watching, this is another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Till the next episode, talk to you soon. | |||
| 10 Dec 2024 | James Durno on Art, Innovation, and Lifelong Creativity - S16/E07 | 01:08:09 | |
In this episode, James Durno shares how growing up around art-focused environments shaped his creativity. He delves into developing diverse artistic skills, mastering spatial thinking, and examines the potential impact of AI on future generations. Sponsored by ConceptsThe Concepts Sketchnote Workshop video — a unique, FREE, hands-on workshop video where I show you how I use the Concepts app to create sketchnotes on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. In this one-hour, eighteen-minute video, I cover:
The workshop video includes answers to common questions about Concepts. Watch the workshop video for FREE at: Be sure to download the Concepts app at concepts.app and follow along with me during the workshop! Buy me a coffee!If you enjoy this episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, you can buy me a coffee at sketchnotearmy.com/buymeacoffee Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Everyone, it's Mike Rohde, and I'm here with James Durno from down in South Africa. Well, I guess it depends on your perspective, right, James? You might be up and maybe us in the Northern Hemisphere, maybe we're down, right? If you think about the way space works. Welcome to the show. James Durno: Good to be here. MR: James, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. JD: I'm an artist. I call myself a visual communicator because I communicate visually. I'm a visual thinker, but I come from a fine art background and illustration, cartoon, and commercial art background. I think that what defines my work largely is the fact that because of all of the different influences, I've kind of developed an offering and a way of working that's at the intersection of all of those different disciplines. My focus is largely on the kind of interdisciplinary osmosis that happens between fine art, drawing, painting different mediums, and then drawing those into the graphic recording and the visual communication space. I don't define myself as a graphic recorder as such although that's what I do. I think in terms of visual language and disciplines and a range of mediums and how I can pull those all together into something that's exciting and different from the norm. Then what comes me beyond that is actually, I'm a husband and a dad. MR: Excellent. JD: And a human being, you know, beyond and before that. MR: Always important to remember that. I think that's the most important thing we can offer, for sure. The word that struck me when you started to describe what you do is almost like a conductor of a symphony. So you're the one, you know, telling the symphony how to represent this piece of music in a sense except that it's your different disciplines kind of all coming together in this one pursuit of capturing what's happening in that moment. Would that be a fair way to describe it? JD: I think it's a fair metaphor. Also, I think if you think more in terms of jazz than say classical music or popular music, it's about on-the-spot kind of being able to reinvent oneself in real time. It's kind of also like cooking as well. It's about a range of ingredients and not really working according to rules at a certain point. Like, the master chef doesn't work according to a recipe, but understands the principles of flavor and texture and color and the harmony of the dish and what works. I think that goes for art as well. There's certain principles that we have. I mean, we're jumping straight beyond origin story and all of the stuff that would kind of be at the beginning of this conversation, you know, straight into the middle of things. But if one looks at graphic recording, sketchnoting, the whole broader area, and it's got multiple terms, and they're not exactly the same thing. I mean, sketchnoting and graphic recording people call them the same thing. But sketchnoting, in terms of how I would understand it in kind of the working in a notebook versus a large-scale events drawing, or a strategy session. They may happen in the same space, but they're not necessarily the same thing. I think a lot of visual practitioners, awful term, but they have it—a lot of visual practitioners' kind of look at the practice as it kind of sprung fully armed like a theater from the head of Zeus. MR: Yeah. JD: Like, it happened. It's this new thing and everybody speaks visual thinking and visual practices if it's a new something, whereas it actually draws on multiple different disciplines. So it owes a debt to fine art and to drawing into architecture. It's kind of narrowed down and simultaneously broadened into different tribes that are quite strangely siloed. There's a—I'm trying to articulate what I want to say here. MR: Yeah. JD: This is where you're gonna have to pull me back into the thread of conversation before we go too far off at a tangent. But you've got people that think in terms of metaphor. Those that are all about visual storytelling. You've got those that are all about icons. And they seem to think within that very siloed mentality whereas the exciting spaces where those overlap and where one can draw on all of those. If there's a moment for working in metaphor, that's the moment. If it's something that lends itself to visual narrative and a narrative thread, then sure. If you're wanting to use an iconography then great. You know, but they're different things. So for me, my focus, and to go back to the conversation around my background as an artist is the principles and also the metaphor, or the conductor or jazz, or the master chef is the principles of art, a balance, harmony, proportion, volume, unity, sort of tonal value, contrast, line, movement, depth perspective. Give me a few, help here. MR: I think you've covered most of them. JD: That those are not rules. They are something that is intrinsic to art, to design, to architecture, to the arts in general. Those are things that we need to internalize, that we need to then draw on and forget about. One learns those, and then we need to actually have them sort of embedded in ourselves and then draw on those. I don't know if that's— MR: No, I'm tracking with you. I think about coming back to the concept of jazz. And so, as a jazz individual, you know, you're always improvising in the moment, right? But I think you always think about a jazz typically is some kind of an ensemble, maybe three, maybe four people, and each one of those individuals is doing something. Now, in your case, I'm guessing that you do this work solo. So in the sense, it's like the knowledge centers are like the different music. So there's a bassist and a drummer, and a someone on keyboard and someone on saxophone, let's say, right? Those could be considered your different, maybe the strengths or the areas that you need. And at the right moment, you know, the saxs is important or at a different, you know, maybe the foundation is the keyboard. So it's always there. That could be some other aspect. So you're sort of bringing them and leaning on each one at the right moment to kind of make things happen as a rough maybe not perfect metaphor for what you're doing, but I totally understand that. Yeah. JD: It's a very good metaphor. I think for instance in a graphic recording, in a live capturing as a visual summary, one is tracking a linear process. Once there's a beginning to the day and there's an end to the day. MR: Yes, yes. JD: It's not entirely linear because certain content will conglomerate over time. It'll build out. A drawing will develop a certain gravitational pull that can hold other information around that. So rather than visual redundancies, one will backfill those visuals. At the same time, some of it will be information drawing. Other ones will be an image that lands that's strong enough to hold a lot of information. We can kind of zip file and pack information into that picture as a holding device. So we've concentrated and distilled a whole lot of stuff into one image that is a powerful visual. That's quite different to just information drawing, but then what does that visual communicate? How is it understood? How is it perceived by an audience? What is the quality of the line? How alive is it? How engaging is it? You know, what are the emphases, et cetera. So there's so many elements to that. And then what is the overall vision, the harmony of the actual picture, how balanced and harmonious is it? How readable is it? And then what is the comfort, in terms of the actual viewer or the audience, how well can they actually engage with it? And is it so cluttered or so messy or so detailed that it's inaccessible? It's about the information and the narrative thread. It's about the essence of the day, the mood and the atmosphere and the spirit. Oh, losing my earpiece. There. The spirit of the actual event or the room or the people. All of those things kind of soak up in the drawing. So there's so many different dimensions to it. MR: Yeah, I was thinking as you were talking about that in some ways it's like, you need skill, but you need to have balance of skill. So knowing when to use the right skill, which is what you talked about with the jazz band. But it's also in a way like meditation and being in the moment so that you can do the right thing at the right time. And I think ultimately, it comes down to experience that probably the only way to get better at this is to study and practice, and then actually practice doing it. And then there's a spiral of skill. Like as you get better, you start noticing like, "Ooh, that just happened. I need to capture that. Where can that fit?" Maybe like you said, you've got a kind of an anchor image where you keep up, that follows the same pattern, add that to the anchor image, and then the anchor image is getting richer over time, but knowing like, when do you stop adding to it? How do you avoid, like just packing the page with information and being more selective? Like all those are learned things just like a chef or a musician, right, knowing keeping the balance. So ultimately, it comes back to balancing all those things because if you have the skills, but you just fill the page with tiny imagery, no one's going to take the time to go through that page full of, you know, a forest of information. Part of what you're doing is that filtering a little bit of the decision-making about what feels like the most important thing to get on this board or screen, right? It's a little tougher to capture that skill. I'm bringing AI into it. I wonder if AI is capable of doing that kind of work or not. I think it's the jury is out, and I'm not sure. JD: I think the issue with AI—actually if we can park the AI for one brief moment, and I'll just respond to before that what you were saying is about hat flow state of experience and, and skill and confidence. It's not just about the information, what one is hearing and about what one is synthesizing and processing, but also responding to the room and to the moment so much that is intuitive how, just to take that and maybe it's a light touch. It's something that one senses rather than something that's conscious. And you were talking about balance, and it's a small thing, but I think most people, when they think of balance, in their minds they see scales, and they think in terms of symmetry, they think this is equal to this. And balance is entirely different. If we think of the human figure, we—I've lost my use again. If we think of the human figure, it's constantly balancing and counterbalancing and cantilevering, every single movement is finally calibrated. And so, so I think if we use that as a metaphor for everything, the grace and the harmony and the balance versus a rigid symmetry in thinking or in the visual, it's a big difference. MR: Yeah. That could be, you know, moving beyond just simply templates and doing the same template over and over again, which is maybe a good starting place to the level above that is being more in tuned to what's happening in the moment, and maybe breaking outta that template and doing something new or just following your— JD: The thing about the template thinking is that one, I think when one is in a group space, one's role is contribution, and you are at the service of that group in that moment. What I struggle with in terms of a template thinking or pre-designed templates, a lot of digital graphic record pre-designed their entire canvas. Everything's prepped, and then they're dropping in and sometimes even repurposing a whole lot of images in real time. And yet, to some degree that misses the whole point 'cause although it's a safety net, you're not in the moment responding to—you are already trying to fit the content into a pre-ordained image, and I'm not so sure about that. MR: You might be resisting the change in the direction simply to fit it within the template that you've predetermined, and then you maybe lose something. You lose an opportunity in a sense, maybe. JD: Indeed. I think it sets a dangerous precedent. You were talking about AI and I backtracked it. MR: We can come back to that. JD: Your question about AI, what was it? MR: My thought was basically the way you're describing this expert level ability to balance and maneuver and have different skills and deploy them at the right moments and maintain the balance that AI, at least not yet. It has a hard time, you know, with that kind of complexity, I think. JD: My take and what do I know, I'm just an artist. MR: Yeah, same here. JD: We both work off prompts, don't we? You know, in real time. MR: Yeah. JD: There's just more lag with me, you know, with AI. I think the issue that I have is that with AI, it's not so much that it's kind of trying to eat everybody's lunch. It's that, to some degree, people are outsourcing their thinking. I commented on one of your posts and said, "It's like a prosthetic brain out." People are outsourcing their creative process to AI or abandoning creative process. I remember in the Midjourney when it first came out, in an article that I read, it said, "It can't take away mundane tasks like the initial stages of design." MR: That's the most critical stage of the whole thing. JD: That's the point, is that AI—and the greatest advocates of AI are those who actually can't do it. Those who can't really draw, go. "Wow. You know, isn't it amazing?" So people speak about the democratization of various spaces from writing to poetry, and I think there's a level people actually believe that they've created those things because they gave the AI some promise. Not to take away from the really great prompt engineers who produce amazing stuff, but AI starts at the end and skips the whole middle. For us, it's all about that middle bit. It's drawing as thinking and, in that process, it can go anywhere. We might have an idea in mind where we think it's gonna go, but it seldom ends up where we think it will. So in that process, there's the push and the pull and the divergence and convergence and divergence. Even in a fine` artwork, one is producing a painting, one is euphoric with the experience, and then suddenly you just lose it, botch it, mess it up, and have to pull it back from the edge. And then you make a mistake. And the mistake defines the direction. You have those happy mistakes in the creative process. AI just, that's just not—that's part of our humanity. MR: Yeah. You kinda lose that process. Yeah. JD: So, and I kind of go, if people are talking about AI and as an ultimate creative freedom when it's anything, but ''cause it's kind of it's freedom that isn't tethered to our humanity. Like a kite, you know, you cut the string, you know, and I think that's what we are kind of doing to some degree. MR: My big concern in the post you mentioned around that, and we can wrap the AI discussion 'cause we could probably talk the whole session about that. JD: Sure. MR: But my bigger concern than AI doing things which obviously it's going to do, and it's not going away at least anytime soon, how far it reaches is unknown, but my concern was more for creative people, like you said, outsourcing the creative process, thumbnail, sketches, conceptual things, leaving it in your subconscious while you have a coffee and go for a walk, all the hard work of arriving at a solution. By bypassing that, you're actually losing creative muscle. And then what happens when the tool changes because the AI company decided they didn't need that feature anymore, and the feature you rely on is now gone, and now you've lost all your muscle to do that work. Now you're kind of in a pickle, right? So my call was for creative people just to be careful about how they use it and where they use it, and to not give away too much of their muscle because never know who might need it. JD: And to that point, and I mean, I know we gonna move on from the AI conversation, but it's relevant to everything else. MR: It is. JD: At a certain point, I don't see upcoming generations putting in the effort to learn things that AI can do. So will they pursue careers in these areas? Because most of the conversations are professionals in this area talking about how it currently impacts them and how it's a good thing, and you know, they can use it and harness it, but what happens with future generations where the less and less and less people actually put in the effort to learn those skills and at that point, what will AI be trained on? Will it become an infinity loop of copying itself? MR: Yeah, that's problematic because of model collapse which is basically when AI runs out of organic stuff that we produce, and it starts to ingest its own stuff, it starts to really hallucinate and have problems, so. JD: It's gonna eat its own tail. MR: Exactly. JD: Yeah. MR: Well, you said something in there that I thought could be a good segue, and that was how you got to this place. What I thought was it might be interesting to hear your story of how you got here from where you began. It sounds like maybe you didn't arrive here intentionally. Like most people on the show, they sort of come from all over the place. So I would love to hear like from when you were a little boy till now, what would be that journey maybe in a highlight view, the key moments where you shifted direction, maybe that could be interesting. JD: Sure. I think the people are only coming into graphic recording or into the whole area of visual practice as a career choice now because it's been—you know, but historically everybody has to come from somewhere else or has had to this point. MR: Yeah. JD: I've been doing this for 21 years down at the tip of Africa. I'm based in Cape Town, right on the peninsula, at the very tip of Cape Town. So I can't go much further, drive for half an hour, and you're at the end of the continent. MR: Wow. JD: I live on a mountain slope. My studio is on a mountain slope overlooking at a valley just five minutes' walk from the sea. I lead a less existence. I was born in Cape Town in 1968, so I think we probably are similar vintage. I'm not sure. MR: Yep. JD: Would you divulge your age on this podcast, Mike Rohde? MR: I could. I could. I'm a little bit further along than you. I'm at '64, but my brother is '60. JD: You're at 64? MR: Yeah. JD: Oh my goodness. You're in very good, Nick. MR: Yeah. JD: So I'm 56. MR: Born, born in '64, so I'm at 59. I'm a little bit ahead of you. JD: Oh, sorry. Born in '64. MR: Yeah. JD: Okay. That makes more sense. MR: Yeah. JD: So born I'm in 1968 in Cape Town. Then moved when I was six years old to a tiny, tiny town. The reason I'm kind of going back this way is I actually started storyboarding a little bit of my origin story, and for the first time certain things actually popped in a way that they hadn't before. Yesterday was my youngest son's 22nd birthday. We pulled out photo albums and I actually pulled out my photo album of when I was a little boy. MR: Wow. JD: I saw few photos relative to the digital age. When you look through that, you've got these photos as kind of that punctuate one's history, but scattered between that is so much stuff that's missing. One of the big things, I moved in when I was six years old, we moved to a little town in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. I grew up kind of in the center of it where I lived one block from my primary school, my junior school. Five blocks from my high school. One block further is where I studied art. I was seven blocks away from the theater and from the museum, and less than two kilometers from the art gallery. So if I look back as a bird's eye view, I can see the edges of my entire childhood and all my experiences. In terms of visualizing spatially, that has had a huge impact on my work and my thinking, because I had the opportunity to be involved in all of those things. I was involved in theater and in set design. I worked at the art gallery. I studied art, I went to school in one—but it was all within a tight, small area. I think that's one of the big things that's defined me to a large degree. I grew up with the—I'm a middle child with two wonderful parents. Both passed away now, but loving, wonderful parents, happy home. My father's fascination with books and history and art. And in terms of just his general interests, very much a kind of a renaissance man, very eclectic, but both my parents were involved in amateur dramatics. And so, as a founder, we got involved in that as well. I remember being a young boy sitting in the theater while they were rehearsing for a production and looking at the set and running up onto the stage afterwards because I couldn't believe that there was this miniaturized world. There were the cutouts of the city escape and then the perspective just in the shallow space. I think to a large degree that's also influenced my work, just looking back, is the idea that even in the work that I do, that when I draw little people, they are actors within a visual narrative. They tell a story in terms of how they act, their body language. When they speak, it's dialogue, little speech bubble. If they're thinking, it's a soliloquy. The whole idea of perspective or shallow perspective for a lot of my work, and I think in a lot of graphic recording and a lot of visual practice, the surface of the page is cluttered with content. You only have got so much space in which to draw stuff, but perspective or shallow perspective by breaking the picture plane, one can punch through that, and one composition content so that you can navigate that within space. So there's a spatial element to it as well. So I think that's one of the things that defines my work as well as I think spatially. Even my studio, I have different workstations where I'll draw there. I'll be at my computer here, I'll paint over there, and I lay out my projects spatially. Then I navigate that space. I walk from one to the next. Then—how are we for time by the way? MR: We're good. JD: Are we good? MR: Keep going. Yeah, keep going. JD: I studied fine art, and then I taught life drawing and painting for a couple of years. That as well is something that's foundational to how I think and how I work as well. Again, all the principles of art and design and that we spoke about earlier. Also, I think learning to think critically and to view things critically. I don't mean critical in a negative sense. I'm sure you would understand that, but not everyone does. To be constructively critical. So as a teacher to be able to constructively criticize someone's work whilst at the same time affirming them and being generous with one's praise, but pinpointing where they need to grow or change. We live in a world where one can if one criticizes somebody's work, they tend to take offense, but not see it as constructive input. I remember life drawing and life painting as a student and spending time drawing and painting, and then having my painting master come along and grab a brush and dip it in, you know, like squeeze out black oil paint and start drawing, you know, with a brush straight through my drawing and saying that, "This structurally the axis runs in this direction. The emphasis is there, the weight is there, the pelvis tilts that direction." And then he'd walk away, and I'd be left with this kind of. And yet it did teach me to think in terms of structure and foundations. I still work with a pencil. Not as a safety nest, although it is, but because it's a thinking tool in a way that a pen isn't. You can't un draw. You can't un draw this. MR: Yeah. JD: As one teases out ideas and pushes and pulls ideas with pencil, those thoughts, those visual thoughts, those are kind of nascent thoughts, but until you pen them, they remain charged with possibility. When you see it, you can understand it. And there's this kind of it's draw, see, process, push-pull, and explore and then pen. So for me, that's—I think a lot of people see that penning immediately is kind of like a gungho thing. You kind of, you jump straight in, you listen, you draw, because you've gotta do this quickly because you really gotta race through because time is marching on, and you've got, you know so many hours. MR: Window of time. Yeah. JD: One can get a lot further, a lot faster by slowing down. I work on the sidelines with a clipboard, and I'm constantly doing thumbnails before committing. Some of those, I'll loop back to much later in the day. Some I won't draw at all. It's a way of testing ideas and my understanding of those ideas before committing. Learning not to commit prematurely as well. MR: Almost like letting those form on the clipboard until they're at the right time to be placed. And then you would lift the concept up, and then build it in final form on the big board, it sounds like. JD: Even on the big board, I still will map in pencil just a few marks. It might just be a rhythm or a structural line just to—it's not built out or developed, but it means that I'm able to work confidently over that and give the work a strength and an energy that it might lack if I didn't have those. For me, that's an important something. On that note, I work with a one-millimeter B lead 'cause otherwise it scores the paper and then a high polymer eraser, because not all erasers are created equal. If one has a poor eraser, the friction will fix the pencil. MR: Doesn't erase it. Yeah, it forces it in. For those listening, A one millimeter B lead basically means a very thick, soft lead, so that it flows on the page and you could brush it with your finger and it would rub. Yeah. JD: Thanks for the translation. MR: I know what you meant, and I assume there must be people who maybe don't work with pencil much and wouldn't know what that meant to them. If you get too sharp of a lead, too hard of a lead, I mean, it can literally cut paper. If it's the right paper, it could be quite sharp. I could show you my 1.4-millimeter Faber-Castell with a soft lead that I like for sketching as well. JD: Lovely. MR: That's really fascinating that I've heard several people who practice, who use pencil. I like pencil. A lot of the reason I teach pen, it was more strategic in that when I'm teaching people, I think it tended to be too much of a crutch for people learning to draw. I wanted to show them number one, that using basic shapes is enough for now, and that you can do basic shapes with pen. And by committing, it kind of freed them from overthinking. Because I think the problem for new students is maybe they overthink it, and if I gave them a pencil, it would only reinforce that. So it was more of a strategic thing. JD: That's a fair point. MR: Yeah, in that context. Right. Not in every context though, but I use pencil as well. JD: I think if one always relies on the safety net, you don't necessarily go beyond a certain points. It's how I work, not because it's right, but because it works for me. MR: Right. JD: If I were going small scale on a sketch noting in a notebook, I would work directly with pen and just have a really nice, you know lovely quality black line. MR: Yeah. I mean, I've seen— JD: But for a larger scale. MR: Yeah, you probably need something. And at that scale you can see the pencil up close. That's another pro tip, I guess. Where you, up close to the board, you can see the pencil, but someone standing five feet back or something would never see it. Especially in contrast to the heavy ink that goes on. They would just— JD: I don't actually mind if they do. It's just part of the honest process. It's not really about the big reveal so much as being able to get the job done as well as possible and as eloquently as possible. Sort of like a visual eloquence. MR: Yeah. JD: To be visually eloquent and articulate. MR: Interesting. I'm really curious. You talked about being a life drawing teacher, you've talked about being a painter. Was there a moment when you discovered graphic recording as a practice and made the shift toward it? I'm really curious about that moment. JD: I came into that from being a—after I taught, I moved from that little town to the business center of South Africa to Johannesburg. That's where I met my wife, and we had kids, and I lived there for 25 years. I worked as, as an artist, but struggled. I worked as an illustrator, as a cartoonist, as a commercial illustrator, so for magazines, editorial stuff, advertising and that taught me to be a chameleon, to reinvent myself, to brief. If a job came up, and they said, "Can you do this?" I'd say, "Sure." And then I'd go— MR: What did I just get myself into? JD: Yeah. And then I had to learn how to do that. My wife, her name is Yolanta. My wife, I remember one day—I did work obviously through agencies. So there would always be a middleman and generally, so often you'd find that that would be there'd be miscommunication from the end-client through the agency to me. Also, they would've been sitting on this for ages, and I'm at the end of the line in terms of delivery and they're charging the client the expedite fee, and I'm doing the hard work for them. So I remember my wife saying, "Why do you have to go through an agency? Can't you just go directly to the business?" And I remember saying, "My darling, you can't do that. There's just no way that you'd say, 'Hello business. Can I draw pictures for you?'" MR: Yeah. JD: Then in 2003, two friends of mine that were management consultants, said, "There's this thing overseas in America called graphic recording." And so, they introduced that to me, and we worked together where they would facilitate groups and I would draw at that stage, just standing at a flip chart and sweating, adrenaline. It was terrifying. But it didn't really work out. The businesses didn't need somebody to facilitate so much as have someone that could draw. At the point of which they went back to get a job, a year or two later, I carried on, and it took up for me from that point. I think that at that point I had this kind of epiphany. It was like in three parts. Essentially, the one was you know, selling a cartoon or being commissioned to illustrate a cartoon or an illustration for editorial or for advertising, et cetera. There's a cap on what would be paid, what is the intrinsic value of that piece of art, you know, even selling a painting, but what is the value of a well communicated strategy? What is the value to that organization? That was one of the big ahas. The other one was, you know, in terms of the middleman. And this was essentially my entire business model. There's the client and there's me, and wedged in between is the agency or the middleman. And there's the broken telephone of miscommunications up and down the pipeline because one doesn't have direct access to the client. There's the money aspect and what I'm getting paid versus what the client's being charged. There's the money aspect, and then there's the time aspect. There's the you know, "I'm getting this thing at the end of the line." MR: Last minute. Yeah. JD: And they've been sitting on it for a couple of months. You know, what if one can leapfrog that entire chain of command and I deal directly with the business? MR: Just like your wife suggested, right? JD: Just like my wife suggested. MR: Your wife was right again. JD: So I drew for myself a picture of pouring a cup of tea through a hose pipe, it arrives cold and late and, you know, how necessary is that? How necessary is the hose pipe? You know, you don't need it. MR: Yeah. JD: So, choice to go—I didn't abandon working with the middleman. I just went, "I will not work with a middleman who wedges themselves in the middle and doesn't allow access to the end client. I will only work with the middleman where I'm able to partner with them." MR: Yeah, that's smart. JD: Or work directly with the end user. MR: That's possible. Yeah. JD: That was a big sort of aha. MR: A subtle shift, but important shift, right? You know, that getting the direct [crosstalk 44:27]. JD: Aha in three parts, AH-AH-HA. MR: Exactly. Well, it sounds like then, you know, the two guys you had partnered with sort of fell away and you continued. Did you find it hard? I mean, this was early, not only was it early in South Africa, it was early, I think across the United States. I mean, David Sibbet's been doing this since the '70s and has had a good business down in Silicon Valley where there's lots of business stuff happening and has found himself in a great spot. But I do know, like, you know, 2003, 2005, it was pretty early. I didn't really stumble into sketch noting until 2006, and that was just, "Well, this just makes sense to me." But I do know that that practice had been going on before that. So what were the clients like, and did you just have a unique angle that provided you access that allowed you to practice and continue that work? JD: It was by word of mouth. The work that I had it created more work. So it kind of seeded new work. MR: That's the best work. JD: Just in terms of word of mouth and because there weren't other people doing that. There wasn't really competition at that stage. Well, you know, or just there weren't other people in that landscape. Although I might not have been servicing a lot of clients relative, you know, relative to what was out there or the potential that was out there. I was busy, or increasingly busy. MR: It was enough for you, which is really all that could you think about. JD: It was enough for me . And so, I kind of worked in isolation because I wasn't really connected at all with what was happening abroad. In terms of a journey of the explorational visual language, 2010 kind of going icons, and I created in collaboration with a local business. We started looking at building an icon library that we called Conversation. Still have the domain, but we never launched it. It defined to a large degree my work as well because I was able to use that as a visual thinking tool, less in terms of like high-powered, you know, high performing organization, HPO. You know, and you've got rockets taking off at 45 degrees, equals or, you know, time flies, you know, alarm clock, you know, or whatever time is of the essence or whatever. It's kind of those where you pack where you have a whole swades of text and an icon sort of punctuating that. I think that that one can be maybe a little bit more thoughtful with those as a learned as a library. I think they're valuable, and I think it's good. I just think people are a bit lazy with them at times. MR: Yeah, they can be. Yeah. JD: I think where they're not really—what people don't generally do, but what I think is very valuable is to look at them in terms of the building blocks of the component parts as pictograms or for pictographic sentences in the sense. You can actually in combination build pictographic sentences or use them in various ways or build them out. MR: Interesting. And so, then the practice started running. and you started serving local community. Is that still the case now? Do you focus on these clients that you've worked with for years? Have you spread out to more businesses in the in South Africa and I guess worldwide, and how does that work? Especially, we sort of commented about digital. Lots of graphic recorders have shifted to using iPads to do the same work, but digitally because of the pandemic, right. It was a necessity. I do know that there's a few people, and it sounds like you're one of these who went in a different direction and maintained the analog practice, but simply upped their game with camera capture. So can you talk a little bit about that and how you arrived at it and how you use that in your work? JD: I stuck with analog because there are other people that do digital better. For me, virtual is a huge chunk of my work, but not necessarily digital. I use digital for my illustration work, but not for live graphic recording for live meetings. MR: Interesting. JD: The reason is a big chunk of my time is spent in a kind of a visual meeting space where I work with groups exploring ideas and co-creating that visual. So instead of just listening and drawing, we have a conversation, and we push and pull the idea under camera and collaborate on what that looks like until one reaches a consensus view that can then be taken to finished piece of work. And it's full of parts— MR: It's pretty unique. Yeah. JD: - because it's producing that in real time and everybody's able to contribute to what that looks like. It's not my drawing, although I'm drawing it so much as a co-created output that is shaped in the space between us. So in terms of getting on the same page, that drawing pan beneath the camera is that page on which everyone gets. And so, it's a very powerful tool for groups to be able to all contribute towards a single visual output in real time and push and pull that. The reason that I don't do that digitally is because seeing a digital illustration spidering across the page as a disembodied picture is not the same as seeing something that's—there's an honesty to the messiness of the process, to scribble with a pencil, erase, rub that out— MR: Not to sanitize. Yeah. JD: - pen it. All the while, there's a hand drawing it, which is the human point of contact. So people are able to connect with it, and they're able to position themselves at any given time within that drawing because they can see where the hand is and where the pen point is. MR: Yeah. It's a reference. Yeah. JD: Where the pen is. And it's important. My focus is kind of on the humanity of like the paper and pens and hands and art. MR: It's interesting. It's important for that context, and I think it provides a unique—like everyone's along for the ride. Everyone's had a sense. I've told this story before. I used to do this with software developers on a whiteboard, and they were there for the whole session. What they were saying I would be capturing, and then we'd have back and forth about certain things. Often, I would invite them to come and draw on the board. So altogether we would craft this visual structure about a feature that we're talking about and how it would work with maybe drawings in black and then annotations and say, red white whiteboard marker. And they would be part of that process. Then a photo would go into a repository so any developer could pull it up and look at it or pull it and use it as a reference to build the thing we talked about. They really loved those sessions that we did together. 'Cause If you ask somebody at the end, like, "Who designed the features?" Like, "Well, we all did. We were all in the room together." JD: Yeah. MR: It's a really powerful thing. JD: I think people are invested in that. That co-ownership is important in terms of workshopping and output as well. Because everybody's a part of it. At the end of it, there's a visual brief that everybody is agreed so constitute sign off. So there's no comeback. I don't need to—and it's a direct translation into a visual of our thinking, of our collective thinking as opposed to my interpretation of a brief, and they're different things entirely. MR: That's really fascinating. That can be a challenge for those listening to maybe find ways to get yourself in a situation where you can be a partner in that sense of a group and do that kind of capture. That might be a challenge for those of you who tend to be just recording from a distance or interpreting, like in a sketch note where you're putting your own spin on things, but maybe actually to be a collaborator could be a fun, a space that you haven't explored yet. That could be really valuable not only for you, but more importantly for the customers you're serving. And then they would see—I think what I see in that is people see the value of the visualization because they were part of it, right. It's often hard to defend why a visual is important. And yet, going through that process, you would see exactly why, because you were part of the process, and you saw it unfolding, right. Again, coming back to the AI, that's something an AI would struggle to do, right. To do that kind of interactive collaboration, I think, at least right now, but we'll stay away from the AI topic 'cause we could get lost. JD: Yeah. MR: It's pretty fascinating. It's really interesting to hear, you know, where you started and where you've come from and how your background really informed and provided you skills to do what you're doing now, which is really cool. I'm really, really happy to hear what you're up to and how you're having an impact with the people you work with. That's really, really wonderful. JD: Thank you. MR: Let's shift a little bit. I wanna talk a little bit briefly about tools. I think primarily using analog, if I were to guess, I would guess you're using Neuland, but maybe there's other markers that you're using. JD: I use a mix of anything and everything. I'm not sponsored by anybody. I don't necessarily draw on Neuland paper. We can Neuland here in South Africa. I do work with Neuland, but I work with a mix of acetone-based pens. Just because of the speed at which it dries. So I work a lot with Copic. I still have the Copic wide and refills, and I use that a lot as well. Then it's a mix of markers and a range of sizes. I tend to work probably kind of like 900 mils—90 centimeters, what's that in? MR: I'm not sure. The math is too heavy for me to do on the spot. JD: Anyway, just in terms of, it's easily scannable. It's kind of like any kind of corner print shop size. The running length, you know, isn't the issue, but the height. I can get good high-risk scans. So I tend to work to sort of set size. And then, this week I've got the South African Innovation Summit. So there, I work on a giant, you know, on a 10-meter by 1.5-meter wall. And that's over two days. Which is pretty intense. MR: I bet. JD: I don't do that often. I used to do it a lot when I was younger, but it's quite physically involving. MR: Physically demanding. Yeah. I would think so. Interesting. JD: There I work on a roll of Fabriano. It's good paper. MR: A big roll of paper. JD: Yeah. That's the paper materials. Pencil and pens and sometimes paint. MR: As a painter. JD: Not only on paper, but I've done some events, graphic recordings where, I've worked on giant canvases with paint. MR: Interesting. JD: It's a totally different exercise. MR: I bet. JD: There's the layering and the flow and the freedom of it. It's less words and far more imagery and far more kind of essence than information. MR: I would think. Yeah. JD: Different kind of approach. I don't know what else there is in terms of— MR: Pretty simple palette, it sounds like. Yeah. JD: Yeah. I work full color because of what color communicates as well. How we respond to color. One can tell a story with, with color in a way that one can't in a monochromatic kind of visualization. MR: It's a full richness in that sense. I'm curious—so let's switch to the tips section here. Popular part of our podcast. We collect these all at the end of the season and put them together in an all the tips' episode. So tell me, what tips would you give someone who's listening who maybe is feeling like they're on a plateau, or they could just use a little inspiration, what would be three things you would suggest to them? JD: I think we covered them, but I'll put the—that was the speeding up to slow down. Don't be so panicked at how much work you need to produce, but actually the idea is to produce meaningful output, not just volume. So be kind to yourself and slow down. MR: Okay. That's a good one. JD: I said speed up to slow down. I meant slow down to speed up, so work slower. The other one is, I'd say, abandon the idea of perfection. What one needs to do is target proficiency, skill. So, practice, but practice makes proficient not perfect. MR: I like that. JD: There are no shortcuts, and there are. There's a yes and no to everything. There are no shortcuts, but there are. The shortcut is the more you practice, the better you'll be. The more concentrated that practice, the faster you'll get there to get to being good. So practice. And the other one is about learning the rules and the principles and the elements of what makes good art. Read up about that. Not from a visual practice standpoint. Sure, do that. Probably somebody will be cross at me for saying this, but so many people have come through a how-to-course where they've learned the how to do this, but all of those courses, someone has a vested interest in that course. And it's not necessarily the way to do it. It's a way to do it. The more courses, or the more broadly one looks at drawing and art in general, and the principles of art, the more one has to draw on. It's to by all means, do that, but look more broadly. So for instance, if one is drawing the stick figure, draw it well, practice it well. But then, if you've learned how to draw a stick figure, don't think of it as an icon that is a placeholder for a person. Think of it as an actor performing that visual narrative. And then you are unable to observe stick figures, obviously 'cause there are those stick figures. But if one takes another view and goes, actually all of us are built on a stick figure. It's called the skeleton. MR: Yeah. JD: Structurally, in its most basic form, a stick figure is our skeleton button. If you think of how articulated that skeleton is, how balanced, how fluid, how mobile, you could draw stick figures that are unbelievably eloquent and visually eloquent and mobile and flexible. So, observe the human figure, even if you're drawing something as basic as a stick figure. MR: That's great. Those are three great tips, I think. Yeah, you got three. You can go more if you have one more. JD: I'll go. Then the listening to understand is the big one. Our drawings communicate, and they're not just about the information that they communicate. We are not illustrating words. We're illustrating ideas. We're visualizing ideas and packing that idea into a picture. If we don't understand what we're hearing and jump prematurely into—and that's why I suggest having a notepad on the side, so that you can test the idea and check that you actually know what you— MR: Before you commit. Yeah. JD: - what you're hearing, whether it's in terms of acronyms or whatever. You know, in terms of misunderstanding, someone says, "The sky's the limit." And you go, "This guy's the limit, what guy?" You know. MR: Yeah. Mishearing. Yeah. JD: Or you know, how do you draw an unaccompanied minor? Well, you draw a minor in a hard hat with a light on the front, and there's nobody with him, you know? MR: Yeah. Very literal. Yeah. JD: So, what we hear is not necessarily what is intended. And a drawing is not just what we intend it to be, but also how it's understood. Apart from the slightly facetious kind of comments on—I think that we draw something with a certain intention of how it's to be understood, but ultimately that drawing is what the viewer reads it as, how they see it, how they understand it, how they experience it. Ultimately, that's what the drawing is. So, we need to make sure that we get it right just in terms of what we pack into that drawing, body language, et cetera, et cetera. That was a slightly convoluted point 3C. MR: Or you could call it a four, right? You know. JD: Yeah, you could call it. A clumsy four. MR: So, all part of listening to understand. Yeah. Well, James, this has been really fun talking all over the place with you and exploring just this general space. I think these are some of my favorite episodes where we have fun and explore. Thanks so much for the work that you're doing, and you're having an impact where you are and influencing the world, and thanks for doing that for us and being part of this community. It's so good to have you as part of our family. JD: Well, lovely to chat. The conversation did kind of ricochet all over the place. Actually, those are fun. MR: Yeah, those are fun. Yeah. So let's wrap this up by, what is the best place for people to find you? Do you have a website or you're on social media? JD: I do. I do. I have a website. That's jamesdurno.com. Just J-A-M-E-S-D-U-R-N-O.C-O-M. MR: There we go. JD: So jamesdurno.com and then on LinkedIn. MR: Yeah, that's where I see you the most. Yeah. JD: I'm on Instagram, but more active on LinkedIn. MR: Yeah. That makes sense. I've seen a lot more activity on LinkedIn from visual thinkers, so it's fun to see people making an impact there and opening people's minds. So thank you for doing that as well. JD: Well, very lively online community on LinkedIn. MR: Yeah. Well, thank you, James. It's been so good to be with you. Thanks for being on the show making time for all of us. And until the next episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, for those who are listening or watching, this is Mike Rohde. Talk to you soon. | |||
| 25 Oct 2022 | Natalia Talkowska - S12/E04 | 00:47:10 | |
In this episode, Natalia Talkowska, visual communicator and founder of Natalka Design. She shares how she left a small town in Poland, landed in London, started a solo visual practice, and has grown that business into a team of fifty people. This inspiring discussion with Natalia is one you won’t want to miss! Presented by The Sketchnote Handbook’s 10th BirthdaySave 50% when you buy any two of the The Sketchnote Handbook, The Sketchnote Workbook, or The Sketchnote Handbook Video together with discount code HAPPY10. For details on the offer, visit: Offer ends December 31, 2022. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by: Concepts: an infinite, flexible creative tool for all your good ideas. Available on iOS, Windows and Android. The new Concepts 6 for iOS has exciting new features, including a modernized canvas interface, a freshly structured, easier to use gallery that integrates with the iOS Files app, and RGB and HSL color options added to its already extensive Copic color palettes. Concepts' infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Draw and take notes with liquid pens, markers and brushes in your favorite colors. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size — with simple gestures. Drag+drop images onto the canvas, and use layers and grids to organize your creative space. When you’re ready to share, export straight to your friends or team. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 30 Nov 2020 | Sketchnote Handbook 8th Birthday - SE08 / EP11 | 01:16:32 | |
In this episode, my good buddy (and fellow sketchnoter) Prof Michael Clayton interviews me about the 8th birthday of The Sketchnote Handbook! We’ll talk about 8 years since the book launched, translations into 7 languages, the community it enabled, the teaching opportunities it opened up, and the in-person and online events it inspired. 48% OFF The Sketchnote Handbook to celebrate its 8th Birthday! Use code 8YEARS at Peachpit.com. This code is good on print or ebook editions through December 31, 2020. SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by The Sketchnote Lettering Live Workshop on December 5, 2020. I’ll show you how I create my signature lettering and handwriting in this hands-on, 2-hour workshop complete with a Q&A after the session ends. Your $25 ticket includes a video recording of the entire workshop and Q&A so you can come back and review it after the live event is over. Sign up today— there are just 5 days until this live workshop takes place on Saturday, December 5th. Grab your spot today! https://rohdesign.com/workshops/lettering RUNNING ORDER
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 18 Oct 2022 | Jude Pullen builds ideas with visuals - S12/E03 | 01:19:21 | |
In this episode, I talk with Jude Pullen, an independent creative technologist who works with partners to make cutting edge tech simple and adapt old tech in interesting ways. We talk about Jude’s sketching and visualization that helps him explore spaces he works in, filter details, and to communicate with clients and colleagues to create cohesive solutions as a team. Presented by The Sketchnote Handbook’s 10th BirthdaySave 50% when you buy any two of the The Sketchnote Handbook, The Sketchnote Workbook, or The Sketchnote Handbook Video together with discount code HAPPY10. For details on the offer, visit: Offer ends December 31, 2022. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 14 Sep 2020 | Season 8 Preview - SE08 / EP00 | 00:03:14 | |
We'll start off this season with interesting people:
New episodes start next week, Monday, September 21st. We will kick off season 8 with the amazing Xina Gooding Broderick! This season we’re sponsored by:
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| 29 Nov 2021 | Anh Bui is drawn to visualization - SE10/EP13 | 00:30:34 | |
In this episode, hear from Anh Bui, a graphic recorder and illustrator who lives and works independently in Germany. Hear Anh’s story of discovering graphic recording, and how a wise manager graciously facilitated the opportunity for her to develop skills as a graphic recorder. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Draw and take notes with liquid pens, markers and brushes in your favorite Copic designer colors. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. Drag and drop images onto the canvas, and use layers and grids to organize your creative space. When you’re ready to share, export straight to your friends or team. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 04 Apr 2023 | Eric Bakey feels that being worth knowing is a higher calling than being well-known - S13/E03 | 00:33:08 | |
Eric Bakey shares how his passion for visual thinking got him promoted from building bridges under rocket attack to working as an elevator apprentice, general superintendent, and construction executive. Hear how this experience helps him solve business blind spots for organizations that he cares more about. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings — any time you like. You can nudge the curve of a line, swap out one brush for another, or change stroke thickness and color at any stage of your drawing — saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need — large or small. Never worry about fuzzy sketchnotes again. Concepts is a powerful, flexible tool that’s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's great to have you, and I've got Eric Bakey on the line. Eric, it's so good to have you. Thanks for coming on the show. Erick Bakey: I appreciate you having me. Longtime listener, first-time caller. So, I'm really excited. MR: And I'm excited to have you. We had a little chat just before the end of the year and immediately thought that you'd be great for the podcast to share your story and your perspective. So, let's get that started. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. EB: It has evolved. I'm an entrepreneur. If I'm at the bar, I would just tell someone I doodle for dollars. That gets a rise outta most people, but in a very real sense, I try to solve business blind spots. That feels right when I say it. I've had to go through a few different iterations of how you show up as an illustrator, which is not quite that. Not quite a cartoonist, not quite a whiteboard wizard, or whatever else you wanna call yourself. But that one fits right now. MR: Nice. Nice. Let's jump right into your origin story. I know a little bit about it, but I wanna let you take your time and tell us, maybe start from when you're a kid. Did you draw since when you were a little kid, and did that maintain itself through your life or did it come later in life? How did all that work out and to get to the place where you are now? EB: Yeah. I was drawn to the arts and I drew cartoons when I was a kid, and I actually won some scholastic awards in high school to go to art school, but I was too much of a tough guy. I just wasn't prepared to go take my art seriously. And so, I joined the Army right after high school and got to do the tough guy thing. Learned to blow stuff up, and more importantly, build bridges. When I got out, pun intended, I came up in the elevator industry and I went from stack and steel and spinning wrenches an elevator apprentice and worked my way up to become a general superintendent and construction executive. Really, it was the application of visual thinking that really helped me exceed in these kinds of things. I've brushed over about 12 years' worth my life there in a couple of sentences, but really, it was trying to understand the complexities of what an owner's intention was, what an architect's plan for making the thing beautiful, how an engineer makes the thing actually work, and then getting 80 different contractors to get on the same exact page and try to put the job in on time. I just used the tools that were available to me, which were a sharpie and a cardboard box, and just wheeled this thing into existence by getting everybody literally on the same page because everyone has their own competing priorities when it comes to a project. I used what tools were available, and that happened to be this thing called visual thinking. In hindsight, I wish I would've put a little bit more attention to that ability when I was going into my day job. It probably would've saved me a lot of stress. But, yeah, that's kinda the origin story. MR: Wow. Here's an interesting question because you came up from the bottom, being an apprentice and seeing everything from that perspective, you think that helped you when you came to the point of being this, I guess, a facilitator, I guess is probably the right way to call it, right? You're a facilitator using visual tools to try to get everybody organized and on the same page some ways, like a project manager, I guess, you might even say. Do you think, coming up from the bottom and working up that way gave you good perspective for all those other roles because you would've had to understand all those roles to really make them almost like interpret one to the other, right? Like the architect to the engineer because they might talk past each other. Is that a fair way to guess how that might have been? EB: Absolutely. It was through hard work and going from not knowing anything about anything and just struggling at every face going up. I hated at the time. I hated my job at every face of that experience 'cause there's always problems. But it was just a commitment to craftsmanship and then ultimately, the respect of the guys when I'm in charge. We all made fun of the guys who came straight outta college and started telling these 55-year-old mechanics how to build an elevator. They don't even know to do anything. The same thing, when I actually got on the office side of things, being able to speak from the perspective of the guys but on a more elevated business-like fashion and being able to—just the proper frame based on true experience rather than hypothetical book knowledge. I mean, it's just like street smarts versus taking a class. Fortunately, I've been able to do both, and absolutely, it was just a commitment to craftsmanship and trading cartooning as an honest trade. That's really how I came to this and leaning into it to say, "Okay, I'm not where I want to be yet, now that I've transitioned into this visual thinking world. I want to go there, but I'm not there yet. So what can I do now with the skills and abilities resources? I've got to be a good steward of these resources and solve the problems that are around me with these things to get me to where I'm trying to go in that general direction of what I think visual thinking should be. " MR: Another interesting question. Because you came from this perspective, you obviously had the respect of the guys who did the work. How did management react to you when you came to them? Do you think you had an interesting, where you are this in-between mediator that could speak the talk and yet speak their talk as well? EB: It's hard to be a legend in your own land. Fortunately, I got recruited from the field, I went to the office, I went to the competition. I could not get to the office level from the field place I was at. I had to take the next step of the ladder in a different company so that they would appreciate my knowledge. 'Cause I was just the irreverent kid, elevator mechanic at the one company that, yeah, sure, he does a good job, but he's an elevator mechanic. Those skills were celebrated by the competition, and it was a big opportunity. I wanted to overachieve and bring everything I could from the field but then apply in a new context in the office. It was appreciated at the new company. MR: Interesting. Almost like the place that where you got to a certain point where you outgrew it, and the only way to make the next step would be to leave it behind where nobody has any kind of preconceived ideas of who you are so you could start over again. EB: Maybe that was my own limited ability, but it's like the grass is always greener anyway. There's always ways, even now that I wish I could have transitioned things a little bit smoother, but, for me, it's always been, "All right, well, this is the new thing I'm doing. I'm going here and I'm gonna kick butt and it is what it is." MR: Interesting. Do you find that that's been the true for your process? Obviously, in each one of these, you had to burn it down and start over again. Are you finding this is a trend in your life for you to go to the next level? Has that been true for you? EB: Whether it's wisdom or fatigue, I'm doing less burning of bridges or anything like that. Distilling down with the truth and principles really are to get to where I'm trying to go has been more important. I think I was driven a lot by ego in the beginning. I wanted to go be the tough guy, army guy. I wanted to go be this pipe-swinging elevator guy. I wanted to go be the boss. Then as I started achieving these levels I was essentially climbing ladders, leaned up against the wrong building. I didn't think before actually building a career. If I would've had some visual thinking skills to really plan this thing out a little bit better, especially as I get to mentor some people now as employees and whatnot. It's like when I see that spark in somebody, instead of letting them go all these different directions, I try to channel it towards, "Hey, what are you really trying to accomplish?" I see there's a whole lot of activity, but what are we really trying to accomplish here? And try to channel them towards the best direction and just trying to be the friend or leader that I wish I would've had as I was coming up. MR: That's great. That's great. What kind of work are you doing these days? Are you still in the construction business? Where are you working? EB: I'm no longer in the construction world per se. I do a little bit of real estate development work, which is similar but different. It's before the construction actually even happens. I would argue it's much more lucrative to stay on that side of things. Also, I just got hired by Boeing, the big aerospace engine conglomerate. I'm really excited about that opportunity. I was kind of the wild, wild west of freelancing, whoever would hire me as a visual facilitator of how you show up as a marketer or a sales strategist or all kinds of different ways that you can use these skills. But I saw a real weakness that I had that I want to solve bigger problems and I want to be with a team executing upon worldwide. I just wanna have a bigger impact with these things. I feel like I have these really cool skills that are Ferrari skills for a small little consulting gig. But always, I want to go bigger and deeper with these people and it's hard to do that internally in a small business. I figured I'd go jump in the deep ocean where I'd have a team and ultimately also get mentoring from somebody I really respect. MR: Got it. EB: It is the same thing of—the ego thing is starting to fall past that. I wanted to be this irreverent entrepreneur, but what kind of problems do I really want? Like, oh, I can get, have a much bigger impact with over here, and I have these weaknesses that aren't gonna be used against me. They're actually gonna be strengthened by someone who I actually trust to help identify them. I'm really excited about the big opportunity that I've got going on now. MR: Give me an example. Let's say you're working with a—now you're internally, so let's say you're at Boeing someplace, just make a theoretical situation. You've got a problem that you're facing. You've got your team, you've got all of Boeing or some section of Boeing. How would you approach that? What kind of stuff would you bring to the table and how do you use visual thinking in that context? EB: It really is very important to understand the situation before you try to solve the problem. Slowing down and asking the right questions, it's not about having the right answers, it's about asking questions and truly having a consultative Socratic approach of feeling, where's the pain? "It hurts on the left-hand side of your body here. Is it in your arm or is it more in your leg? Oh, oh it hurts right there." Like, "Right there, right there, right there, right there?" And really taking a frame of, okay, so how does that apply to visual thinking? Drawing it out, asking the questions, capturing the emotion. That's the power of studying cartooning. The extra squiggles that make a cartoon really pop, make it look like it's moving can speak and tell a story that's more true to life than reality itself. I love that ability, and I do it and I show it to somebody and it's like when I get that, when I see the pain in their eyes and they can laugh about it, then I really truly understand. And then it gives me the right to then, "Hey, could this possibly be a solution?" Again, you get that work done upfront before you start prescribing a solution. So, really, it's understanding and doing it visually so that I don't have to have all the answers. I don't have an aerospace engineering degree, and so I'm gonna go—they did a fantastic job of interviewing a whole lot of people and I felt very unqualified 'cause I have no aerospace engineering background whatsoever. But I guess it was just in the way that I approached problem-solving, and that's what I'm excited to work with their innovation team to do that and really understand the kind of problems that a big multi-billion-dollar international company has and solve them with some simple pictures. Sounds really exciting to me. MR: That sounds really cool. I've looked at some of your work and talked to you a little bit. My impression is that the visualizations you do are a means to an end. Your goal is not to produce an image. The image is a step towards solving a problem. So, it doesn't have to be beautiful. It could be, as you said, you drew it on cardboard with a sharpie. Like medium doesn't matter, quality doesn't matter as long as it's communicating those concepts. Talk a little bit about your perspective on the actual work and how you use it and at what point do you just not worry about it, it just becomes a step along the way, or maybe it does become like a map of some kinds that maybe a team would follow over a long period of time. EB: I'm very fortunate that I have put the work in to become a really good illustrator. I've been paid to illustrate, I can draw photos realistically. I can paint portraits, I can do this really cool thing, but so can everybody else and they can actually do a lot better than me. So, I'm like, "What can I do to compete in this industry, the talent level is just unbelievable what people are able to do." I just chose to solve problems that were bigger than just pretty pictures. In the beginning, I didn't wanna share things that weren't super pretty. Like, is that social media envy game of who can get more status and likes and whatever. I just started sharing stuff that I thought was meaningful for me. I've been very grateful that it has resonated with some people 'cause I get people comment and message me very often about how can I do this for them in their organization. It's just me scratching my own itch. The longer I took to make sure everything was picture perfect and drawn out just perfectly, I got no different people either get it, where they don't get it and they're just like, yeah, like why am I so worried about this? Nobody actually cares. No one cares at all. So, it's like they only care about what you could do for them. And once I realize that it's like, okay, so how do I get faster at this and how do I capture these and share these meaningful things that maybe I care about and I thought people would actually care about, and they don't. So, like, huh? It's just been just creating as many—that parable if you wanna create the perfect pot, you don't spend three months making one pot. You spend the next 90 days making 90 pots. I'm just trying to crank out 90 pots and then eventually I'll get the perfect one. And then what to what end? It's ultimately just trying to solve problems for organizations and people that I want to be around. To what end, it's simply to have—I call them visually valuable conversations. I wanna have conversations with meaningful people. That's the end. I happen to use analog tools, digital tools, all kinds of different tools. It just a medium. I could be a crayon a on butcher paper for all I care, as long as I get the kind of impact that I want out of it. MR: And that it communicates. You're connecting your communication between whoever you're working with or the people that you're working with, so you get on the same page. That seems really important as well. That's really fascinating and I think that's covers a little bit of what you're doing. If you're just starting, you're probably not even sure what you're gonna be up to at Boeing yet. That'll be real fun to follow and see, check in with you in the future and see what you're up to. I wanna shift into the tools that you like. You've talked a little bit about using crayons and butcher paper and sharpies and cardboard. Do you have like a go-to set of tools like pens or notebooks or paper or some materials that you like, that you typically will run with? Let's start with analog first and then shift to digital. EB: As I said, I started with just a cardboard box and a sharpie marker. That's effective when you're just quick and dirty in the field trying to just get a point across, explain something complicated to someone who doesn't get it, that checks the box. When I went pro, about 2016, I started doing this full-time and I bought this fancy flip chart all the Neulands and replaceable nibs. I love it and they're super cool and fountain pens and feud tips and like, all kinds of really sweet stuff. And then I let the tools get in the way of doing the real work. I spent all this time practicing my typography. It was fun to take the courses. There's so much stuff to learn. There's so much to this stuff. I have a whole huge book MR: Your books. EB: I love. I'm a total nerd when it comes to visual thinking and tools and only having the best. But then I stopped being a little bit so precious about it once the pandemic happened and I'm like, "Well now it's like what problem am I really trying to do?" I was so concerned about making sure it was pretty and messing around with like the right tools and everything. It's great. It's hard to do good work with crappy tools, but only a poor craftsman blames his tools. It's just like this dichotomy of, what can you use to get the job done and what job is it that you're really trying to do. When it comes down to it, you can do this job with some post-it notes and a sketchbook or a whiteboard or whatever it is that you have around you. There are some really nice things. There are wonderful resources. But I try not to get too hung up in it 'cause I will nerd out on—like the 0.07 G2 is better than the 1.0, or vice versa. I can totally nerd out on it, but I try not—what am I really trying to accomplish here? So that'd be my only feedback is don't let the tools get in the way of a good job. MR: It does sound like you probably appreciate—my perspective is I like to have tools that I can go into any drug store anywhere in the world and buy. If I can get used to using those tools, I know I've always got a backup. If mine blows up, I can go to the Walgreens or the corner drug store in the UK or whatever and probably buy something that if it's not that thing or it's pretty close. Sounds like Pilot G2 would be one of those things. Do you have any favorite notebooks? I only use 3M post-it notes because the cheap ones tend to curl up and fall off the wall. That's a little tip there in case you're gonna use post-it notes, get good ones ‘cause it's worth the money. EB: I do not leave the house without a little pocket-sized back—my back left pocket at all times with a sharpie, with the fine tip and the regular tip on it and a big like a 0.9-millimeter mechanical pencil because they don't break. I will never leave the house without it because you should always have your tools, especially there's always time, little five-minute pockets time to practice or the things that pop in your head or whatever. I love to just capture these little tiny things and it's just something that it is impossible to forget for me when I write it down, which is why I started doing this anyway. And if I put the words with the visual, it will burn itself. It's like mental dynamite. It's in there for good if I take the time to draw it out, especially in an emotional moment. So, I just have it with me. I don't always pull it out every single day, but it's always there and it's just like, these are my tools and this is how I'm showing up. Those are analogs I gotta have. MR: Nice. Then I assume like the little notebook that you keep in your pocket set, like a field note notebook or something like that. EB: It's a super cheap one. You can get them in packs of 12. They're super cheap and they're just plain. There's no dots or anything on them. Again, just like an Amazon special, I've got super precious notebooks and like sketchbooks that I don't wanna screw 'em up with like, whatever. I bust them out for [unintelligible 00:22:09]. I'll really lean into it when I'm gonna do it, but when I'm just for an everyday carry, it's better to have something that you don't mind messing up and just getting used rather than never using it. MR: There is something to be said about something that's so inexpensive that if it gets screwed up, "Eh, I'll just recycle it and start a new one." It doesn't feel like you're hurting anything. Nothing precious has gone away. It got all bent up or got a little burned in the fire or whatever. Take pictures of the important stuff and recycle it and move on to the next one. There's something really freeing about that. You're not so tied to having to have a special book or something like that. So that's really interesting. What about digital tools? You can run an entire business now with Google Docs. It's just unbelievable what is available for free to be able to do this. I've used Procreate to illustrate a couple books now. I love it. Concepts is really cool. I'm probably gonna transition more to Concepts because I'm running these much bigger projects and gonna need that infinite canvas to be open at all times and continue. When it comes to actually doing consulting work and delivering these things, Notability is just unbelievable. Being able to have a really pretty PDF that's uploaded into it and then you can also draw on it. It's unbelievable the tools that you can get for like 10 bucks. MR: Right. I know. EB: It's just mind-boggling. Because I'm not as seasoned as you are, but I was not willing to pay for Adobe Creative Suite back in the day. It was just not even an option. I just got good at these inexpensive tools and they're just unbelievable how good they really are. The tools are smarter than me. I don't even use them for even a fraction of what their ability to do is, and I'm already just blown away by how useful they are. MR: I've seen that as well. The quality of the tools that we have available to us for the price that they cost, like Procreate and Concepts, and even I use Paper By WeTransfer like that's $12 a year. That's a drop in the bucket. I get value out of that within the first week that I use it, it's already paid for in my mind from the value it provides. Even some other tools that you can get are pretty reasonable as well. I think that's good. It democratizes accessibility to those tools where maybe in the past it was pretty limited. You had to really be in with the old Adobe suite, especially if you bought it. Couple hundred bucks, maybe a thousand bucks if you really needed lots of tools and suddenly you better make use of it 'cause you know, a lot of money. That's really fascinating. Well, thank you so much for sharing a little bit about your tools. Sounds like you're a pretty practical guy like me. Let's shift into tips now. The way I frame this is imagine there's somebody listening, they're a individual thinking, whatever that means to them, and they feel like they've reached a plateau for whatever reason. Maybe it's the beginning of the year, maybe it's just, tired out of something. Just they need a little bit of inspiration. What would be three things you would give them, three tips you would tell them? It could be practical, it can be theoretical things that you might say to encourage them to begin again or start the climb. EB: I'd say first, what problem are you really trying to solve? You're hung up on this thing, you are trying—what are you really trying to solve and who are you trying to solve it for? Are you trying to solve it for yourself? Because sketchnotes are a fantastic way to solve for yourself also get some gratification and edification from other people who think your work is cool. There's a whole community for people who just do sketchnotes. As someone who's gone through several apprenticeships, it's essential to get those basics down 100%. What are you trying to solve? If it's skills that you need to get, just do some sketchnotes and it's for yourself. If you're trying to solve for somebody else, okay, is this a graphic recording kind of question? Is this a visual facilitation kind of question? Then what is the value of solving that problem? For you, is it to just get past the mental block of that, "I'm not good enough to do this thing?" Well, yes you are. There's so many uses for visual thinking and how you can in increase your skills and share them with somebody else because the only way to get better at drawing is to push the ugliness out of your pencil on that piece of paper. There's no way—no matter how many books I read or courses I take, I continue to learn and continue to get better. People are so good at this stuff and even after people are tell me that, "Oh, you're so talented." Still, I'm never satisfied with how much further I could push this. The tip point number one is what problem are you trying to solve? Is it for you or for someone else? And what is the value of solving that problem? So, you get off your butt, actually solve it. You need consequences for it not being solved or a reward for solving it. What is the problem? Who's it for? What is the value of doing this work? You need to get that clear before you're gonna get past your funk. That'd be my first tip. Second is, so where are you right now and where do you want to go? As I said, if you want to build sketchnotes onto and become a professional with this thing, you can. There's also people who I would argue I'm a better illustrator, or arguably they've got incredible businesses doing this thing. It has very little to do with your physical skillset and more about who is the community that you're surrounding yourself with. If you're just trying to be, like just educate yourself on a specific topic. Maybe you're struggling with math or physics or something like that, and you can use visual thinking and sketchnoting to solve for that. Or there's tons of business and personal development advice out there. There's tons of podcasts that, to distill it down. It's a whole problem of itself, there's this proliferation of advice out there. It's too much of it. It's a massive fire hose. And people have made incredible Twitters and Instagram pages and made incredible illustrations and sketchnotes of just distilling down all the stuff. Maybe you'll also see that some of it is bull crap. Drawing it out and seeing, oh, this actually doesn't—that I see it in front of me, it sounded really good, but. That would be, so where are you now and where do you want to go with this? Do you wanna do this professionally? I have now I've got hired by this incredible company that's an aerospace defense company that's unbelievable. And I'm just someone who's like a reformed construction worker turned cartoonist. It'd be really hard to even put your finger on exactly how I got here. It's not something that I intentionally woke up and said, "I'm gonna do this thing." It was something that pulled on. Once I saw it, once I saw your work, I saw there was a whole community, how do I get better at this skill so that I can be undeniable that even that I can solve these problems and work for a company that is on a mission that I actually care about. Cool. My third and final one would just be to be useful, resourceful, and worth knowing in your five-mile famous world. It's not about being the best artist or even being the best listener. It's not being about being the best, it's being useful with the talents that you've been given, the resources that you've got. Resourceful people, use your resources and be useful to the people who are around you. And being worth knowing, I feel is a higher calling than being well known. That's really what I aspire to do. I guess I'm giving myself my own advice here, but that'd be my third tip. MR: That's great. Those are three great tips. I love all three. Thanks for sharing those with us. We're right at the end of the podcast if you can believe it. It just kind of flew by. It was so fun chatting with you. Tell us, what's the best place for people to find you if they wanna connect, if they wanna talk with you where would they go? EB: I post pretty regularly on both Instagram and LinkedIn, and they're under my name Eric Bakery, B-A-K-E-Y. I also have my own little website, Eric bakey.com. The whole online presence, I'm not hard to find if you just type me into Google, I'm sure you'll find me. MR: I hadn't thought about this until you said your name. Is there any kind of background in your family of being bakers? Is that in your history? EB: Funny thing on my mom's side, so not my dad's side, but the Bakey name, my mom's grandfather was a famous wedding cake baker in Philadelphia. MR: Really? EB: Well, my mom makes me a birthday cake where she makes wedding cake, birthday cake for me. MR: Wow. MR: I can't get it at the store. I gotta get my mom's fancy birthday cake stuff. I guess I'm kind of spoiled. MR: There is baking in your history somewhere. EB: There is. Yeah. MR: Interesting. That's pretty cool. Well, Eric, this has been so much fun chatting with you and having you share your experience and your story. Thanks so much for being on the show and thanks for the work that you're doing and how you're sharing and how you're being in the world. We so appreciate it. EB: I appreciate you. You're a huge inspiration. Thanks a lot, Mike. MR: Well, thank you. And for everyone listening to the show, it's another episode of the "Sketch Note Army Podcast." Till the next episode, we'll talk to you soon. | |||
| 08 Feb 2021 | Ana Reinert of The Well Appointed Desk - SE09 / EP02 | 00:53:18 | |
In this episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, I have a fun discussion with Ana Reinert, the creator of The Well Appointed Desk. Pen fanatics will know Ana for her deep knowledge of fountain pens and inks and other pens too. Her Well Appointed Desk covers all kinds of other goodies, like pencils, paper, notebooks, and beautiful objects that make office work more joyful and fun. In this discussion, I talk with Ana about the origin of her site, the expansion to other authors who specialize in specific areas and more. SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by The Sketchnote Lettering Live Workshop Replay. This is the year to upgrade your lettering with my 2 hour video replay, where I teach you my signature lettering style showing you how I create letters, tips and tricks, and my lettering philosophy. Watch as I demonstrate 2-line, 3-line, condensed, extended lettering, script and faux script and handwriting techniques. This session includes a Q&A portion where I answer student questions and downloadable PDF reference and practice sheets so you can follow along. Buy this video replay for only $15 at Vimeo. RUNNING ORDER
LINKSAmazon affiliate links below support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
TOOLSAmazon affiliate links below support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 05 Oct 2020 | Krisztina Szerovay - SE08 / EP03 | 00:42:03 | |
SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by The Sketchnote Ideabook, the sketchbook designed for sketchnoters. Equipped with a no-bleed, now show through paper, The Sketchnote Ideabook can take almost any marker or pen you can throw at it. Learn more at: RUNNING ORDER
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 02 Nov 2020 | Patti Dobrowolski - SE08 / EP07 | 00:44:09 | |
In this episode, I talk with Patti Dobrowolski about her path into visualization and her passion for drawing your future. We talk about the power of visualization and how we as sketchnoters are perfect facilitators for this work in the world. SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Neuland, the innovative maker of visual thinking tools. Every Neuland product is designed with passion to be durable and sustainable. Check out their newly redesigned Neuland FineOne® line of water-based, refillable markers. Save 15% with code amb290425 until December 31, 2020 RUNNING ORDER
LINKSAmazon affiliate links below support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 08 Mar 2022 | Zsofi Lang on sketchnotes and mural-making - SE11/EP04 | 00:46:38 | |
In this episode, Zsofi Lang journeyed from NGOs and international development in Brussels, Belgium — into live sketchnoting, illustration, and mural-making. She shares what she’s learned from transformative, team-building exercises where she guides teams to create large-scale murals together that map their culture and values. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 28 Sep 2020 | Dave Mastronardi - SE08 / EP02 | 01:03:24 | |
SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Paperlike, a screen protector for the iPad that makes drawing with the Apple Pencil feel like paper. Paperlike’s Nanodot technology offers the paper-like friction you want with the clearer screen visibility you need. This new surface even improves drawing precision — and reduces arm fatigue. It’s the closest you’ll get to paper on a digital screen. Buy yours today! RUNNING ORDER
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| 29 Mar 2021 | Grant and Paddy of The Visual Jam - SE09 / EP09 | 00:42:04 | |
In this episode, I’m joined by Grant Wright and Paddy Dhanda, the two guys who run the super-popular, monthly online meetup, The Visual Jam. Hear how their Visual Jam plans changed — from a local meetup in Birmingham England — to a truly international gathering during the pandemic and lockdowns of summer 2020 and beyond. And don’t forget to check out the link for Visual Jam Xtra on Saturday, April 24th, where I’ll deconstruct my sketchnoting process with you. Enjoy the episode! SPONSORED BYThis episode is brought to you by Visual Jam Xtra: Live Sketchnoting Deconstructed with Mike Rohde! In the first ever Visual Jam Xtra, Mike Rohde joins Grant, Paddy and you to deconstruct the process he follows when he creates real-time sketchnotes. Mike will take a popular speech, listen, pause, sketch and talk through his thought process step by step. In this 2 hour live session, you will be able to immerse yourself by sketching along with Mike, picking up valuable tips and insights along the way. Learn how Mike prepares his sketchnotes, builds his layouts and how he weaves writing, lettering and drawings together, followed by a Q&A to get your questions answered! You don’t want to miss this very special Visual Jam Xtra event on Saturday, April 24th, 2021. Sign up today!
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| 26 Nov 2024 | Blanche Ellis and the chance encounter that sparked a career in graphic recording - S16/E05 | 01:05:00 | |
In this episode, Blanche Ellis shares how dyslexia led her to discover graphic recording through a chance encounter. With a background in literature, music, and art, her work focuses on capturing the emotional essence of ideas and stories to build connections and understanding. Sponsored by ConceptsThe Concepts Sketchnote Workshop video — a unique, FREE, hands-on workshop video where I show you how I use the Concepts app to create sketchnotes on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. In this one-hour, eighteen-minute video, I cover:
The workshop video includes answers to common questions about Concepts. Watch the workshop video for FREE at: https://rohdesign.com/concepts Be sure to download the Concepts app at concepts.app and follow along with me during the workshop! Buy me a coffee!If you enjoy this episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, you can buy me a coffee at sketchnotearmy.com/buymeacoffee Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike, and I'm here with Blanche Ellis. Blanche, welcome to the show. It's so good to have you. Blanche Ellis: Thank you, Mike. No, really nice to be here, and I'm looking forward to our conversation. MR: Yes, me as well. We've run across each other I think on LinkedIn. I saw some of your graphic recording work. I thought it was really unique and interesting. Wanted to have you on the show. So, let's just begin right at the beginning. Tell us who you are and what you do. BE: Okay. I am a multidisciplinary artist. I've always done quite a number of things, often at once which I think happens a lot to creative people. I'm a visual artist. I had my own practice of painting and drawing, and then I use graphics to facilitate the flow of ideas for other people and with organizations and workshops. Mostly with graphic recording, also a little bit with animation, a little bit with—or quite a lot with behind-the-scenes graphics. So not live, but working from conversations, documentation of sorts. And then I'm also a musician, and I'm a songwriter, so I spent quite a lot of years doing that in multiple forms as well. MR: Wow. BE: It all kind of wraps in and, you know, a bit of poetry, a bit of dance, a little bit of anything you can think of really is on my name. MR: Wow, that's really fascinating. So, I'm curious, you touched on a musician. Are there certain instruments that you like to play? Are you more of a vocal artist? Tell me a little bit about that. I'm just kind of curious. BE: Yeah, no, the voice is definitely my home. The voice is my first instrument. Singing harmonies is possibly the best feeling that I know in the world. Instruments, yes, I don't consider myself a great instrumentalist, but I play guitar, I play banjo. I used those, you know, to do songwriting and I perform with that. I even used to be in a band for a few years playing the washboard. Doing harmonies and playing the washboard. MR: Really? BE: Yeah. MR: Wow. BE: But mostly it's guitar and banjo. MR: Interesting. It sounds a little bit like Americana or bluegrass or something along those lines is the style I think of when I hear those instruments. BE: Mm. Yeah. Well, quite folk. So, I think— MR: Folk music, yeah, that's the word I was looking for, folk. BE: Poets with guitars, I think, is a good description. A lot of the music that I love, you know, Jenny Mitchell and Annie Cohen. MR: Yeah, of course. BE: That whole crew and the Ballad writers. So, storytelling for me is a large part of it. Like the music in itself and the rhythm and the physicality of that that goes beyond words, but then also the storytelling element is very strong, close to my core. MR: We've touched a little bit on using music and vocals for telling a story. So I would guess that maybe that's what's drawn you to this, you know, if we come back to the focus of the show, which is more visual thinking. Using those same techniques, but with a different part of yourself to either live capture what you're hearing and express it, or like you said, taking recorded bits or research or those things and turning it into something that encapsulates or consolidates that information. Is that a fair way to guess at how those things are working in the way you work? BE: Yeah, I think there's a really strong connection there, narrative seeking, which think of as, in a way, pulling on threads. You can do it through music, or you can do it through visuals, you can do it through writing, kind of pulling on threads and weaving. That's the feeling of it. And so, thinking with visuals is definitely something—I was the doodling kid in class always. Let's see, I dunno, before I even knew that this existed, Sketchnoting, graphic recording, I took some speeches or books that were really affecting me and turned them into—not exactly comics, 'cause I didn't have that style, but yeah, visual vignettes that for me, communicated that idea and opened it up in a new way. So, I think that's kind of connected. MR: And again, in a form that's in a way a story, right? You're telling the story of the thing that's impacting you. So again, here we are back at narrative again. It's sort of this core that draws you. BE: Yeah, and they both have an emotional element because you've got the bare facts, and you've got sort of just putting things down. But I guess I chose things that affected me. So at the time, what was it? One was a book, it was actually a book by a Finnish architect about space and how we designed space and how we live in it, and the multisensorial nature of space actually, in contrast to how everything in the modern world is designed. A lot of space is designed visually without considering how it would feel, how it would smell, how it would, you know, the enveloping senses. So anyway, that book, and then I felt very strongly about that. And the other one I can think of was like a speech by Neil Gaiman about—I think it was one of those, what are they called when everyone finishes university in the States, and they give a commencement speech or something. MR: Yeah. Commencement. BE: I dunno what it's called, but there was a really beautiful one that sort of captured that. And yeah, there's emotion to the song and there's emotion in the weight of the line. That is something in the narrative that can't be stripped back to bare facts. It's another layer. MR: Interesting. That's fascinating how these all fit together. You mentioned too, that you have a lot of things going on at the same time. I feel the same way. I suspect other listeners to the show feel similarly. I lately have gotten into making pizza and sourdough bread, and I see the same things involved in that as well, like being willing to start something and get it moving, but then you have to wait until it's ready. You can't rush sourdough bread in bulk fermenting, right. It takes five hours or whatever it takes to get to the place where then you can work with it. In some ways, the work that we do is a little bit like that sometimes, I guess. BE: Yeah. Actually, it's really well described, and it's a really good learning that maybe took me years I think when I moved into doing it professionally was, I sort of thought that the work was when I had my pen on the page, you know, pushing the lines forward to the final piece. And it took time to recognize the value of the reflective work of taking in the information, letting it move around, making lots of trials and experiments. There's parts that work well under pressure and there's other parts, it’s just that they're gonna take as long as they take to get to the right point. MR: Yeah. That's pretty fascinating. So it sounds like professionally, at least, it sounds like mainly what you would do is the graphic recording, graphic facilitation. Is that a fair guess? Or where would you say the core of your work is? Maybe that's the way to say it. BE: The core of my work has been graphic recording more than facilitation, although that's something I'm kind of sidestepping more into now from a different angle. But much more listening and digesting and giving back the information. The facilitation, I think happens mostly behind the scenes, or as I think of graphic facilitators, maybe as someone who's standing up and leading the workshop. I love to work with facilitators because then I think you really get the best outta the visuals because you can arrange, you can do interactive pieces, and create a more whole experience. So a lot of facilitation behind the scenes, and that's been part of it as well, learning to guide clients, guide people who want visuals, but they don't quite know what that looks like or how that could happen. And every job is different. I don't know if you experienced this. MR: Yeah. of course, it is. Yeah. BE: Yeah, so a large part of this kind of work is that there is no cookie-cutter and someone comes along, and they have this much information, and they want it to have this much impact or this much information, and they want the result to be something— MR: Fit in here. BE: - you know, really small and punchy. You know, 60 pages in one, easy to read graphic. And you're like, “Okay, so let's, you know, work out what's possible within this field.” Yeah, and that's kind of a dance that's always going on. That's I think where my facilitation part goes. MR: Got it. BE: And then the graphic recording, I kind of love just being the vessel. The information comes in, resonates, finds images, finds connection. Okay, back out onto the page. That's something more like a dance or flow of a different kind. MR: That's really interesting. I've seen the work that you've done is really beautiful. It's got a certain style to it that is very unique to you, I think. Maybe that's because of your background with visualization, drawing and painting and such. It just has a different—when I look at graphic facilitation or graphic recording, sometimes it can fall into very similar looking styles. I think a little bit of that maybe comes from where you're trained from and what your background is. I can clearly see that you've got artistic skills that you're applying in this way that's sets you apart a little bit. That's just me reacting to what I've seen, which I think is great. I think it really sets you apart and probably is why people wanna work with you. I would hope. BE: Yeah, I hope too. It's interesting to hear that because often I think a style is easier to see from the outside than from the inside. I feel like I have lots of variety, but I have that in my personal work as well, I think. There's loads of variety. Then someone who knows me or doesn't know me will come along and be like, “Yeah, but these all are clearly by the same person.” There's something in that. I think there's a very strong part of my practice that comes from drawing on the London Underground. Years and years and years of living in London, being a musician and a graphic recorder. And to be honest, a creative odd jobs person for many years. Like doing so many things and always on the move, two or three hours on the Metro for—well, the London Underground every day, and just drawing and drawing and drawing people. So you never knew how long you had, you weren't gonna see the people again, the stakes were low, the variety and the diversity of people was really high, and everyone's in their own world. I think that's a great trip tip just for drawing in general is drawing on public transport. Loads of people do it. So I learned that kind of like to speed and summarize expressions and scenarios in that kind of. MR: Speedy capture, I guess in a sense, right. Like you said, the next stop that person might get up and walk away and, you know, you hope that you've caught enough to capture their essence as much as you can in that two minutes or whatever you have. BE: Yeah, and it's a similar feeling to the graphic recording when the words are flowing past, and you're like, “I only have this moment to capture it. I can't capture everything. What am I gonna go for?” And it's kind of exciting and stimulating as well. It's something about life and movement that, you know, a static document, ah, you could read it today or later or whatever, but information that's in flow, whether that's visual or auditory, yeah, gives that kind of speed deep connection go to the essence. MR: Oddly enough, as you talked about that, I almost had the sense that you were like a fisherman or a fisher person standing in the stream, you know, like, which fish, putting your hook out and hoping you grab the most interesting things and bring them to shore or something. I dunno. BE: I like that. And then you're like, “Right, so this is what I've got now how do I make a great meal?” MR: Yeah. BE: And you connect it all up. MR: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, this leads me to the next question, which is really common in the show, is tell us about your origin story. How did you get to this place? Because there are a lot of people that do graphic recording and do the kind of work you do. Obviously, you have a unique style. I can see it immediately. So going back to maybe when you're even like a little girl, like you said that you were the one who's doodling, just like, you know, I was always doodling and drawing, making something. Talk to me about that process. What led you to this place and what were the, the key, I guess, pivot points or turning points or influence points that led you to where you are now? That's really fascinating to me. BE: Yeah. It's a long—all right. MR: We have time. We have time. BE: Thinking about that, in school, I think, part of that, using visuals to process information, which is something I wouldn't have conceived of at that time. MR: Right. Yeah. BE: This kind of phraseology is preverbal, basically, you know. So putting information into joints, sorry. I think that could come in no small part because I had quite very strong dyslexia as a kid. My letters were upside down and backwards and mathematics was non-existent. In fact, when I started school and started writing, what I wrote appeared to be gibberish which confused the teachers because they were like, “She could talk perfectly well, she was understanding, but you pick up a pen, there’s no understanding.” And then actually what happened was one day it was my dad after work, he took my exercise book at school and joined up all the words, read them out phonetically, and then re-separated them. And it was something that made sense, but it was just I had made up my own visual code because I didn't get what other people were doing. So I guess that was some sort of creative solution, even though not one that worked. MR: Interesting. Yeah. BE: Yeah, that layer of like some kinds of communication being more difficult for me. Meant that I lent on others more strongly. And visual communication is definitely one of those. There was that. Then I think, part of it is being one of the people who never stopped 'cause we all do this as children and to some degree or another. There's a beautifully simple element of just being allowed to carry on or not stopping because it's a strong enough push. Meaning that I carried on, I had sketchbooks all the way through school. I think it was an art teacher who first suggested I draw on the London Underground at age 14 or something. I just started and never stopped. Now, I'm in my mid-30s and it's still— MR: Still part of you. BE: - part of my practice. Yeah. Also, I studied literature. So that's what I went to study after school, literature and creative writing, American literature and creative writing, which is how I ended up studying in the states for a year. And that all connects with storytelling. So, at the end of my degree in American literature, I ended up focusing on oral folk tales. And so, my love of folk art, folk music just grew and grew and grew and storytelling. And the idea that first of all that stories, they belong to everyone, they are accessible, they are living things. That's at least in folk music, folk art, folk stories, they don't belong to anyone in particular. It's information and flow in community. And it normally serves a purpose. Education, catharsis passing on learning, creating connection. It's really innate and natural and belongs to like the very first humans that we have any evidence of. And we just update the ways in which we use that. So yeah, so I studied all of that. Feel free to push, prompt me, or ask any questions 'cause I'm just jumping all over the place here. I came out of university, and I think actually I studied literature instead of art because my idea was like, “Oh, in art you don't get jobs.” For some reason, I thought that in literature you do. In my world that I was in, that made more sense. I know maybe you can be a journalist. I used to say to people, “Oh, well I'll be a journalist,” because it was the only thing I could think of that made sense of my studies. MR: Active writing. Yeah, every day. BE: Yeah, exactly. And I came out of university and I didn't think I was gonna be a journalist. I was like, “What am I gonna do?” I went to some interviews. I still had this idea that being in an office, chained to a computer, 9 to 5, that's what being a grown up meant. And I was gonna have to do that at some point. I was just playing around until like, that happened to me and then I'd be in it forever. Like, I really, really thought, that's how life is gonna go. Then I would go to these interviews and just shoot myself on the foot because I didn't want the job. Never get the callback. In the meantime, I was going to meetups all around London, anything to do with arts. So meetups for people working in the arts, for artists, for professionals, for gallerists, for anything. Just talking to people and telling them what I love to do and, yeah, discovering really. At some point, someone, and it was in North London in a pub garden with quite like dim lights.I can't remember the face of the person that I had this conversation with. But at that moment they were sort of like my guardian angel because they told me that this job, graphic recording existed as I told them what I like to do and how I describe things with visuals. And they were like, “You know that's a job. Right? I sometimes work with this agency that do this.” And they gave me the name. I gave those people a call and went to a very informal interview where they essentially pointed at a wall and said, “Draw while I talk.” I was like, “Okay.” I walked away, and I was like, “No idea what happened with that.” Then they gave me a call and sent me on a three-day job for a big trade show in— MR: That's pretty quick. BE: - with three other artists 'cause we always worked on teams with big jobs. It was essentially like single swim, like this is your trial job, but three days of it, which is great because I had time to like really get into it. And I never re-found that person. I asked the people in place. I was like, “Do you know who that is?” Like, so that was weird. MR: Maybe it was an angel. BE: Yeah. MR: Interesting. BE: Graphics, angel. Yeah. So then I worked with them for years. It was their freelance structure, small family business based in London and a freelance structure. I was still doing lots of other jobs around it. We always worked on teams. Almost always it was two to four people, and I loved that. It was a simplicity to—this is before I had my business, so someone else was doing all of the client work, all of the stuff that I now really appreciate as being like— MR: Yeah, a lot of work. BE: - 60% at least of the job. You just get the call, first one to answer the email, first ones that get sent on the job. Take a train, get your materials, take a train, set up, find out—you know, someone hands you the agenda if you're lucky, off you go. You find a working rhythm, like a dance with the other people you're working with, you know, tag-teaming the talks and sharing tips and styles and going along. And then at the end of the day, off home. MR: Job is done. BE: That was a lot of learning, very fast learning. MR: It did sound like, you know, that you'd sort of prepared yourself for that with all the work that you'd done 'cause obviously they wouldn't have just sent you out with the other two people if they didn't think you were at least potentially capable of doing it, right? If they didn't think you were qualified, there would've been, “Yep, see later.” Never heard a call from them. So obviously, you gave them enough to send you. Of course, they hedged their bets, right. At least had two other people. They wouldn't mess it up. I'm sure that they must have had to think that way, or? BE: Yeah. No, I mean the interview was informal, but they had their criteria. So they're like, you know, in essentially, because it's kind of recreating the circumstances of graphic recording, like an improv, little information potentially, you know, how do you perform under pressure? And what can you do? And of course, the main thing apart from being able to make reasonable lines on a page, the main thing with graphic recording is listening, you know, so. MR: Right. Right. BE: All of the literature studies, and I think all of the studies and the interests that I had in, I think beyond formal studies, the interest I have in studying life and the work that I'd done visually and visual summaries that all fit into the work. I like to go beyond keywords. I think sometimes graphic recording can be pushed— MR: Keyword heavey. BE: - too far down into the summary. And I sometimes find, I write a little bit more than other colleagues. But then also, like for me, there's so much contact in the details. And of course, it's a balance you put too much in and it's not accessible. But I really do think that the details sometimes give the flavor and the human connection. I don't know if that comes from studies and things where it's just the way that I feel about information and connect with it. It's in the songwriting as well. There's a word smithery. I think that that's connected to the graphic recording apart from the— MR: Like a smithery is like a smith, you know, where you're hammering on, you know horseshoes or something with a hammer. BE: Yeah. It is like a really old-fashioned word. I dunno where I got that, but I like the idea because it's sort of like exactly. It's like the tangibility of like physically working a material. I think you can do that with sound. You can do that with words and words smithery. MR: Well, the thing that struck me when you talked about your history, the one that stuck out to me was the folk storytelling. So you think about where that's coming from. It's people who are probably illiterate in a written sense, maybe in those folk environments where the story was everything, right. You said it belonged to everyone and they would share it. BE: Yeah. MR: You had to be a good storyteller on the one hand. So that's the outbound. What about the inbound? Like everyone, because of that environment, that culture, that expectation that there's an expectation of good listening. Because if you don't listen, you're gonna miss the nuance and the beauty of the storytelling. So there's an expectation that you're listening skills have to be up to par. And that's bound into it too, which you don't think about it until you start thinking about the context. So I would think that your listening skills probably improved quite a bit in those studies listening to lots of stories, I'm sure you listened to a fair amount of stories, spoken stories. So that was one part of it. Then the other thing that you mentioned too was so the keyword heaviness. I see that you're connected with my friend Dario Paniagua. He talks a lot about one of the tests he has for graphic recordings. He has a young daughter, and what he does, he gives it to her and he has her read them. In a past episode of the podcast, I interviewed him, and he talked about that. He pulled up some of my work. I didn't know he was gonna do this. And he started reading it, and he said, “You know, a lot of the graphic recording or sketch noting,” maps, he calls them, “You read them, and they don't make any sense 'cause it just keywords, this and this, and you jump, there's no connectivity to it.” He found that the best ones are ones where you can read it almost like a sentence. I mean, there's still visuals in it, but there's some thinking of visual structure that makes it fit together. Would that be a fair way to what you're describing? It sounded to me a little bit like that. BE: Yeah. I mean, I think visual grammar, which is so different to linear grammar, but is really, really important, and flow in the work direction as well. Guiding, I suppose the eye, which is something you learn in the fine arts as well in a different way. But it's connected to guide someone through a piece of work. And it depends on what you're trying to create as well. So, you know whether it's something that's very, very orderly or it's something that actually has many directions and like sometimes you're capturing a talk, and it's 1, 2, 3, 4, and you really need to understand that structure. Sometimes you're capturing a conversation that is voluminous, and it goes over days or many hours. And actually, it can be read in many ways as long as there's somewhere for the eye to rest and there are connections that make sense. You don't have to block it up to be, you know, unidirectional. It can actually be yeah. More multi-directional. And I think it depends, yeah, what kind of information you're dealing with and also what effect you want it to be having, where you think it will be seen. You know, is they gonna be in a place where people can stand and consider it for time or is it gonna be something that people are scrolling past, and you really need to have ultra clarity to get straight to them. MR: That makes me wonder too, I guess I've thought of this before, but this idea that the talk itself—so you, as much as you control what you hear and what you place, you have the degree of control, whatever that percentage is, there's gotta be some percentage, maybe it's small, 5%, 10%, 15% where the talk itself drives the structure, right? If somebody is distracted, and they're jumping around to different things, you can correct that to a degree, but like the core of the talk is distracted and jumping in all these places. And that's probably gonna come through a bit in the visual as much as you try to maybe not include it, or am I wrong in that? BE: Yeah, I mean I think that depends. Sometimes the speaker is basically a gift, you know, and they have a really clear structure, and they tell you where they're gonna go, and then they actually go there, and then they summarize it, and you're like, “Ah, beautiful. You've done half the work.” Sometimes it's more distracted. And then, yeah, there's part of, I mean, working spatially means that as they jump back and forth, you can group in a way that they haven't. That is possible. Sometimes, I mean, you're working with the material that you get and sometimes if it's a very, very confused speech. There are limits to what you can do at the moment. Joyfully with digital, you can move things around a little bit afterwards, but in the paper world, what is there, is there. MR: It is what it is. Yeah. BE: Yeah. Exactly. MR: That's really interesting. Well, and it sounds like now you've sort of come up to current date talking about your experience and where you came from. Really fascinating to hear all those different experiences and the way you approach things. It's funny that you said something about yours being a little bit more wordy. I think my default tends to be more wordy as well. People are surprised by this. When I wrote my book, I really wrote the text first. Probably 'cause I was a reader first. As a kid, I did drawing, but reading was sort of my source. My whole book was first written and once I had the manuscript structured, then I went and I illustrated the structure. So there was probably structure in my head. I see that occasionally where, you know, visualizations are maybe a little bit more wordy, but I appreciate that in some cases. Unless it's, you know, just all words. I mean, obviously that would be—at the other extreme, I don't think that's too common. People probably wouldn't necessarily pay for that unless it was, you know, functional something where you're just in this facilitation space where you're getting stuff on a board and maybe then you reprocess it into something more refined, I guess, at a later time. BE: Yeah. I think in the words, there's something about as well, like the human expression that people use when they're talking that they don't write down. Those things for me, really key to capture. Like, language is so colorful when we use it in the day-to-day and speak as warm bodies in a room. As things get formalized and written down and that can get reduced. So I think, that's where I like to be, I'm gonna capture that whole phrase because everyone who's there gonna remember the way that that was said and the emotion behind it. MR: I think this is gonna be sound really strange, but I've been playing around with Grammarly. It's this third-party tool which will help you, I guess correct your grammar and make you spell things better and such. I just wrote an article recently, and I was frustrated a little bit with it because I think the way I write is I write the way I speak and I wanna capture that. I want that to be in the way I write. Like it sounds like I'm telling it to you. If I were to read it, it would sound like I'm talking. I found that this Grammarly tool would make these recommendations. Like, “No, I don't want that. That may be technically correct, but I don't want it to sound that way. I want it to sound like I'm thinking it, or I'm saying it.” Which is kind of fascinating what you're talking about this, we say things, and then it gets kind of compressed and corrected into this readable form, which is not what we necessarily exactly what we said, which goes even further back to, you know, these stories that people told that were all, you know, oral discussion, right. There was nobody writing it down necessarily, right? BE: Right. I was absolutely fell in love when I first came across authors who wrote in the vernacular, like to Toni Morrison and William Faulkner and people who would write the way, and of course, they were writing about specific communities, you know, with their own dialects and accents and everything. The writing would flow the way our minds work, the way our conversations happen and sometimes do away with formal grammar altogether and certainly correct spelling and all of that kind of thing. But it was just understandable in this direct and innate way, but sometimes formal language, we sort of have to bring it in and then understand it. It's not as natural direct to the system. Yeah, exactly. MR: I remember encountering that when I read The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck. The way he would describe these machines running across the landscape. He is descriptive. I was like, “Wow, I've never read anything like this.” And it really influenced me at that point, at that time to want to do more description. Almost like he was painting a picture with words. I dunno how else to describe that. So that I found really fascinating. I think there is a connection between literature and, you know, visualization. It's all part of human communication we're trying to express, right? BE: Yeah, and it's naturally multidisciplinary. Art is graphic according you're a user of words and images in a way that's sort of actually in some ways kind of untraditional for each. The images are standalone, and it's not the words in the strict logical flow. It's, “Okay, what happens if we mash these up?” Very long traditions of as well, but it's a bridge. It's a bridge between modalities of thinking which kind of in that way gives broader access, I think. Because you can come in through the words and then let the visuals help you come in through the visuals and let the words help you. MR: Yeah. I think about music, you're trying to express emotion and all these things that we talk about, if you think about it, they're still limited in some way. You can't fully express your feelings for the things you're thinking. You're giving a reduced set that can be absorbed because we don't have the capacity to, you know, mind meld like Dr. Spock and see someone's thoughts or feelings or emotions. Even the best of times, it's still a pale expression of what we think and feel. Right. So by its nature it's limited to some degree. BE: Yeah. MR: This got really philosophical. This is fun. It's really interesting to think about these things, which is why we have guests like you on the show to go in different directions. BE: Yeah. I guess what you said, everyone comes from somewhere different. MR: Yeah. Hopefully, you know, someone's coming to this, and they feel aligned with where Blanche is coming from. That's the point of this, is to really provide different perspectives on how to come into this. And of course, the limitations, we do our best, but we are limited. And I think, you know, doing the best we can does communicate. And hopefully, what we're trying to do is, like you said, you know, just a block of text, you can read that at any time, but a visual adds another layer and maybe sound would add another layer. Whatever we're doing, we're trying to communicate these ideas and as direct as way as we can. So I do think visuals are another way. BE: Yeah. I think it's very much like building bridges between people, between ideas. Building bridges and all these different directions and creating ways into the theme, creating ways to connection. Yeah, I feel like one little piece that I haven't—I don't know, maybe you have another question, but something that I have in my mind that feels relevant in this space, if we're talking about all the different places we come from. You have a place that I did a little bit of training in art therapy, which is a place that has a vocabulary for things that I have understood for a very long time about the way the art works. Also, the accessibility of like, anyone can draw and it has so many functions. Some of them are communicative and some of them are emotional and some of them have all of those pieces involved together. And so, being a graphic recorder, so part of the facilitation can be participatory and creating spaces where people can bring their voice either by writing or drawing their own pieces to, you know, add to some co-creation piece or by sharing their voice and then seeing it represented by somebody else. So that's a space that I'm also really interested in where there's being a graphic record, but there's also opening that space and everything that it potentially contains those tools and to more people, to anyone who's interested, or to anyone who thinks that way. That's something that I feel is a beautiful place to explore and important as well. MR: Yeah, I agree. That would speak to being in person, right? There's some advantage to being in person. I think you can to some degree, do this remotely. It's probably a little tougher. But being in person—I think of the story I have is I used to do this kind of graphic recording or facilitation around interface 'cause I'm a user interface, user experience designer by day. That's what I do for my main work. And I was in a situation where we had a team of developers would come, and we had a big whiteboard and I would listen to what the tool was and how we were going to add this feature. So I would listen to what they were saying and be drawing on the board. I remember there's one guy would say, “How are you reading my mind?” “Well, you were telling me exactly what you were—I was just drawing what you were saying.” But the best moments in those environments where when someone would have an idea, and I wasn't quite capturing it enough, so I would offer the marker, and they would come, and they would always say, “Oh, I can't draw as well as you can.” I was like, “Ah, it doesn't matter. Just do it anyway.” And they would draw on the board and express. Those sessions were the best. Often it was a very difficult feature that was complex. I remember one that it took so long for us to process, I think before we began, I think I drew like a gravestone or something and said, you know, “Rest in peace,” this feature when we finished. That was one of the features that really was well done because we really thought about it from all these perspectives, and it involved everyone. If someone would say, “Well who designed this feature?” It's like, “We all did.” We were all in the room, we all contributed, we all guided. Some people even came up and drew on the board that weren't Mike. The purpose was not to do the drawing. The purpose of the drawing was to the feature. So it was in a lot of ways a means to an end. Those are the most exciting moments is when everybody was involved, and we were all— they were sort of buzzing at the end of it that I dunno how else to describe that, but it was really fun. BE: Yeah. There's a line I have in a song that's like, “There's nothing made that beats the joy you get from making.” It's not just joy, it's also connection. Like that buzzing is, I don't know what endorphins. Things reaching your brain and things connecting. That experience expands your capacity, your memory, your future, creative thinking, all of that. So that's a beautiful example of that happening. MR: Yeah. That's great. I still remember that was, I dunno, 2016, 2017, so years and years ago. Still when I see those people, they mentioned it too, so it was clearly impactful on them as well. BE: When did you start graphic recording? MR: I didn't know what graphic recording was actually. I stumbled into sketch noting on my own because I was frustrated back in 2007. But it had been going on a long time before that. If you look back to David Sibbet and maybe even some of his contemporaries were doing in the ‘70s, maybe even the ‘60s, sort of visualizing discussion. I suspect it's been going on longer than that under different names. BE: Absolutely. MR: So I really just stumbled into it. And I didn't know that graphic recording was a thing until I met the organization and turned out that we were kind of doing similar stuff. So it was pretty interesting to stumble into this space with my people. “Hey, these are my people.” So it worked out. BE: Yeah. Like, you're already doing it and then, oh. MR: Yeah. That was really great. Well, this has really been fascinating to kind of unpack your history and how all these were opening up the space to look at what you do from all these perspectives. It’s really fascinating. I'm glad we had a chance to open that up, and you were willing to. BE: Yeah. Thank you for proposing the conversation. MR: Yeah. Yeah. So I think now unless you'd like to add anything, sounds like we're at your current, your space where you're at now, independent, of course, you're appreciating all the selling and all the paperwork and all the logistics that the company did for you which now you have to do on your own. BE: Exactly. but also, there's hardness to it and there's also actually being able to accompany a whole process, control, and, I dunno, thoroughness, detail, being able to—yeah. MR: Participate from end to end. Yeah. BE: Yeah., yeah. It's beautiful too. MR: I guess influence too, right? I mean, you hinted at this before, you think of facilitation as, “My customer wants to achieve this thing, they don't know how to get there. They have all this material, or they have no material. How do I facilitate them getting to this end point with my experience knowing kind of what they want to achieve?” That's kind of fun, right? In a lot of ways, you're facilitating them achieving what they want to express, which is a little different than being in the room facilitating. BE: Yeah, it is. MR: In some ways it's the same and different. I dunno. BE: Yeah, it has a lot of back and forth. Ping ponging ideas back and forth and going through iterations and finding the unique shape for that particular thing. Then of course, it's really nice if what they're communicating is something that you really wanna support, as much and as often as possible, which I feel like happens quite naturally, which is very, very lucky. But yeah, exactly. MR: That could be the benefit of having your own firm, right? Where you get to choose like those people while, you know, I could do that work, maybe it just doesn't quite align with what I want to do right now, but that client really aligns. And so, it's a little bit easier to make that—and you have that choice, right? They emailed me, “Hey, Blanche, can you do this thing? We got two other people. Are you in?” Then you have to make a choice, maybe not even fully understanding like what the ask is other than you show up and do stuff. BE: Even who the client is, sometimes. MR: Yeah. BE: No, absolutely. That's a really important part of working for yourself is you can decide who to work with and where to go into and whatever work you show in your portfolio and all of this, like, that's what will come towards you. For me, that's one way to make that choice is I choose what to show and that's naturally fed that. I don't think I have anything that I wouldn't wanna show from quite a few years of work, but because also that kind of natural feedback loop. MR: Yeah. What you do attracts more of what you want to do, right? BE: Exactly. Yeah. MR: I think that's a really good way to think of it. Something to remember too when you're faced with that decision like, “I don't know if I feel good about this.” That might be a red flag to say, maybe it's not for you. Even though it's good work and maybe you need the money. Maybe if you're not proud of it, maybe that's a flag for you to pay attention to. Yeah. BE: Yeah. I don't know if I thought this, or I probably heard it somewhere, but like, just the idea that, “That's a great opportunity for someone, but not me right now.” For whatever reason, you know, like great opportunity. But you know, after the first years of starting off on your own and taking everything that comes and feeling like you should never say no. Learning to be like, it's okay to say no sometimes, you know? That's also an important part. MR: Yeah. That's part of the whole decision-making process. BE: Yeah. MR: I think if you're not into it either, you're not gonna be helpful to the customer, so you're really not serving them as well. BE: Absolutely. MR: It serves both you and them to find the right person. BE: Yeah. MR: Interesting. Well, this would be a good time for us to switch into tools. Now, it sounds like you do some analog, or at least you have. It sounds like you do digital. You hinted at that as well. Let's start with the analog tools, you know, pens, pencils, notebooks, paper, any kind of things that you find are helpful in the work you do that might be something interesting for someone listening to go check out and play with. Maybe that's their thing, and they've just never heard of it before. BE: Well, the first thing that comes to mind, for me, the most simple and the most obvious is having a sketchbook, and just that personal practice. That means that your visual world is always alive and growing. I make my own sketchbooks most of the time, so that's not very helpful. MR: I was gonna ask that. BE: It's a really nice thing that you can do is the simplest thing in the world, fold paper, tear paper, you know, make some holes and stitch it up, put some kind of cover on that you like. But yeah, finding materials that really feel good to you, touch them every single day, you know? I love watercolors and I like soft pencils. So where you can make the softest line and the heaviest line with the same tool and just lean into it and make it change. Let's see. In my early days of graphic recording, it was all on firm board because that was what the agency did. I really do like the finish sometimes of firm board, but I don't like the ecological aspects. Especially if I don't think they're gonna keep it and use it, you know? MR: Right. Throw it away. BE: Now that everything is so digital very often they'll take the digital image on, throw it away. MR: Chuck it, yeah. BE: Yeah. So, my preference is now paper. There's many papers. There's one I find in a local shop. It's almost like a canvas like weave. Still quite light, but it has a little bit of texture, which is nice. Then actually on live graphic recording work, I still like to use pencils. Although in the end I go with the marker. I have quite a sketchy style. And so, with a pencil I can be free and create a sketchy style. Then on top of that, work with the marker. Not always, there's time, you know, two layers is not always possible. But yeah, that’s for the analog. I suppose I am one of many to use Neuland because they're refillable and it's just— MR: Excellent work. Excellent tools. Yeah. BE: Yeah. As well as being excellent tools and refillable and that's great. And then also in recent times, oh no, what they're called Molo—maybe we could put it in the show notes. MR: Was that it, Molotow? BE: I think so. Yeah, I think so. They're also refillable, kind of acrylic markers that you can get really great colors in and mix your own colors and everything. MR: I think that's also a German brand, if I'm not wrong. I think that's a German based brand. BE: Yeah. I went to their shops, and it looks like all kind of like graffiti stuff that works really well for this. MR: Yeah. BE: Also, something else that I really enjoy, or maybe I wouldn't do this on every job, but paper cuts out, cutting out signs, cutting out lettering, cutting out creatures, making skyline profiles, you know, depends on the time you have and the budget if you're doing preparation or not, but that can be like another physical element that's really nice to have. MR: Interesting. Soft pencils, handmade notebooks. I did see there's a short course from Domestika on making your own books. That could be interesting for someone to look up. I can see if I can find a link to that. I know my friend Marro Tuseli was really into hand making books. They were pretty simple with paper. Is there a size that you like? Is there a size you like when you go to the tube? BE: Yeah. MR: They are quite small. BE: Quite like this size, and then they change shape. But I tend to like the tall ones all because I write a lot. So it's writing and drawing. Okay. And mine are really rough around the edges, and I think that's what I encourage anyone who wants to do it. It doesn't all need to be neat. I don't cut paper, I tear it. They're very rough and very lovely. You can make them as finished as you want, but it's actually very accessible way of creating something that feels unique for yourself. MR: I think too, if you've just torn the paper and put it together yourself, it's a little less precious in some way that—you know, when I first bought Moleskines, I had a resistance to use them 'cause they were too beautiful to use. I thought I would wreck it. And I learned, you know, doing teaching, I just bring a ream of printer paper and hand out the paper and a simple marker because, so you screw it up, you crumple it up, and we recycle it, life goes on, you know. BE: Yeah. That's great. Any tools that help with perfectionism are great because perfectionism or fear of breaking the, the blank in graphic recording is great for that anyway cause when the event starts and you're like, “I dunno what's gonna happen, but it's gonna happen.” MR: That's the fun part. Yeah. I think. BE: Exactly. MR: The other tidbit I thought about too, as you talked about shifting from foam board to paper and that you specifically like the paper with a little texture because I think for most graphic recorders that I've encountered, they like a smooth paper with very fine if any tooth. It sounds like you're actually okay with that. Maybe that's because you're coming from an artist's perspective that maybe you actually like the feel of that. Maybe it gives the look that you're trying to hit with your pencil that you lay, huh? BE: Yeah, I think there's something about the actual experience, So like the texture. MR: Yeah. Feeling it. BE: With material, you get that little bit of resistance. I think I'm quite like a firm maker, and so I like to feel that kind of resistance. Also, the finish looking at something. we live in such a world of screens and everything on screens is flat and shiny and textless. MR: Yeah, that's true. BE: And so, for an actual thing that's in space with you, for me, the more texture and presence it has, there's more connection for me. MR: That's just an observation. Pretty interesting. Sounds like pretty much stuff you can get at any art store if you're listening. BE: For sure. MR: Soft pencils, textured paper, tear it up and make it into a book. rolls of it on a—you know, it might be interesting for a major graphic recorder's listening who's got our training. Maybe they challenge themselves and go with a little bit textured paper this time on the next job and just see how it feels. BE: Yeah. MR: Pretty interesting. You mentioned you use digital. I assume you're using on iPad. What's the tool of choice that you like? BE: I am indeed on the iPad. In the very early days of the pandemic before I had an iPad and I hadn't fully moved into digital, I just made the leap as everybody else did at the same time, and I was using a computer that overheated regularly and a Wacom tablet. Had about a three-second delay. MR: Oh boy. BE: You know, you're just going on faith that what you're doing down here is gonna appear up there. MR: Eventually. BE: Eventually. That was very nerve-wracking, but when I got my hands on an iPad, I was like, “Okay, yeah, this is better.” So I use iPad, I use Procreate as to many colleagues. Other programs that I find really useful are the Adobe World because actually apart from the actual graphic recording itself, very often you're either taking photographs of work, you know, in uneven conference hall lighting and on [unintelligible 00:54:32] paper or something, and you need. And I do a bit of photography as well. I've got a light room. It's really great for, you know, getting a really— MR: Corrections. BE: - and light on everything. For corrections. Obviously, Photoshop as well. And there's a lot of pinging back and forth. So you maybe like take the photos, send it into Lightroom, clean it up the light, and then send it into Photoshop and clean up some other aspects and then send it back into Procreate and you know, add some extra drawings because you can. So there's sort of whole—sorry, it just started to hail, I think. I hope that's not too loud. MR: That's the life of a podcaster. BE: Yeah. But yeah, so all of those tools I find really useful in different ways. And I think that there's loads also like I have Adobe 'cause I use it a lot, but there's a lot of free tools that do all the same things. And it's just finding the ones that work for you. Also, I often find it's really unexpected what's gonna help. So like in the last project that I was doing, and basically an illustrated booklet front to back, the whole thing. It was quite like a large project. There were like 12 illustrations in it or something. MR: Wow. BE: And it was for a printed piece, which I love because I'm like, “Oh, you know, I have a beautiful project.” Yeah, equality in schools and really lovely thing. And I was really happy to know that it was gonna be printed, but also was talking to them about other ways of accessing it for people who weren't there that day or things like this. I've used InDesign a lot not normally this kind of work, but for creating catalogs for exhibitions. Creating liner notes for album artwork, you know, all this kind of thing. And I was like, “Hey, you know, I can make you an online PDF booklet where people can also go online and, you know, it's got the sound wosh as the pages go over and people can use an index to click back and forth and, and find all the pieces.” MR: Interesting. Interesting. Well, that's really cool that you gave them an additional space that they maybe hadn't thought of, you know, thought of the physical. This provided something a little bit more. Interesting. BE: All the tools cross-pollinate in the end. There's almost nothing you learn that isn't useful somewhere down the line. That's what I'm learning. MR: And the hail is back. The hail is back. BE: Yes. Maybe that's a sign. MR: Coming and leaves. Let's talk a little bit about tips that you might offer for someone. So this is a good spot where I frame it that maybe there's someone listening who's a graphic thinker of some kind, maybe they need some inspiration, maybe they're just in plateau, and they need some encouragement, what would be three things you would tell them could be practical, they could be theoretical, to help them maybe go to the next level or just think of things a little differently. BE: One would be to try different ways in to the same activity. So I did one recently, there was challenging myself to only draw, so not to write and then to go in afterward and give and write drawings. MR: Annotate. Yeah. BE: Annotate. Exactly. Not necessarily with exactly the words that were said, but like pulling from the drawings and then maybe you come out with something that was more synthesized than something came out in a long way. Instead of immediately writing all of that down and then trying to find illustration for it, you go straight to the visual meaning and then extrapolate back into it. So that's a fun game. And then, I dunno, experiment and find your own style. Like you said, there's a lot of people, some graphic recording can go into base in the style, and it's useful to have some plates, but also like, mess around with different materials and brushes or, or pencils or, you know, even digitally brushes and procreate, whatever it is. Like to find something that feels yours. I recommend. I don't know what other things, keep a sketchbook, only show the work you wanna do. I'm just repeating myself now, but those are things I think that are really important. And I think don't underestimate the background work to being an entrepreneur as an artist in any way, in any field. And appreciate that part that you do as well. MR: That's good to remember. Especially even if you're someone who does it on the side, appreciate all the work that not only that it's—you could really easily fall into the trap, “Oh, I have to talk to the client, I have to do this, I have to do that.” That can lead you to a place where you think of it negatively. Sometimes, this idea that “I get to do, I get to do,” could be a really interesting mental shift where yes, you have to do it, but you also get to do it. If you are responsible, you can change it. That's where you want to be, because then you can adapt to the situation or offer something that they had never thought of. So that's a positive thing. BE: Yeah, yeah. There’s a quote I heard the other day, oh gosh, I really hope I'm right, saying it was Tony Morrison. It was, “Freedom is a freedom to choose your own responsibilities.” I feel like as an entrepreneur that kind of thing is that, you know, very much to remember that because a lot of things can feel like obligation and there are favorite and not favorite parts of every process. But stepping into that space and taking those pieces on it, that's a chosen freedom, if that makes sense. MR: Interesting. The other quote I remember is from Mike Tyson, the boxer has this quote, he says, is that—I forget exactly how to say it, but it was something along the lines of “Discipline is doing the things you hate like you love them.” That was pretty deep, right? What if you took the things you hated to do that you acted like you loved them, like training and doing all the things that—getting up at 5:00 in the morning to do the thing that you don't wanna do. What would happen if you switched your mindset to say, “I love doing that.” That's kind of an interesting perspective, I guess along the similar lines of opportunity and choosing your responsibilities. Another thing as well. BE: Yeah. Nice. MR: This is the philosophical episode for those who've made it this far. We're just talking about philosophy all over the place. BE: Sorry, I dunno if that was the plan, but I've enjoyed it. MR: No, this is fantastic. Yeah, no, I love it. Each episode is unique, and each person brings their own unique perspective. And I appreciate the work that you're doing, Blanche, I love that you're doing it so uniquely that you're not necessarily following a pattern, that you're following your own way. I think that's really great because that encourages other people who see your work to do the same thing. I think we need more personality and variety and instead of everyone getting squished into all doing the same thing, like that would get quite boring. So I'm glad that you're doing that, and I appreciate that you are doing it and following your path that makes sense to you. So, thank you. BE: It’s a wiggly path, but I'm on it. MR: Good. BE: Yeah. Very good. MR: Now this would be a good time to ask what are the best places to connect with you, to see more of your work, to find you? Where are the places that you hang out? I know we crossed paths in LinkedIn, your Blanche Illustrates on LinkedIn if you wanna find her there. What would be some other good places to find you? BE: For my graphic recording work and graphic facilitation work, that's all Blanche Illustrates. So that's my website, www.blancheillustrates.com. My LinkedIn and on Instagram as well, Blance Illustrates. And then my personal artwork and some music can be found at Blanche Ellis Art, which is, so it's quite a different aesthetic, a different world. Through there there's links to other places. I have music on Spotify, on YouTube, and all around the place, just under my name Blanche Ellis. MR: Great. So Blanche Ellis or blancheillustrates.com is the one that I see here that's got your work-work. BE: Yeah. Exactly. My work-work. Then there's a million personal projects always running behind and most of them are under Blanche Ellis Art, yeah, exactly. MR: Okay, great. Well, we’ll put those in the show notes for sure and let people connect with you and find you. Thanks so much for being on the show. It's been really fun to have you and have this very deep discussion. I think it's good every now and then we get into these deep discussions. I look forward to them. So thank you for participating and sharing that with me. BE: No, thank you. I've really enjoyed that. As I said to you at the start, I'm not a public speaker, so I really appreciate speaking with someone who makes that really easy. MR: Yeah, no, you did great. You're a really fascinating person. So for those who are listening or watching, it's another episode of the podcast. Until the next one, we'll talk to you soon. | |||
| 27 Apr 2020 | Alma Hoffmann - SE07 / EP08 | 01:14:00 | |
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SUPPORT THE PODCASTBrought to you by The Sketchnote Ideabook — the sketchbook designed for sketchnoters. Equipped with a no-bleed, no show-through paper, it can take almost any pen or marker you can throw at it. SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes | |||
| 04 Oct 2021 | Rasagy Sharma tells stories with sketchnotes - SE10/EP05 | 00:56:30 | |
In this episode, I talk with compulsive sketchnoter and designer, Rasagy Sharma from India. Learn how Rasagy came into design and sketchnoting from computer science, coding and engineering. Hear Rasagy talk about the hard work of improving his handwriting and how that led to his sketchnoting practice. I think you’re going to enjoy this interview! Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Draw and take notes with liquid pens, markers and brushes in your favorite Copic designer colors. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. Drag and drop images onto the canvas, and use layers and grids to organize your creative space. When you’re ready to share, export straight to your friends or team. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 19 Apr 2022 | Tanmay Vora co-creates with sketchnotes - SE11/EP10 | 00:40:26 | |
Tanmay Vora has integrated visuals deeply into his leadership training and business consulting through visual co-creation, helping businesses visualize ideas worth sharing. In this episode he shares what that looks like in his everyday practice. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 04 Oct 2022 | Hermen Lutje Berenbroek visualizes conversations - S12/E01 | 00:41:39 | |
In this first episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast season 12, I talk with Hermen Lutje Berenbroek, a design strategist and visual thinker from the Netherlands. Hermen shares how he helps people understand complex information and how being an outsider often gives him the power to listen intently, draw what people are really thinking, and ask questions insiders might be afraid to ask. He also goes into detail about the process of creating his new visual thinking course with Domestika designed to reach people around the world right where they’re at. Presented by The Sketchnote Handbook’s 10th BirthdaySave 50% when you buy any two of the The Sketchnote Handbook, The Sketchnote Workbook, or The Sketchnote Handbook Video together with discount code HAPPY10. For details on the offer, visit: Offer ends December 31, 2022. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
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Credits
Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 08 Feb 2022 | Season 11 Teaser - SE11/EP00 | 00:01:30 | |
Sketchnote Army Podcast Season 11 starts next week! Special thanks to this season’s sponsor, Concepts, the infinite canvas sketching app.
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| 25 Apr 2023 | Julia Knyupa is helping translate ideas into visual language - S13/E06 | 00:49:57 | |
In this episode, Julia Knyupa shares her visual thinking journey, the war in Ukraine and her journey fleeing war, and how she came to be where she is now. She also shares how the sketchnote community came through for her in her time of need. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you sketchnote in a defined area while still enjoying infinite space around it — to write a quick note, scribble an idea, or keep pre-drawn visual elements handy for when you need them most. The infinite canvas lets you stretch out and work without worrying if you’ll run out of space. When combined with powerful vector drawing that offers high-resolution output and complete brush and stroke control — you have a tool that’s perfect for sketchnoting. SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Tips
Credits
Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike Rohde, and I'm here with my friend Julia Knyupa. Did I say that right, Julia? Julia Knyupa: Yeah. More or less. Everyone, even in Ukraine struggle with pronunciation of it, so it's fine. MR: You mentioned that it's even an unusual name in Ukrainian, so maybe you can give it a little tidbit in that, in your origin story, but before we get to that, let's first say, Julia, who are you and what do you do? JK: Yeah. Hello, everyone. Hello, Mike. I'm very happy to be here with you today. My name is Julia Knyupa. I'm 32. I'm Ukrainian, and last year I felt like I became even more Ukrainian. I speak to you from the United Kingdom where I temporarily based, and we'll see where life will bring me next. Originally I'm from Ukraine. I'm a visual practitioner, sketch noter, graphic facilitator, whatever you call it. I help to translate ideas into visual language. MR: An interesting question would be, I know that you use digital tools. Do you also use analog tools like large boards and markers and such? What does your practice look like when you do that work? JK: Actually, I need really to come back in time to talk about this because mostly it happened in Ukraine and before COVID, and of course, before the war. I worked as a graphic recorder on event. Mostly they were conferences and sometimes strategic sessions in organizations. Little and big, no matter. Mostly I worked being most attentive listener in the room and trying to keep all the ideas put on the paper, or like phone board. This is another type of paper I use. This was since 2017, I started my journey in my native town, Turka, and then moved to the Capital of Ukraine, Kyiv. I spent wonderful few years doing this to different conferences and I never, never put any efforts to promoting myself. I still don't have a proper website. It was always word of mouth sharing information in my contact. This is in short. MR: Interesting. Well, I've always believed that word of mouth is always the best kind of advertisement even better than having to send someone to a website. But of course, websites do provide good information and are valuable as well if you wanna branch out. It sounds like you started in the analog space in Ukraine, and now that you're in the UK, are you still doing analog practice? Do you, like many practitioners see a shift towards digital for a variety of reasons? Is that true for you as well? JK: Last year brought me one chance to do analog graphic recording. It was in Moldova in October, two days of educational forum. Mostly, I do now digital sketchnoting and graphic recording. As I still mostly work with clients from Ukraine and sometimes from other countries. But mostly it's very, very convenient for all of us and cheaper for organizers of events. Of course, it kills the magic of being present in the room with other people, but if they're all also are present digitally, so it has no sense. MR: Then the last question I have around this is, have you experienced the case where you're doing your work on the iPad, and then it is being projected on a screen to the side? Is that something you've experienced yourself? JK: Yeah, I tried it with a few organizers, but we found out that it not focuses people, but distracts them. Now I offer organizers both options, but after explanation, most of them come to idea of having it afterwards. Sending participants via email or somehow else. Because if you want to see a person who is talking to you when it's digital because it's so many distractions and it's better to be focused on people, not on drawing. In analog world, I would say the opposite. MR: I wonder too, if it's with the analog world, because you're in the front and the scale is smaller for someone, say in the back. They see someone's doing something, maybe they catch a tidbit here and there, but if you're far enough in the back, you can't really read anything and you're not tempted to. So, you know it's happening, but your focus and attention is on the speaker. Whereas with digital, a lot of times you might have a pretty large screen, and then if you're like me, I'm zooming in to do work. And they're probably seeing this zoom-in and the zoom-out. It can be very distracting in that regard where you can actually sort of see a little more. It almost draws you towards that in a way that analog maybe wouldn't. I'm just asking these questions because as this transition is happening and I encounter graphical recorders, I'm curious to see their experiences 'cause everyone seems to have a little bit different one, and it's really great to hear your perspective on that. Let's shift into, I wanna hear your origin story. How did you become the Julia that we know? That we see your work and you're doing this work, right? You didn't just come out of kindergarten and suddenly you were a graphic facilitator. You had to build up and probably experience a lot of things. Tell us your story from when you were a little girl, what are some of the key moments that directed you to the place where you are? JK: It's a very nice question. Bringing me back in my memories. You said about kindergarten. I never was in kindergarten. I spent my childhood with my granny. It was very calm and nice, and she was very, very nice and creative person. I remember she spent a lot of time with me playing, showing me how to find a way in the forest. Drawing as well as her dream was to become a painter like an artist. Unfortunately, she didn't have this chance in her life. I feel when I'm drawing now that I'm kinda a little bit helping her to fulfill her dream. I had a pretty basic childhood, very common for post-Soviet countries. Nothing really special. And it was pretty boring by the time I became a student. My first degree is in publishing and editing. As when I was a kid, I liked to read books so much. My dream was to create books and to help people to get really interesting and important information in a nice way. I liked to write things, so I was really happy to play with wording, with editing. Of course, when it comes to English, I'm not so good at explanations, but in my native languages, I'm much better. Believe me, just believe me. Also, when I became a student, I found out that there is not much happening in my little hometown. So I started to look for opportunities to grow and to travel as well as my family didn't have a lot of money, so I never left my hometown till the time I was 17, 18. I started to apply for different trainings, projects, and conferences, and that's how I discovered that a lot of youth is participating in something like non-formal civic education. And I was really, really excited about this. That's how I decided, like deeply in my heart that I want to become a facilitator, a trainer, and not to be only a participant of this, but also to guide other people. By the time I finished the uni, I already was a facilitator in youth programs. I'm really, really grateful for this education through Theodore Hoch College. This is a German program. Also, a nice and interesting part of this story is that I was a journalist, a TV presenter, and in newspaper when I was a student. It was a very fun experience for me. Also, my granny was very proud that she can turn on TV and see me on the screen. This was something exciting about this. It also taught me that people really like when information is set up nicely and that time is money. Because on TV you suddenly realize that one minute is very expensive, so you start to put words in short which is also a very useful skill to what I do now. Seven years of facilitation of youth projects gave me a lot of nice opportunities to learn about people, diversity, social projects. It gave me a chance to travel a little bit around the world, not like the world, around eastern Europe, let's say. It was a very great experience when I started to think that the world is something much more interesting than my little hometown. MR: This reminds me a little bit of a interviewee we had last season with Natalia Talkowska who grew up in Poland, in post-Soviet Poland, really similar experience where she was just really hungry to see the world and to get out. Probably a little bit of a similar personality. We'll make sure and put a link in the show notes. If you wanna connect to between Julia and Natalia, you can listen to both of those interviews. Anyway, continue. Please continue. JK: Yeah. Cool. This brought me to the moment of my life when I was practicing, doing seminars with young people. And I saw that my colleagues, especially from Germany, are using wonderful skills, drawing while explaining something. And I was really excited. I never saw anything like this. It was a totally a new world for me, but I thought that it's absolutely impossible to learn how to do this as I never draw before I was 25. It was just kind of a dream, but I never even tried because I didn't believe that it's possible for me. But in 2016, it was my birthday and I was very lonely that day, so I decided to scroll Facebook and I saw that there is a training in Kyiv, in the capital of my city on visual storytelling. It takes three hours to get to Kyiv from my city. So I bought myself a ticket and went to this training and I was so excited. It was the best birthday present I could give to myself. I tried that basically I can do this and I can use it on trainings. I started to put it in practice. At the end of the year, I created my first big visual recording. And participants were excited because in Ukraine that time there was only one person who did this professionally. No one was really acquainted with this kind of, I would say, social art. That was amazing. It gave me an inspiration and gave me confidence that I'm able to do this. I decided from the first day that it's a very difficult thing to do, it's not like hobby so I need to do this for money. So I set up a tiny, tiny price for it, but for me, just to know that I'm doing this to grow and to be a professional and not just to play with it. I took it very seriously. But I didn't get any support from my ex-partner. He saw my first picture, and he said, "Oh, such a shame. I don't think that anyone will pay you for this." MR: Wow. JK: That made me so angry. To be honest, anger is a power which really can bring you very far. So I decided to prove-- MR: Him wrong. JK: That he's wrong. Yeah. MR: Good for you. JK: I decided to create visual notes. Now, I do visual notes digitally and if needed offline. I do explainer videos, and animated stories, and I also teach sketchnoting people in Ukraine in the Ukrainian language. For few years, I think few hundreds of people learned it with me. And I always recommend them your books, Mike. MR: Wow, that's great. My book is in Ukrainian, by the way. I think you know this, right? JK: Yeah, yeah. Of course. MR: I don't know how well it's selling. I haven't gotten a report on it, but anyway. JK: I'm sure I was a great promoter of your book, Mike. MR: Thank you. JK: Half of books in Ukrainian are sold because of me-- MR: Right. I like it. JK: Lobbying. JK: You may not be wrong, actually. Well, we'd have to see. Along this story, I dunno where this fits in, but we met each other in Portugal when we went to the International Sketchnote Camp. That's when I remember first meeting you and chatting with you really briefly, because a lot of people were talking and stuff. But it was really fun. And I thought that sort of brought full circle for me, knowing that the book had been translated into Ukrainian and I have copies here. Honestly, I'm pretty aware of the world, but Ukraine was sort of a blind spot for me. I just never thought of it separately from Russia simply because when I grew up, they were kind of the same thing, right? MR: That's probably my own blind spot. I was really excited when I learned that there was this, well, there's really like a separate language. Then as the more I learned, like actually this culture is really old, it's a really old culture, and it's this whole different experience. That was kind of my first awareness that. Of course, then I met Yuri Malichenko, who I learned as Ukrainian as well. Then suddenly like all these Ukrainians started popping up in my experience, like you and I think there's some others that I've met. It was kind of a fun awakening for me. Like, wow, there's this whole country. I was not aware of it, and now it is and there's these really cool people. My book is in this language. It was a fun way to be introduced to a country in a really positive way. Anyway, that's somewhere in this story, we met each other, I think that was 2018 in Portugal where we met. JK: Yeah, I think so. This was my first time ever I met visual community. MR: Really? JK: Yeah. Because Ukraine is really, really far from what is happening in Central and Western Europe. Yeah. I felt like I'm really the first person who came from so far to sketch note camp. I was excited. And I remember it was very expensive for me. This was my first time I asked the community for support. I said, "I can volunteer, I can do something there. So please just give me a chance to come. I will be really, really excited to see all of you." Because on the time, I only could follow people on Instagram, and it was unbelievable to see all them offline. That was great. When I saw you, I even didn't have words. I was so scared to approach you, and I was so happy then when you approached me. Like, "Oh my gosh." MR: That's funny. I remember you being very quiet and then we were chatting, I think it was after a session, I don't know which session, maybe it was Michael Clayton's session potentially or something. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I remember we had a good discussion. There are so many people in those camps. You're sort of lucky if you get maybe 30 minutes with somebody unless you intentionally spend time together. So yeah, it was really great to meet you there. JK: Yeah, that's for sure. MR: Well, that's really interesting. Go ahead. JK: Coming back to what you said before about Ukraine and the Ukrainian language, I also had a feeling and in my childhood, it was a very common narrative that Ukraine is a part of brotherhood, of big brotherhood. Also, my family has some roots, or not roots, but history is connected with Russia. My granny and my mom were born in Siberia, which is very far and it's a very cold place. But life circumstances brought them to Ukraine so I was born there, but I always knew a lot of facts about Russia, and Russian culture. We spoke Russian in our family, and even my school studies were in Russian. I grew up on a lot of very propaganda narratives, let's say. It's a very common story, unfortunately, for a lot of citizens of my country, but the good thing, which is happening now, we are finally becoming very, very independent. The freedom of thinking, the freedom of expressing your culture. I would say that being Ukrainian is not about your origin, but about what you feel yourself, about your soul, about your values, and how you identify yourself. Even it came out that I don't have any Russian origin, I'm Jewish, which is another funny story. I feel so much Ukrainian these days. I feel like I'm so much with my country and it is in my heart every day, and it made me even more Ukrainian these days. MR: I can imagine. I can't even imagine what that would be like. It's not even in my ability to imagine what it would be like. I'm so glad that you made it safely. Now, I guess, it's somewhere in this origin story. I'd love for you to tell what happened when you were there and how you got to the UK and all that stuff. It's really important for us to hear. JK: In Feb, on February 24th 2022, like a lot of people in my country, I woke up from explosions and sirens in my city. And the first thing I did, I thought this is a siren of ambulance because I was sleepy and I didn't realize what is going on. And I thought that all the explosions are also happened in my night dream. I didn't take it serious, even I was very worried before. I was anxious. Few months before the war happened, I kinda had a feeling that something gonna happen. The first thing I did, I opened the chat with my friends and then saw a message, "Oh my God, girls, the war has started. I remember that I had a very, very clear thinking, and I managed to do it very quickly. I mean, I realized that I cannot stay there because I'm--in short, I have some mental disorder, which is anxiety and I couldn't stay there because I knew that, unfortunately, I couldn't manage to-- MR: Yeah, too much. JK: --be productive, and yeah. So I decided to move from Ukraine the same day. JK: Wow. JK: It was a long journey as I live in the very center of Ukraine. By the way, I think that a lot of listeners even don't realize how big is our country. It's the biggest country in Europe. I don't remember if it's bigger than France or France is bigger, but we are kind of the same size. It's a huge country. It took me one day to get to the border and I spent two days on the border. It was 36 hours in the car with my friend. My friend helped me to escape. She was driving. I spent one month in Poland. And it is an amazing country. Thank you all Polish people who are listening to this now. You are really great and your support of Ukraine is priceless and what you need to help our country is amazing. Not to underestimate the help of other countries, just we could really feel that this is a real friend now to us. Later when the United Kingdom started a governmental program which allowed Ukrainians to come because early it was very, very difficult to get visa to the UK for us. It's really an amazing chance to start your life somewhere in safe place with all the support provided from this country. So they offered local people to host Ukrainians. It is an amazing thing. And all last year was about feeling how world is supporting. A wonderful family in the UK offered to host me. So I still there. I still here. I'm very, very grateful to this amazing family who has eight children in total. MR: Wow. JK: They call me the ninth kid, and I really can feel it. I can tell this. And all other people who I met here, also very supportive and amazing. I even met here an amazing partner, like the best person I ever met in the whole life. Andy, I know you're listening and watching this. This is an amazing journey even it sounds horrible because of all this difficult circumstances like millions of people had to go through. Some of us really suddenly could feel that our dreams came true. A lot of us wanted to travel, and we got this. A lot of us wanted to try something new. We have all this, but unfortunately not in the way we usually plan to have this. It took me half of a year to feel where I am, what is going on in general, to find out myself standing steadily on the ground. And yeah, I started to look for chances to continue what I was doing, because I remember that it's such an amazing thing when you do what you love, it supports you. I don't want to share it as a long story, but what I was doing in Ukraine, like visual facilitation, et cetera, it's helped me to overcome depression. Of course, combined with the help of specialists, but it is an amazing thing. If you can do what you love, it really helps you to be focused on your goals and your dreams. That's how I found out that, oh, my old iPad is not working anymore like it's used to. I dunno how to say this in English. So I cleaned it from the dust, and I found out, oh my gosh, it works only like 30 minutes even being plugged in. I cannot provide quality services to my clients anymore. Unfortunately, it was not so popular last year in Ukraine to have visual facilitation as not so many conference has happened. So I had to start looking for new clients. It was a very stressful moment. However, one day I decided, oh my gosh, why I am struggling so hard trying to earn really little money if I can ask people to help me, because I remembered that if you ask, you have a chance to get it. If you don't ask, you will never get this. I decided I will try. I didn't believe tha it'll be fast. I didn't believe that a lot of people would love to support an unknown person, really stranger. I would say I wasn't a part of English speaking visual community for a long time. I was very focused on Ukraine and people I worked with. It was really needed that time so I never invested a lot of efforts and time to be in touch with English-speaking visual practitioners. However, it was an exciting moment when I realized that, oh, I can message some people I know. And that's how I messaged you and you were so kind to share my request. I created a fundraising campaign on GoFundMe and I just ask people if they will be so kind to support a person who has to start a new life from the scratch. And yeah, it was a magical period of two weeks when I was like sitting and realizing that unknown person from Malaysia sent me $5. A person I don't know. I really was sitting and sending mental love and kindness and gratitude to people I never saw before for the support and help. In two weeks we got the amount I needed and I bought myself an iPad and I was able to create again. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience. It made me think how much community matters and how we can really support each other. In my goal list is one day to pay it back or pay it forward. However, today I need to be focused on helping my country, and I try to do as much I can to work for Ukraine and to donate to support my people. MR: Well, that was a great story. I remember when you reached out and I thought, well, "This is exactly what our community is supposed to be here for. If we can't take care of someone like this, then what are we doing? Why are we even here?" When I posted it and encourage some friends, I just felt like, "Okay, come on, community. You gotta show up here 'cause this is what it's about." Everybody did. I haven't looked at the campaign, but I think we exceeded whatever--you had a a minimum requirement. I think we exceeded it by the end, which was really good feeling and a lot of people contributed. There was a variety of people, quite a list. So that was really encouraging to me to see that. JK: If you're listening now, this wonderful people, I'm sending you my best wishes and gratitude for supporting me. Thank you very much again. MR: It was exciting. It was really fun to see that happen and know that we were making an impact because we could all see what was happening. I think the other thing too was, I did some donations toward Ukraine for food and other stuff, but you feel like, especially in the U.S. maybe not so much in Europe, I guess, you sort of feel like it's so distant. Then the problem of the news cycle means, you know in a week you forget about it because it's not on the front page. The fact that I knew Ukrainians, it was more on my mind pretty often, but you feel a little bit like, how can I have an impact? You can donate, but it still feels like so distance. Having a person who started her life over and needs this help to do the things that we all do, that felt like, wow, I can actually apply something to a person who's doing the work that we do and she's part of our community and I've met her. That was a really great feeling to have that direct impact. Often the donations, you don't see the people getting fed, or the whatever you're donating to is sort of distant. So this was great to see it directly go to you and to help you move forward. As much as it helped you, I think it also helped us. In a community, it's really a win-win situation where you win because you can move forward and we win because we feel like we're making a difference in your life. That's a really great, great way to be. JK: That's like amazing. Since that time using this equipment, I already like finished more than 20 different projects for Ukraine. A few animations, a lot of visual notes. I was surprised, but by the end of the 2022, a lot of conferences had happened and most of them are now devoted to the topic, how can we support each other? How can we develop our country even in these circumstances? How can we rebuild our country? That made me think about what should I do when I come back to Ukraine. What will be my next step to support my country? I decided while I'm here in England, I have a great plan to make a master degree in illustration. It's a very strange choice for a visual practitioner to choose illustration because it's kinda what we are moving from because the idea of illustration is very different from what we are doing. It's about ideas not art, but I found out a very nice program which helps to design your learning path. And showed them what I'm doing and they said, "Okay, we're gonna support you in learning what whatever you need." Now I'm applying for university and this is a dream. I never told anyone except of my few friends about this. And today I'm sharing with everyone about this. I hope that when I come back to Ukraine, I will be able to illustrate something really important. Something about social issues, strategic sessions, how to rebuild the country, et cetera, et cetera. I want to really come back and being well prepared to this and have all the skills to show how much we can do when we work together and think visually. MR: That's really great. That's such a great wrap-up to that story. And it's not the wrap-up, right, because you still have it when you return, that will be the next phase of the story. It's great to hear that story and to hear that you're investing in yourself. 'Cause I think investing in yourself will eventually lead to investing in your country. That's a really great way to think about it long-term, I think. JK: I think every visual practitioner, going into metaphor is kind of a prism which accepts a light and helps to spread the light. MR: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. JK: If you can be a really sharp prism, you can do a lot of change in the world. I hope to be a nice prism for Ukraine. MR: Great. I love that imagery. I love that imagery. Well, it's hard to shift away. Just wanna keep on enjoying hearing about all the work that you're doing, but I think it's really important that we continue with tools. At this point, talk a little bit about what are your favorite tools. We'll start with analog tools, which I know maybe you're not using as much, but maybe they're still part of your practice. Then, of course, digital tools. What are your favorite software and other things that help you do the work you do? JK: Yeah, of course. Talking about analog tools, I'm not original. I use what master visual practitioners in the world use. I use quality markers like Neuland because they're available in Europe and phone board because I guess it's more thick and it stay longer than paper. I know that some companies I worked with still have this board in their offices. It helps to prolong the effect of session, which is visualized. Also, sometimes I use just usual paper like usual A4 paper and Pilot pen. Nothing really original. I always compare it to like, cooking our favorite Ukrainian dish, borscht. So if you come to a person who, usually it's a woman who made a nice borscht, you don't tell her, "Oh, you maybe have a good pot." Because it's all about skills. The same about visualization. Good equipment is important, but it's mostly dependent on skills and love and knowledge, not about only--when people learn sketchnoting with me, I always say, "No matter which instruments you have today, we'll draw anyway even if it is a toilet paper, I don't care. Please just bring some paper and some pens." When it comes to digital instruments, I use iPad Pro with a pencil and Procreate. I chose them just because a lot of visual practitioners in Facebook community advised it so I just started to use them and never switched to anything else. It's very unusual, but I would recommend a online service Canva, which is for non-designer. Because it's so well developed nowadays that you can really create something visual note style, even without drawing if you don't have anything like a tablet. It's very easy nowadays. For animations, I use Toonly and Doodly, which is kinda the same company who produces them. This is a very basic software. I'm pretty satisfied with what you can create because I didn't want to invest too much because I was not sure if I will continue doing this. But yeah, people are very satisfied with what I produce because it's very quick when you, for example, create an animation with cool animations today, it takes months. But I can really create it in a few days, which is amazing nowadays. MR: That's great. All the power is right there in that iPad with some software, which is great. JK: Yeah, that's true. MR: Cool. Well, I love that you have a simple tool set. I believe in being able to go to the drugstore and find your pens and your paper and be able to work. Again, it's really about your skills and your love and your soul, and not so much about the tools, but good tools do help, right? Bad tools can definitely distract. JK: Yeah. MR: Let's shift into tips now. The way I frame this is, imagine someone's listening who's a visual thinker, whatever that means to them. They feel like they're on a plateau, they're not growing, and they need some encouragement, they need some inspiration. What would be three things that you would tell them, either practical or theoretical to help them think about ways they can move forward? JK: It's a very nice question. I'm a person who needs a boost now because I start to work with absolutely new audience for me, English-speaking audience. I'll give this tips, first of all to myself, and I hope that they will be useful to someone else. The first principle I always use when I try to do something new when I need to learn something is like, fake it till you make it, but I change it a little bit. I do it as a game. You can pretend being a master in this and doing this, or you can think that you are a YouTube vblogger and you're telling to your audience how to do this or teach five-year-kid how to do this. I kinda try to pretend that I already know how to do this because I find it much easier to advice to someone than to do it myself. So I pretend that I'm just advising. So fake it till you make it with the first principle. The second one is about work-life balance. I never understood it earlier, but now I realize how it is important to observe beauty and consume quality content. I really recommend to get inspiration from everywhere, from colleagues, from traveling to follow people from different industries. For example, I found a lot of inspiration in design industry, psychology, coaching, facilitation. Just continue learning every day and follow good people on Instagram. Let's say this is the second tip. And the third one is a very important gift of allowing yourself to be yourself. What I mean by this that for example, I'm a very slow thinker and slow doer, so I give myself permission to do it in my own pace and with my own style is sometimes I think, "Oh my gosh, it's so ugly. Why people at all should like this or should pay for this, even." I know now that authenticity is the most important value nowadays. Authenticity is very important so please allow yourself to be yourself and be very kind to yourself. It's very easy to say, but it's very difficult to do. But it's a moment where you are healing your inner child and be just very kind to what you're doing. Talk to yourself as a caring parent and support yourself. It's wonderful what you can reach when you kind to yourself. MR: Those three are great. I love those tips. All three of those. The last one I especially like, and I often tell people, give yourself grace especially new learners who are doing sketch noting the very first time, like, "Okay, look, you've never done this before, how can you expect to be amazing?" It's gonna take time. Let yourself be yourself, in that sense. So I love that one, especially. Well, Julia, like we thought was gonna go really fast. So here we are at the end of the show. Can you believe it? JK: No, this is crazy MR: Now what I wanna do is let people know where they can find you, your social media. I'm gonna make the bet that your website will be done by the time this episode comes out. If it is, we'll make sure and put all these in the show notes. So if you wanna contact Julia and reach out to her to connect with her, if you've got projects for her. What is the best place to start? JK: Yeah, any social media, like Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, you can find me with the name Julia Knyupa. Hopefully, I will have a working website by the time when this episode will come up. Also, if you want to kinda learn something and to hear some inspiration from me on YouTube, there is my TEDx Talk in Ukrainian, but with English subtitles. It was in 2019, and I talked there about creative confidence. If you want to learn about this place, find this on YouTube. MR: Julia, we'll have you send some links to us and we'll make sure those get into the podcast show notes so people can click on it and watch that as well. Last question is, do you know what your website domain name or URL will be for the website yet? JK: Not yet. MR: Okay. Not yet. Normally, I would've had you give the website and then people would just type it in and go there, and maybe by the time they hear this it would be live, but that's okay. JK: I want to thank you for this wonderful chance to talk to you and to all of your people who are listening to this now. I know that it's tricky, but I want to ask you to continue to support Ukraine because the war is not over and we are fighting for the whole democracy and freedom in the world. So please continue to support Ukraine and I will be absolutely happy to work with people from different countries. Please reach me if you want to support Ukrainian artists. MR: Yes. I love it. I love it. We definitely will. Thank you, Julia, for your time. And for everyone listening, that’s another episode of the “Sketch Note Army podcast” wrapping up. And until the next episode, this is Mike and I'll talk to you soon. | |||
| 06 Dec 2022 | Sathya brings positivity to visual remixes - S12/E10 | 00:36:11 | |
Information designer Sathya shares how he began creating visual remixes during the pandemic which has been a big part of his work along with teaching others create visual remixes themselves. Presented by The Sketchnote Handbook’s 10th BirthdaySave 50% when you buy any two of the The Sketchnote Handbook, The Sketchnote Workbook, or The Sketchnote Handbook Video together with discount code HAPPY10. For details on the offer, visit: Offer ends December 31, 2022. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by: Concepts: an infinite, flexible creative tool for all your good ideas. Available on iOS, Windows and Android. The new Concepts 6 for iOS has exciting new features, including a modernized canvas interface, a freshly structured, easier to use gallery that integrates with the iOS Files app, and RGB and HSL color options added to its already extensive Copic color palettes. Concept’s infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Draw and take notes with liquid pens, markers and brushes in your favorite colors. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size — with simple gestures. Drag+drop images onto the canvas, and use layers and grids to organize your creative space. When you’re ready to share, export straight to your friends or team. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 09 Apr 2024 | Jimi Holstebro creates visual clarity - S15/E06 | 00:54:12 | |
In this episode, Jimi Holstebro discusses identifying gaps, pursuing education to fill them, and seamlessly integrating acquired skills into his work, all while enjoying the process. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike, and I'm here with Jimi Holstebro. Jimi, welcome to the show. It's so good to have you. Jimi Holstebro: Thank you. Thank you for having me. MR: It's an interesting name that you have, and I think you gave me a hint as to your name. Why don't you reveal to the listeners how you ended up with Jimi when you live in Denmark? JH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mostly because my father was a huge Jimi Hendrix fan, so they chose to call their firstborn son, Jimi. Actually, will be calling me Jimi today, but then it's Jimi with, you know, like a soft J and it's pretty darn hard both for Dens and for everybody else to understand the "Yimi," so we go with Jimi. MR: Interesting. Yeah. Cool. Well, and so, tell us a little bit about where you live and what you do. JH: I'm living actually smack in the middle of Denmark, in the part of Denmark that's called Jutland. Which is the mainland. You know, there's a lot of island seals. Funen and then we have Jutland. And in the middle of Jutland, there's this city called Viborg. It's a small city with 40,000 people living there. It's a beautiful old city with the—what's it called? One of those very old churches we have in Europe, which have been, you know, a trade city, an important city where the court is. Also, the old court from that part of Denmark. So beautiful, beautiful city with some lyrics and it has a good football team. It has some handballs, it has stuff. Actually, I ended up here because I moved here with my children's mother back in the day when she started in school as a nurse. They have a nursing school here. Originally, I come from the top of Denmark, the top of Jutland at a city by the sea called Frederikshavn. So, actually, my childhood was in a small fisherman's town called Frederikshavn. MR: Wow. JH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Back there I was like, you know, a little in toward kid—ah, that's not really true, but in toward in the way that when I came home, I sat down and then took out all my pencils and my markers and start drawing, listening to music, and just sat drawing all afternoon and reading comic books. I think maybe you heard that kind of story before about people interested in drawing. They have like, you know, hours and hours of reading comics and then trying to draw it themselves. MR: Yeah, I had that history myself, you know, living our best lives as kids, right? JH: Yeah, exactly. So that's kind of it. You know, normal school we have in Denmark. We also have, you know, like we have just a primary school, and then we go to some sort of high school. And after high school, I went to—actually, I started to read to become a teacher. MR: Mm. JH: Yeah. But when I was doing that, I applied to get into to the art academy. Actually, I got in. It's not something you just do. There's a lot of a lot of people trying to get in, and just few getting in there. Actually, I got in there and got my master's degree in fine arts. MR: Really? JH: Yeah. Back in the start of—middle of 2000-something. Yeah, '05, '06 or something like that. MR: Did you have a specialty in the fine arts? Was there an area that you focused on? JH: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, it was mostly drawing and graphics. You know, like old-school graphics. What is it called in English? I don't really know. But when we have paper, you put on rolls. MR: Oh, yeah. Printing. Yeah, lithographs. JH: Printing. Yeah, printing of course. Yeah, yeah. Stuff like that. I did that a lot. So always been very, very interested in the line, in the black and whites, working a lot. Also, you just show me you have one of the books I made for Neuland, which is also, you know, just a line. Very, very simple. I'm a huge fan of that, so just drawing, just black and white. And I love it. MR: Interesting. Interesting. JH: Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of it. Then just started my artistic career from there. MR: Interesting. And so, tell us a little bit about what you do now? JH: Yeah, actually, the last decade I've been independent, let's call it graphic facilitator because that's the word people understand. Actually, I'm not very fond of it anymore, and I'm referring more and more to myself as just being [unintelligible 05:14] but I draw because that's what I do. MR: And I think everybody understands it too, right? JH: Yeah, yeah. They do now because when I think graphic facilitation popped up in Denmark like 12, 15 years ago or something like that, and some people started doing it, and I actually quite fast got a grip of it and heard of it and tried it. And got a lot of jobs all of a sudden because it was also in the time when the social media, especially Facebook started rolling, everybody had an account, and everything that went on there was interesting. So when people saw it, they kind of just called me or wrote me, "Can you come and help us?" But before I got there, I kind of stopped with art school in the middle of the 2000s. I didn't live from doing art, but it's kind of difficult. I think it's the same story in United States because when you're an artist, you are pretty much dependent on people liking your stuff. MR: Right. JH: And even though I have a master's degree, you know, it's not like being an engineer who's coming to tell you, "When we build this bridge, we need these materials." Everything has to be mathematically calculated to fit so the bridge won't fall. And when I come with my theoretical ideas about art and tell people it has to be like this because my reference is compared to other artists, blah, blah, blah. You know, people just say, "But I don't like it. I don't care. I don't like it." MR: Yeah. JH: And the internet wasn't—you know, there were no social media. So when I tried to sell art, you know, I had to drive around showing people my stuff and try to get into galleries or art shows and stuff like that. It was kind of difficult actually. So actually, I went back to teaching. Started teaching again and actually quite, quite fast got into managing. I started at a small school and they asked if I would like to manage the school. So actually, I ended up doing management for 10 years. MR: Wow. JH: Yeah. And in the area of special needs. MR: Oh, okay. JH: Get kids and youth with special needs. And, you know, that was interesting because they didn't learn like, you know— MR: In a traditional way, right? JH: Traditional way. And actually, I used the comics very much and the understanding of that, you know, the way it's sequenced. The sequential build of a strip was much easier for them to understand when they had to read text or understand connections with things. So that kind of opened up something for me in terms of, you know, "Okay, this is interesting in many ways. What if we do it in other terms and also did it with the people I managed." In some ways started to, you know, using all of this. And then graphic facilitation kind of you know, popped up and then it started to make a whole lot more sense to work with stuff in this way. And, meanwhile working as a manager, I think maybe I have a little, I dunno, may maybe I have a little HDHD—ADH—ADHD, something like this because I've always been, you know, very, very busy especially while working always taking some kind of—still keeping on educating myself. Because actually, I have a degree in management, I have a degree in facilitating, and I also have a master's degree in communication. MR: Wow. Wow. JH: I read a lot. You know, I read a lot and kind of built on. It became obvious for me because it's nice to have a master of fine arts, but then you're an artist and people, you know, they kind of expect you to be, you know, like a heavy camper with brushes and paint on your clothing. It is not always serious. So I had to somehow put some aspects to my CV that kind of made me have some weight when I talked about communication. That became obvious for me in the last decade or something. So built on with my education, meanwhile working both with management and then the switch to working with the graphic facilitation so that I kind of, you know, had some weight when I told people about why visual communication was actually working and how it worked and stuff like that. Yeah. MR: Interesting. So you sort of built that in. JH: I'm sorry. Yeah. And I build that in. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. MR: No, yeah. I was just gonna say, it's interesting the way you've sort of build in the things that you saw were missing as a, you know, something you're interested in, but it also provided—what's the word? Gravitas, or like the credibility or something, right? JH: Exactly. MR: So when you would go to a business to say, "Well, I've done all these studies." I guess you probably wouldn't say that, but it would be in your history. So they would see that pretty quickly. JH: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So the last, a little more than a decade now, I've been an independent graphic facilitator or doing drawings for people in all kinds of ways. You know, traditional graphic recordings or scribing or whatever we call them, where I've of course started out with markers on papers, you know, in big style huge papers, wallpapers. And then I've been doing, of course, I would like to say a lot of teaching using markers or the way of drawing as a means to communicate for others in their way of communication or teaching or stuff like that. I've been doing hundreds of small—what's it called? Animated videos. You know, the ones where you see the hand draw something and stuff like that. They also have a lot of different names. I just call them drawn videos. MR: Like white whiteboard animation. Yeah. It's common. Yeah. JH: Yeah. Something, yeah. They have all kinds of words. And then I also do like, I call it the strategic drawings. You know, where people want to somehow to unfold their strategies, their visions. You know, they have like 40 pages hidden on a H-drive somewhere in the business that nobody ever looks at. But to make it live in the company. It actually helps to put it on a poster or make it hang in the walls, in the canteen, or something like that so that all the employees actually see what's going on, and they can see themselves in that process. And so, I do loads of that as well. So mainly I've been doing that the last 10 years and been very, very happy about it. It has taken me all around the world, but mainly in Denmark, of course. But I've been traveling also different other countries to do drawings for companies. And it's been amazing. It's been amazing. MR: Wow. And I kind of love the way that you sort of built this combination. So you began as a teacher. You know, you practically were a teacher and then a manager. But you've had this art background when you were a kid, you were drawing and looking at comics, it like, sort of this, I dunno, collection of all these components that now you're applying, right? So you have to manage people and yourself, you have to teach them. And you know, those processes, you know, you know how to draw, but you're also then teaching that to other people, and then using it, of course, as a way to communicate. So your communication skills. So you've really made use of all the backgrounds that you put into yourself and you're applying them all, which is really cool. JH: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It kind of makes—you know, it's very holistic the way I've you know both my history with drawing and management, you know, organizations and then the tools I acquired and putting it all together, it's very holistic. Actually, I'm getting up every day and I'm not getting to work, I'm just doing my thing. MR: Having fun. Yeah, yeah. JH: Exactly. MR: That's kind of the ideal place where you wanna be, right? If you can. JH: Yeah. It kind of is. Of course, you know, you making drawings for other people on their demands is not the same as the artistic me, of course, because I still do a lot of art, which is mostly the place, you know, where I do my own thing. MR: Yeah. JH: And that's a different language than the one I apply when I do business with people, you know because it is another game. But it smells like art in a very, very satisfying way, you know? MR: Yeah. JH: I own my skills in drawing and communication all the time with the work, and I really love it. The long-term idea for me is of course to, you know settle down in the mountain somewhere. I don't know, it's in France in a little cabin walking around half naked, just, you know, like wine in the one hand and brushing the other hand and living from my own house something like that. MR: Well, it's still a possibility. JH: That's a good thing about it. MR: Yeah. That's really fascinating. I'm kind of curious to give me a sampling of a project. You sort of given generalities about the kinds of projects. Is there a project that you could tell us about? Of course, sometimes NDAs apply, of course. But a project that you can tell us about that you're excited about that would give us a sense of the kind of work you mostly do for a client. JH: Yeah. Yeah. I can do that. Right now, I'm almost putting last bricks together with a strategic drawing for a company in Denmark. They reached out—and that's kind of very normal process for me. Client reaches out, say they need me to come and draw, summarize, live draw, you know, something at a meeting. And then the last handful of years that has never been satisfying enough for me. So I ask the client, "Okay, why do you want me to do that? What do you need the output to do?" And it always baffles the clients because they have seen, heard something about live drawing and they want a really nice poster of what has been going on. And even though I am pretty good at drawing, and I'm also pretty fast at drawing, it is also very much to ask of me to come in a couple of hours and summarize a whole lot of strategic processes, boiled down to, you know, like a couple of hours. And my question to the client always is, "But I can do that. I can do that, and I will listen to what you say, but are you sure you want that to be the output you are putting to life when I leave?" Because that will be my very subjective—what is it called? Boiling down what you're telling me in that specific timeframe. I can do that, and you can pay for that, but wouldn't it be greater if you kind of introduced me a whole lot more to all the strategic reasoning behind what you're doing, and then we make it into a small process where I then try to sketch what I see and hear from that. And then, you know, we have some back-and-forth ping pong about what, and at the end out which, you know me inking it up, making it look nice and coloring, and then you have like a poster where you really, really have ownership of what's going on instead of me just subjectively drawing all kinds of things I here in a small timeframe. And then also, the businessman in me also makes it much clearer for people to understand that from here on, you also have almost the manuscript for if you want to make a small animated movie out of it afterwards. And I can deliver you packages with all the drawings on each own. So you can use them in PowerPoint, you can do all that. Because you get like a digital package. MR: Yeah. JH: And people always go with that because it makes sense. MR: Yeah. JH: So that's kind of a typical way I do these projects. And then again, if it's an animated video, they start out reaching out for, I also kind of make them buy, you know, posters and stuff like that in the other end, because it makes sense to have all these components put together so you can, as a company, use it in a way. I think it makes sense for you as a designer as well, you know, to have things, they have a red line through all the things I do for them. So have like a pack again, unfolding on different platforms afterwards. And of course, it makes sense, you know. MR: That's more of a sweet— JH: So that would be kind of a—yeah, yeah. Something like that. And that would be a typical process or project for me to be involved in. I know it's pretty selfish, but it is because I'm also a little—you know, when I started out, I just did everything the customers ask me. Two, I did this and that. But I also, you know, become a little lazy and a little more self-centered. I wanna deliver something that I'm very proud of when I deliver it. MR: Yeah. JH: Back when I started, I just wanted as much as possible, I wanted to draw, draw, draw, come out, visit everybody, go everywhere, do everything. But now I've grown a little older and I'm a whole lot more interested in just sitting down really nerding, deep diving into the drawings, and have my own party and fun with doing the drawings and making them look, you know, awesome. So, it's kind of funny, but it works and it makes sense for the customers as well. So everybody's happy. It's a win-win. MR: Well, I would think that if you're gonna put that much energy into it, you might as well get exactly what the customer wants and also what you want, right? JH: Exactly. MR: Than just to, you know, 80 percent of the way do it, you know? I dunno, so. JH: Yeah. MR: Anyway. I'm kind of curious, how do you convince the customer? This might be helpful for someone listening. How do you move them from, "Well, we just want you to come in for a day and draw things," and then you end up with this subjective perspective? How do you sort of move them into the next? Are there certain things that they respond to that someone listening could integrate into their own practice to do the same thing? Like, what can our listeners learn from your approach to help do that? JH: Yeah. I think mostly I start off by saying most clients don't really know exactly what I'm doing. You know, they know I draw, they know I draw and they heard of graphic facilitation, recording something like this, and they've seen drawings, and they instantly know how it works. When they look at a drawing, they want to look at a drawing and they get curious about it and look more at it and read some of the stuff. They don't do that with the 40 pages and the D-drive, right? MR: Mm-hmm. JH: So, instinctively they have, you know, an understanding of this kind of works. So, when I unfold and I question them more and more about, but which kind of output do you really want? I think they kind of understand where I'm coming from and what it is I actually do. So they have like this kind of revelation as, "Ah, oh, can we really do this? So can this be the end product? Is that possible?" So, I'm kinda opening their eyes to what the drawings actually what it does and what it can do and what it really is, and how it is unfolded and put into work when it's best. Which is something that I'm very, very interested in. You know, all the things around it, you know, because also I've been studying it and I think it's very interesting and I want to study even more about how is it, it works, and functions the way it does for us, you know? I don't know if I'm pretty good at per persuading people or something, but I don't think it really is this, I think it makes sense for people to hear that I can come draw for you live and then I leave, and then you are left there maybe with a piece of paper, maybe digitally whatever, and then what? And then they, you know, maybe also kind of get scared because they don't know what to do from there. MR: Yeah, yeah. JH: They don't have the skillset, you know, to—but maybe even if they have a digital drawing, you know, they will put it into Word or other program and cut it and it won't look nice if they need some of it. So they're also happy to have me guide them and help them in all of the process. And when I tell them, but if we make a drawing here, that's pretty good, you can have that as a standout component you can use in PowerPoints or whatever, in emails and stuff like that. That also compels them to go with it, I think. MR: Yeah. It almost seems like— JH: And then— MR: Oh, go ahead. JH: Yeah. And then normally, of course, it will be a tiny bit more expensive to do the process. But not that much again, because I charge more when I'm out drawing live than when I have the opportunity to sit back at my office, you know, then I can work at different projects at the same time, and I can use my time in a better way. So, in that way that will make it a bit cheaper, but then of course it'll be a longer process. So it is normally not that much more I charge people for one or the other. MR: Well, it's interesting. I think what I'm reading that you're saying and maybe the way we can think about it is if we get in a situation with a customer or a client is to—because we know they probably don't know how to apply it, at least effectively, but they're willing to spend this significant amount of money to have someone come in and do this. So we need to think like, well, what would be the—we kind of know, like what would be the best application and sort of think as if I were the client, what would I want? And then you present it back to them and say, "Well, we could do components for PowerPoints and emails." Like, you know, you could even say that, like, "I've worked with clients who had the single image, they tried to cut that corner out, and it wasn't exactly right. If you've got me on board, we can separate that and we can make that into a component that you can use even after the fact," right? Like, they might get a month into like, "Oh, Jimi, there's this one little part that we've just focused in this area now. Can you pull that out?" JH: Exactly. MR: And you might say, "Well, I can't pull it out, but maybe I could just redo it based on the same thing." You're now a resource to them. So you almost need to think like, what is it? You sort of have a better idea of what they could do. JH: Exactly. MR: The other thing that I would imagine is once you've done it once successfully, you can then show that as the proof. Like, "Hey, look, this other company, look what they did. I came in for the day, we caught some information, but then we started to collaboratively work to get it exactly right. And then we realized there were five elements that we could pull from it. And here's the five elements, and here's how they used it, and here's a quote from the person at that company and how they were so excited," or whatever. You could, like, once you do the one, then it kind of flips the next one, right? So you can think of it that way. JH: Yeah. I also always do that, you know, in the mail correspondence, I always add, you know, like, "I did this one, you can see how I did this one. And if you want to see how this one has been turned into and explain a video, here's a link to this." So people also, they—and that's also the thing, because I am obviously very visual in my way of thinking, which most people are, but they think that they everything is written. So they kind of need help and guiding in seeing things. So I always send materials so they can see how it is. So sometimes confidential and stuff like that, but this is for your eye only, you know, stuff like that. Then they also feel kind of included MR: Special. JH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. MR: That's great feedback. I mean, we are not even to the tips yet, but these are great tips for visual thinkers who are trying to find ways to integrate this work into their daily life or their work life. So if you're either independent or even inside a company, you could do the same thing, you know, on your own time, and you'd be really surprised at how open many companies are to this. I know, 'cause I work for companies, I integrate my visual thinking all the time, and they're really excited when I do it, and in fact, request it, right? So just because you work for a company doesn't mean this is off limits for you. This is a huge opportunity. And you might have some benefits that someone like Jimi doesn't have because he's outside. As an insider, you could have some different perspectives and maybe some built-in, you know, a reputation that you could lean on to show this stuff since you know, the inside the product so well. JH: I kind of have a question for you, Mike. MR: Sure. JH: Because in Denmark, I haven't seen the first job opening as a graphic facilitator yet. It's yet to come. And I don't understand why, but that's another discussion altogether. MR: Yeah. JH: But do you see job openings or applications that people asking for, you know, as an employee on a regular basis, not just like freelancer or something like that? But do you know of or heard or have heard of graphic facilitators that are hired into larger businesses? MR: The only place I've seen it has been for graphic recording companies. JH: Oh, yeah. Yeah. MR: So like, my friends at Sketch Effect are often looking for new people, right? JH: Yeah, of course. Yeah. MR: Sketch Effect, not to focus too much on them, is they do have employees, but I think they also have freelancers. So they have a variety of different modes, right? But they will hire—I dunno if you know Heather Martinez, she's amazing at hand lettering. She just took a position with a company and she's doing something around I think vision work or something. But I can guarantee you that Heather Martinez is going to do visual thinking in that role, right? So in some ways, probably, maybe in a big company, you would see that kind of a role. But I would say if you're listening and you work for a company, it doesn't mean you can't do it, right? You can just find ways to integrate this. Again, your job even as an employee, is to communicate ideas effectively. And if visual thinking is your effective way of communication, that should be part of your suite of communication tools. But you know— JH: It is kind of funny. I don't really understand it because now it has been, you know, like— MR: It's been a while. JH: Yeah, it's been a while. 15, 20 years, or something. And there's a lot of people working with it. And of course, visual thinking it's not like they—yeah, and some people, when I talk to, "Yeah, we have a graphic designer." Yeah. MR: That's different. JH: That's not it. MR: Yeah. JH: Yeah. That's not it. But I think many huge companies just think about how many meetings they have every day. If they had like, you know, a visual thinker joining those meetings to help retain information, you know, make it shareable. All those things that makes a visual communication interesting. That's amazing. This year I'm gonna do some work and asking some questions in the proper places to why that's not happening yet. MR: Maybe it is happening and it's just so hit-and-miss that we just aren't aware of it. JH: Denmark is so small and we are so few doing it. So, I think I would know it. MR: I think we're like— JH: We're like as many inhabitants in Denmark as you are in the biggest citizen in the states. MR: Yeah, yeah. That's true. That's true. The small group. Yeah. I mean, I guess the two things I think is one, probably companies are trained to look outside and don't think about hiring it in. Maybe because they feel like they're too small. But maybe that will be a shift too. So when you think about, oh, it's probably about maybe 8, 10 years ago, I dunno if you remember this, but lots of tech companies bought design firms. So if you think about who's providing graphic facilitation and recording and sketchnoting, there's firms that typically do it and they're trained to go to an outside firm because it's kind of a one-off thing, right? JH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. MR: In a lot of cases, the problem too is that when the budget gets tight, you know, first thing to go is gonna be graphic recording, right? Because "Ah, we kind of, don't need that. Let's—" But at some point, there may be a place where it's— JH: But that's the thing that I'm interested in and curious about because it's not a one-off thing. MR: Yeah. It shouldn't be. JH: As I just said, think of all the meetings that are being held, all the processes that are being designed every day, and they have like, loads of project employees just to manage all those kinds of projects. Why don't you have one helping you to visualize it? That's what I'm saying. Yeah. MR: Maybe there’s… JH: That's another discussion. MR: Yeah. Exactly. Now we're sort of talking a little bit about that, let's shift into tools. I'm really curious to hear what tools—we talked before we began, we're both Neuland ambassadors and we use their tools 'cause they're great. So I assume there must be some favorites there, but I'd love to hear about notebooks and paper and any other analog tools, and then of course, digital tools that you like to use in your practice. JH: Yeah. I think I might be kind of boring in the tool ways because I've never, you know, nerded into what kind of marker do I love the most. Do I have some special pen flown directly in from Japan or anything? When I draw on paper, I like the paper to be kind like for wall coloring, you know? So, it has to be thick. I like that. So it doesn't bleed through. That's number one. Of course, but I don't really have a favorite. If we have to talk about the Neuland markers, I love the brush tip. And I love that they just made the big ones with brush tips. I absolutely love it. That's my all-time favorite. But normally I just do like—and I have, I don't know, thousands of pens and markers and, you know, just with the small felt tip, something like this black. MR: Yeah. JH: It works for me. Works for me, you know? And then when I do my arti fati thing, I mainly paint with the acrylics and brushes. And there also, I'm kind of a weirdo because I don't have any brand or specific brushes I just have to do or any specific canvas. I kind of just make do with the— MR: Whatever's available JH: - whatever I have. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. That might be a bit weird, but yeah, I don't know. I have colleagues that really, really nerd into, you know, what kind of notebook they're using, what's the paper and what's the pens like? But I never really—I'm fascinated about it, but, you know, I never really dug into it somehow. I am, and I know you, you said that it could be a little boring talking about the digital tools because all of us have an iPad and we probably also have a Wacom or something like this. And yeah, I think maybe 80, 90 percent of all my work is done on the computer or the iPad. Because for me, as I told you, as a process evolves when I'm working with clients, it's just easy for the client, you know, and to send files back and forth and do corrections on them and split 'em into single components and stuff like that. It's just a whole lot easier. But, you know, I have a big iMac and I have the large and new Wacom Cintiq. I really love to draw on this. I used to draw a lot in Photoshop, Adobe's Photoshop, but a couple years ago, it was kind of like they downgraded. They nerfed the drawing part, and I had to reinstall my brushes again and again. And I kind of grew tired of it. So, now I'm mainly drawing when I'm drawing on the computer in Clips Studio. It's a program made for making comics and it kind of just have the tools depends the stuff I need and all the shortcuts are basically the same as Adobe. So I've been working with Adobe for, I don't know, two, three decades, something like that. So it is in the fingers. So the transition to Clips Studio was painless. Just did it overnight. And then of course on the—I don't know if it's of course, but I do use Procreate a lot. I miss so much—do you know the German guy, Hulk, who made—in the early days of the iPad— MR: That's right. JH: He made— MR - an app, didn't he? JH: He made an app that when you—he designed it for live drawing because what you did, all the time when you projected your screen, it was the whole screen. But you could sit on the iPad and work, you can zoom in and out and— MR: And they would never see that. JH: Yeah. They would never see that. But somehow it ended up with the Apple not supporting the support of it or something like that. So, it went off again. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and really miss that one because it was kind of Procreate, but you had that single feature, and maybe it's me that haven't been smart enough to figure it out, but I haven't seen any programs having that feature yet. So, normally now when I do live drawing on my iPad, I wait until there's a break and then I send them like a jpeg of wherever I've gotten to something like that. So that's the thing projected up on the screens and the breaks anyway, something like that. Yeah. MR: I think I've seen features, and maybe it's not in Procreate, it might've been in—I have a note-taking app I use for slides where it gives you the option in the settings to say don't show the tools. Right. So it would hide the tools and you just see—I don't know if they hide the zooming, I can remember— JH: But one thing is the tool, but then, assuming if you're sitting in your audience and watching the Zoom, you would be like, nauseous, you know. MR: Getting sick. Yeah, JH: Yeah. But if anyone is listening to this, knows a program that does it, please, please make a note about it. That'd be nice. MR: Let Jimi know. JH: Yeah. MR: Do you remember, it was a company called FiftyThree, and now it's owned by WeTransfer paper, that app paper. I think in an old version, it would do what you talked about, where it would just show the screen. Now, I don't think you could hide the tools, but if you zoomed, there was a tool. I can't remember what it was. But when you zoomed, it wouldn't show the zooming. It would just show the static and they would see the changes happening. JH: Exactly. MR: Now you're making me curious to poke around my tools and see, is there a tool that will do that? JH: Was it Nils Holger Pohl, or something, I think? MR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. JH: He made that one. I can't remember the name of it. Yeah, but that would be nice to have, because this, of course, I talk people away from projecting it live because people get nausea and then we end up with, you know, a solution where it's shown in the breaks but people will just be watching in the breaks anyways. But sometimes it would be nice to, you know, like have it projected up whilst people are talking so that they could concentrate and see ideas unfolding, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. That would be nice to have in there, within the whole scene anyway, so. MR: Yeah. Now you're making me curious to dig around. If I find apps that do it, I'll let you know. And if somebody's listening and you know an app, then let Jimi know. JH: Yeah. That'll be nice. Thank you. Yeah. MR: You sound like a practical guy. Probably because you grew up as a kid in a fishing village, you know, just drawing all day and, you know, there was no special art tools when you were a kid. Like me, if I wanted something, I had to make it. If I wanted a comic book, I would take printer paper, cut something up, and make it, staple it, whatever. So you just make it happen. There's no stuff for you. JH: Exactly. MR: So I think that I'm like you, I like going into the corner drugstore and finding my favorite pen there in any city in the world, right? Or something close enough to it. I've always had that feeling like I also use a laptop because I've always wanted to feel like I could work independently of a place. So I want to be able to have the ability to work and not have to have, oh, I have to have this monitor, and I have to have this desk, and I have to have because that really limits your ability to do work if you become adaptable to the situation. You know, that's always been my approach. So I think that's maybe a little bit of a mindset in some ways. JH: Yeah. Yeah. It wouldn't be the first time I've told myself I can't draw unless I have this gadget. And then I kind of, you know, go totally numb until I have that gadget. And in the end, I also always have a notebook and a couple of pens in my back everywhere I go, because I don't want to be limited. But you know, when I'm sitting in my office—I'm sitting in my living room right now, I'm not even at the office, but when I'm sitting in the office, you know, I have thousands of gadgets and I can't find half of them, and "Hey, wait, didn't I have that one?" You know. MR: Yeah, exactly. JH: And at some point, I couldn't live without that gadget. MR: Yeah. That's funny. That's funny. JH: Yeah. It's terrible. MR: For all the guests that I have on, I'd like to make it practical. We've done some of that already, but I would love to hear three tips. You can give more if you like, but I just asked for three. JH: Mm-hmm. MR: Imagine someone's listening and maybe they're in a rut, or they just feel they're not so inspired and they need a little encouragement or inspiration, what would be three things that you would tell that person can be practical or it can be mindset stuff? JH: I think maybe it's obvious because we just talked about it, but don't limit yourself. Don't limit yourself on gadgets. It does not have to be the right notebook or the right pen. That is nice to have, you don't need it. You don't need it. Just grab paper, pencil, pen, whatever you have, and start doing it. And number two would of course be exactly that. Just do it. We are so fortunate, not like when we were kids, Mike, I had to take my bike and ride, I don't know how many kilometers to go to the library if I needed any kind of inspiration other than what was in my mind, you know? MR: Yeah. JH: You just open your smartphone, your laptop, your iPad, whatever you have, add your hand and you can find tutorials, you can find everything. I would have been the greatest artist in the world if I had those opportunities when I was a kid, I think. Hours I have been sitting, you know, copying stuff to get better. If I could just sit down and watch all the good guys doing all the good things and copy that and rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, that would be—and of course, maybe tip number three, I always kind of say to students I work with, "Do you play any kind of instrument?" And people say no. If they do, they do, and if they don't, they don't. And I ask them, "How do you get good at playing an instrument?" "Yeah, by rehearsing." Exactly. You know? And it's the same thing with drawing. If you wanna be good at it, you have to do it. You just have to do it. But the funny thing with drawing is that we kind of all have at least 10 years experience of drawing and, you know, it's sitting in us, it's living in us that we kind of think that it's a thing we ought to, should have to do, could do better because we all have done a lot of drawings. You know, what's her name? Ah, that's embarrassing. It's a Ted talk, and she's talking about—that's what I first heard it. It's not her founding, but you know, it's the only universal language we have. And it's evolving all over the, all over the globe in the same fashion. From you can get a crayon in your hands till 12 years old. It evolves in the precise same way all over the globe. So it's a universal language we have, but then, you know, of course, our brains at sometimes understand now the things I'm drawing does not look like reality. And then most people stop drawing, you know? And also, because we are not encouraged to continue doing it in school. MR: Right. JH: Which in Denmark at least, getting better. People are getting better and better understanding that we have to, you know, utilize all the modalities to make greater retention, understanding and engagement and all those kinds of things, which are also very, very interesting. And so, do it. Just do it. If you want to use visual communication as a tool, it's not about being—of course, if you use it, you rehearse every day, you utilize it, you do, of course, get better. But it's not about being good at drawing. It's not always about being good at communicating, it's being good at listening, it's being good at visualizing ideas, you know? And it's the ideas of things, and they are often and normally very, very simple, very simple icons of reality. You know? So, you're not doing lifelike portraits or anything. It's not what it's about. It's about conveying ideas. MR: Yeah. Well, said. Well said. JH: Thank you. Thank you. Which is of course also something I'm very, very interested in. And I don't know if that's a question of all, but now I'm just gonna tell you. You know, I told you I'm glad to be educated and actually I'm working hard on trying to see if I can build even more education on top of what I've already done because I think there's some questions that need to be answered. And it is, why is it drawing actually works as well as it does, you know? So right now, I'm trying just as a start collecting as much evidence as there is, see who's been researching in stuff like this. And, you know, because it draws from psychology and movie studies and all kinds of things. But that's not really doing a lot of studying in what is it exactly drawing does, and why does it do? Because we all feel it works when you look at a drawing and, you know, we have all kinds of sayings, like "Picture says more than a thousand words." MR: Right. JH: Why is it that it does that? That could be interesting. And maybe I don't know if it ends out with that, but I'm willing to do a PhD on that subject if it comes down to that. Because it would also be a very good selling point for people like us. But we have to draw because research tells us exactly that works in this and that way, you know. MR: And here's why. Yeah. JH: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's what I'm very, very occupied of as we're going into '24. And some of the things I'm trying to get laid out planned out, what's the direction for this and how do I somehow get that into motion? MR: Sounds like a keystone project for you. Something that could be a lifetime achievement kind of thing. JH: Mm-hmm. Hope so. Hope so. MR: Cool. JH: I'm very occupied with it right now, and I've been a couple of last years, and I've also—we haven't been talking about that. I've been in some other programs where we're talking about, I also made, you know one of the first, I don't know how it is in U.S., but I've been one of the founders of making visual communication, you know, as graphical visual communication education that actually gives you points as in a bachelor degree in Denmark. MR: That'd be cool. Yeah. JH: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. MR: Yeah. That sounds excellent. JH: Yeah, it is. It is. MR: Well, Jimi, this has been really wonderful to chat and sort of have these interesting discussions. Thank you for sharing. JH: Of course. MR: How can we find you? Do you have a website? Do you have social media that we should check out? What's the best way to connect with you? JH: I'm everywhere. I didn't even mention, I'm also a certified social media manager. MR: Oh, really? JH: Yeah. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Facebook, I'm on Instagram. I was all on other platforms before, but, you know, I kind of narrowed it down. Also, I have two different websites. One for my art and my posters, which is my name Jimiholsterbro.dk, as in Denmark. And then I have, you know, the work platform, the work website for all the visualizations and movies and stuff I do, which is and it is a Danish word, it's taenkogtegn.dk. Taenk og tegn which means think and draw. There you can see a lot of work I've done with the visualization of vision strategies, movies, teaching, and stuff like that. So courses. Yeah. Also, of course, we have contact infos and mail addresses on those on those websites. But I think the fastest way would probably be on all the social media platforms. MR: Mm-hmm. Okay. JH: And everybody just reach out if you wanna have a chat or wanna ask me anything, it's okay. MR: So is your handle the same on all those social media platforms, and what is that handle? JH: My name, Jimi Holstebro. MR: Okay. Just Jimi Holstebro. It's pretty unique. JH: Yeah, yeah. MR: Cool. JH: That's Even Stevens. That's easy. MR: And we'll reach out to you and get links for all these things and make sure the show notes—we like to have robust show notes on the podcast. JH: Yeah. MR: So if you're listening and you wanna find any of these things, you can check there and go to any of those locations. JH: Very welcome. Yeah, very welcome. MR: Thank you, Jimi. This has been really great. I'm so thankful for the work that you do and how you're representing visual thinking and all the thinking that goes behind what you're doing, and how many people you're helping and businesses you're helping. I think it's great to have you representing the community, so thank you. JH: Likewise. Thank you, Mike. MR: And for everyone listening, that's another episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Until the next episode, this is Mike and Jimi signing off. JH: Bye-bye. | |||
| 08 Mar 2021 | Debbie Baff on sketchnotes to earn a PhD - SE09 / EP06 | 00:49:46 | |
In this episode of the podcast, hear from Debbie Baff, a PhD Student in E-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning. Debbie has found sketchnotes have been instrumental in her academic work. Hear how mind mapping connects to sketchnotes for her and how she uses sketchnotes to better understand complex ideas. SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Neuland, the innovative maker of visual thinking tools. Every Neuland product is designed with passion to be durable and sustainable. Check out their newly redesigned Neuland FineOne® line of water-based, refillable markers:
Save 15% with code neuland@sketchnotearmy-2021 at Neuland.com until May 30th, 2021 RUNNING ORDER
LINKSAmazon affiliate links below support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 24 Oct 2023 | Season 14 Teaser | 00:01:50 | |
Hey, It’s Mike Rohde, and I’m here to announce season 14 of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, which is launching on Tuesday, October 31st, 2023. This season we’re featuring 9 amazing guests, including:
…and of course the fan favorite All The Tips episode for Season 14 You are going to love every episode! Special thanks to our sponsor, Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android.
SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Credits
Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 03 Dec 2024 | Peter Durand uses visual thinking to bring clarity to complex problems - S16/E06 | 00:51:19 | |
In this episode, Peter Durand explores the power of using a pen as a creative thinking tool, the beauty of embracing iterative processes, and how collaborating with professionals from different fields has deepened and broadened his artistic perspective. Sponsored by ConceptsThe Concepts Sketchnote Workshop video — a unique, FREE, hands-on workshop video where I show you how I use the Concepts app to create sketchnotes on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. In this one-hour, eighteen-minute video, I cover:
The workshop video includes answers to common questions about Concepts. Watch the workshop video for FREE at: Be sure to download the Concepts app at concepts.app and follow along with me during the workshop! Buy me a coffee!If you enjoy this episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, you can buy me a coffee at sketchnotearmy.com/buymeacoffee Running Order
LinksAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. ToolsAmazon affiliate links support the Sketchnote Army Podcast. Tips
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike, and I'm here with Peter Durand. Peter, thanks for being on the show. It's so good to have you. Peter Durand: Thank you, Mike. MR: Well, let's just get right into it. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. PD: Well, first I wanna thank you for giving me the heads-up that I should dress in stealth mode with the black shirt and black cap. You know, this is the Captain America disguise. MR: That's right. PD: Yeah. Well, my name is Peter Durand. I go by Alphachimp, and that name emerged way back at the dawn of the internet when I was just starting off. I'm an artist. I went to art school. I was a squirmy kid sitting in math and science class, having a rough time tracking what the teacher was saying 'cause My mind was always in cartoon land, and I was always doodling and drawing. MR: Oh, yeah. PD: And it was only much later thanks to this book called The Sketch Note Handbook, that I realized I could have been using that the whole time to be a neuroscientist or PhD in physics. Yeah, I was an artistic kid, visual learner, and fortunately had parents that always supported that. Was surrounded by nothing but support to, you know, follow that direction. So, went off to art school in St. Louis, Washington University. Studied painting, printmaking 2D design, 3D design, but landed in illustration as a major and visual communications 'cause I wanted to tell stories. I really liked reading and comic books and graphic novels. And I think at that time, my real dream was to be whoever the dude or dudette is, who makes the illustration on the other side of a National Geographic foldout map. My grandfather was a geographer, so we grew up with a lot of maps and stuff, but I always liked the reverse side of those foldouts because they had little vignettes of watercolor paintings and, you know, it was like a full giant poster-size, graphic novel squee education thing. So that was my big aspiration when I went off to school. MR: I suppose it's easier to get paid as an illustrator than as a fine artist. At least regularly. Although maybe there's a few—Banksy maybe can defy that logic, I suppose, with his work. PD: My father was a lawyer, so I was actually born in Kenya because he went off to law school in the '60s after being in the Marine Corps. And he practiced law for one year and was super bored. And unfortunately, it was up near you, Mike. It was in Madison, Wisconsin. MR: Okay. PD: So he was in Madison, Wisconsin, and he was bored. He was like, "I don't think I wanna do this." Somebody had given him a brochure that he threw in his drawer for this thing called the Peace Corps. MR: Yes. The Peace Corps. PD: And so, he was in the first wave of the Peace Corps in the '60s and was working with magistrates and lawyers in countries that had just gained independence. So through that, well, he met my mom, who's also American, and they moved to Kenya. And so, I was born in Kenya, and he was using drawing and cartooning in his classes because he didn't have law books. I don't think. MR: Yeah, yeah. PD: So there's a picture of him over the right shoulder, his ear, his, you know, jaw, his shoulder drawing a cartoon. And so, now when I teach, I show a picture of that from 1965 in Malawi, and then this pretty much identical picture of my ear, same shaped head drawing is like, you know, this is— MR: Wow. PD: I'm just carrying the lineage forward. MR: Well, the person that I work with who supports me in doing transcripts and the show notes for this podcast is Esther. She lives in Kenya. So that's pretty cool. It's a cool connection. PD: Yeah. MR: Yeah. PD: Yeah. And then for me, it's gone full circle. About 10 years ago I went to Kenya on a project as a graphic recorder and visual note taker. And was working with a group that was studying the effect of climate change on women and girls and visiting a lot of different locations. And at that time, I don't think there were any, you know, professional graphic recorders, sketchnoters in Nairobi that I was aware of. I've just recently reconnected or connected with several that are there. So it's been great to see how this practice is put into use all around the planet. MR: Yeah. I have a feeling like graphic recorders, visual thinkers, sketchnoters, a lot of times we fly under the radar. I'll kind of include myself. You know, that I think people are there, but you don't always know about them. And I think that's one of the things that IFEP is trying to do in connecting more professional graphic recorders and facilitators so that there is that community. And I think the sketchnote community is doing the same. That's part of the international Sketchnote Camps job. We run a Slack thing for Sketchnote Army where people can practice and chat with each other. we share activities and whatever's coming up as a way to kind of tie the community together. So I think there's always, I guess, more work to do in that area to help us be aware of like who's where because you know, we can help each other for sure. PD: I know going to one of these gatherings is like being a unicorn at the Unicorn convention where you're just like, "Hey, wait, I'm used to being the only weird one in the room, and now they're all bunch of us." MR: "These are my people." That's what I said. PD: Which is a combination of like excitement and like, "Wait, I wanna be special again." I was just on a call right before this conversation with an artist who had just learned about this field, you know, she's maybe mid-career, and was so excited. I gave her my philosophy, and it's to build on what you just said, Mike, is that the greatest competition that we have, if we're doing this professionally, is nobody knows what to call us. MR: Right. PD: That's number one. Like, nobody knows what Google. MR: Describing it. Yeah. PD: Like, guy who draws while people talk and has a little book. You know, they don't know what to call us. And then the other is just, if somebody has a negative experience. So if a client does, you know, try out a sketchnote artist, story boarder, you know, whatever visual part of the spectrum, designer, and they have a negative experience. That's really bad. So it's up to us— MR: You gotta overcome that. PD: You've been a big part of this, just, you know, helping people raise their awareness, their basic skill set, being super generous with your time and knowledge, and that just makes everybody smarter, faster, better, stronger, and have more fun. MR: Well, that's the hope anyway. You know, I kind of increase the awareness is part of what I like to do. And we can certainly always improve that. Always looking for opportunities. Well, this is cool. So this is what you do professionally. I know you do teaching, you have Rockstar Scribe, at least it used to be your teaching program. Is that still true? Is that something you offer? PD: Yes. Yeah. It's gone through, you know, it's ups and downs. As you know, you go into it thinking, "Oh, this is gonna be so much fun, and I'm gonna make so much money." But actually, you produce a product that you have to take care of, right? MR: Yes. Yeah. PD: And so, all the marketing and reinvention and everything. So sometimes I get tired, you know, and I'm off doing other things. But just recently with my friend Christopher Fuller in California, he's a long-time superhero of graphic recording and facilitation, we did a course in Houston, called Learn Describe, and it was basically us just kind of like bringing our toys over to each other. And it was like, "Ah, here's my Legos mashed up with your GI Joes. Let's make something cool." For me personally, that's the real pleasure is people in a room lots of different experiences, different ways that they want to apply this skill, insights that they have. You may have one or two people who are instructors, but we don't know everything, right? MR: Right. PD: And so, getting to learn with and from other people, and then seeing the confidence level grow because they already had it inside of them, they just didn't know it, or they were shy about it, you know, and you get to see them just get looser and more confident. And then to see people learn from each other— MR: That's cool. PD: - that's where the juice is. MR: I suppose, too, that you, being a professional graphic recorder, your engagements tend to be similar, right? You're going into a company event, you're going into a conference, and they tend to follow pattern, like they're structured in a certain way. I think the advantage of maybe doing a scribing thing like this would be, you might get exposure to like, what does it look like if somebody does scribing as an internal person inside a company to maybe pitch an idea or to build a PowerPoint deck or something, you know, integrated that way. That might be something that you don't really encounter much just because of the nature of the kind of things that people are willing to pay you for, where you could see that this can have an influence, you know, in different areas of the business. Is that something you encounter? PD: Yeah. It kind of depends on what world you're from or you're stepping into. So I think for a lot of people who grew up in some area of the arts, you know, it really doesn't matter. It could be theater, could be a 3D sculpture. When we see this being done, we're like, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense," right? 'Cause that's how we work. Iteration, sketch things out, try things, you know, show it to somebody. They're like, "I don't know about that." Then you recombine. And for people that don't just kind of grow up in that natural way of working, it seems really exotic. Correct me if I misrepresent your background, but you kind of came through this through your whole design UX? MR: Right. PD: Web design— MR: Exactly. PD: - path, just thinking with a pen, right? MR: Mm-hmm. PD: And blocking out images, text interfaces. MR: Right. PD: And so, that's what's really cool is to see that people come with different experiences from their different genre. Engineers are really cool to work with as well. Because that's like the four-dimensional thinking is what I call it. You know, they're able to think of stress levels on curvatures and screws. You know, that's not what— MR: That that's not what we think about, Peter. PD: Oh, I would put googly eyes on it and say, "There you go." Yeah, but one of the masters that I learned from early on, and this does come back to your point of being inside a company and seeing the rapid sketching is my first professional gig was as a temp worker where I was sent to an innovation center where a lot of my friends, you know, that we come out of that world, the accelerated solution environment, it's called lots of different things now, but it's basically people in the room trying to figure out software and how to make it work for a company. And one of the guys that was my heroes is Brian Kaufman, and he went to the Colorado School of Mines. MR: Oh, really? PD: He's a geologist. Yeah. He studied rock formations. And when he did drawings about strategy, about conceptual stuff, you know, it always had this time-based plus three-dimensional aspect that blew my mind. You know, I was just like, how does your mind even convert this abstract thinking into that? So there are lots of different family trees that bring us to this, you know, way of working. MR: And we can learn from each other, right. What you saw there, maybe in some situation, if you somehow could get, like even the high-level understanding what he was doing, maybe there's a way to apply it, you know, in your setting. Maybe not to the degree that he would, 'cause he's got a different frame, but there might be interesting things you could steal from that that would make sense in certain contexts. PD: Yeah. One thing I'd add that I saw him do that at the time was a magic trick to me was synthesis. One of the first experiences I had with him, there was this big 3D or three-day strategy session, and it was about software, software implementations, like SAP implementation for this multinational company. And so, people have been working in breakout rooms on flip charts and whiteboards for two days, and all that stuff was up. And he came late, he parachuted in and then just walked all the different rooms and like, took everything in, and then went off in a corner and just started making models, sketching out models that synthesized a lot of that different stuff. And this was overnight, it was like late into the evening. So the next morning he presented that back and there were a lot of jaws that dropped from his capability. But it's a tool, it helped advance the work. So then people say, "Yeah, those two spot on. This third one, you're missing this critical aspect." And then it became a dialogue, you know, and a collaboration. MR: Yeah. Opens up. Yeah. PD: I think that's where it becomes really interesting, where you're not an artist in a corner or off to the side or the back of the room. You're in dialogue with the audience building something together. MR: I think that's a challenge in some ways because we often think of the work we do as the dead end. I mean, we would call it a dead end, but it's like the summation, the ending point. And nothing changes it. I think that's can be—I know that from design side that when I include my customers, like when I used to do logo design or icon design, I sort of built this practice where we would have discussions in writing. So I would try to understand what they were trying to do, and they would see every sketch that I made, and I would put in the bad sketches and the bad concepts, number 'em, and then tell them, "Yeah, this is not gonna work, and here's why." And so, it became a conversation. It was a means to an end, which was the brand or the icon. And I've noticed that too, when I did it with software where the sketch was just the means to the end, which is the software actually working. We're just using this as a way to think visually as well as like, we can talk as a way to capture that. But it was never seen as the final thing that you couldn't—you know, it's not like some holy document. It's just another step towards the solution. And maybe after we use the thing for a while, even though we think we've solved it, we might have to go back to the whiteboard and draw like, "Hey, here's the problems. How do we solve these and make some revisions?" So thinking of it as more of a in progress document and a way to kind of further the discussion, like you're talking about, is pretty cool. PD: Yeah. Do you use Figma, or do you? MR: I have used Figma. I'm lately using UX Pin, but I've used other Sketch and XD. PD: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. MR: Similar tools. Similar tools. PD: I use Miro, you know. So it's— MR: I do as well. PD: So I think that that history of the iterations, super important. It's one of the things that I think generative AI shortcuts and becomes—and I'm not a doom and goner, I'm not, a like, "Uh, doh, doh." It's that it's so fast, and it looks so good, it looks so complete, but there was no process in the middle for the group to think through things. MR: Right. PD: And when you're using something like whichever tool we just threw out there, if you have that track record—and this comes from architecture and graphic design, having that big wall, right? Where you have everything up, you get to see the history where it went off the rails. You know, the end product may look great, but it doesn't work. MR: Yeah. PD: Or, you know, I forgot this key aspect of functionality or a use case or a user story that was like the whole point of building the software. So having that living memory is just so useful especially when the client has to bring their stakeholders along. So, as an example, I did a whole year-long project that culminated in just a two-minute explainer video, which looked really simple, but it was community health workers. And there were interviews that we did. There were multiple whiteboarding and post it notes sessions. There was writing scripts. There were creating version A, B, C, D, trashing them all, starting all over. And we have all that in a huge mirror board. And that's what I use and that's what the client sometimes uses to bring their funders along and some of the institutions that they need to convince to be a part of this is to say, "Here's the story, but here's how we discovered the story." MR: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's really important to remember. It seems like every discussion in this season sort of touches on AI somewhere. How could it not? It's in every part of our lives now, right, at this moment in 2024. And I think the thing that I think is—if you use AI in the, I guess, I dunno if there's a right way, but the way I think makes sense is in tedious things that don't benefit from you spending seven hours, you know collapsing Excel spreadsheets into something, right? That would be a great application for it. And it's bounded and limited, right. It's not asking it to invent something. Where it becomes problematic, I think from a skill maintenance perspective, is what you talked about, is like, if I go in there and tell it to do—it's like, take an example writing. I just wrote a post a few weeks ago about what it was like to be a designer in the pre-computer era. And I struggled with it. It took a long time. I had to fight with it and really struggle. I had to reorient all the information the right way. If I'd gone to check GPT for an example, and I asked it to write a story like that, you know, it would've taken away that whole process of like, what am I trying to say? What's the message? There's a bunch of stuff that I wrote, and I just threw it away 'cause It was like too much detail. No one's gonna care. It doesn't move the story forward. And I think the same too with like visualization. It's really easy to go prompt and like get really complex with your prompt, but again, you're not entering into this understanding with living with it and iterating. And you're sort of losing that. And I think that's where we have to be careful is not letting AI take over the thing that helps us maintain our creativity and our ability to see. I think sometimes, like you might be going one direction and then through this process you see like, "Oh, we have to change direction." You wouldn't see that if you just sent it off to, you know, some AI tool to throw something back at. You'd miss that and maybe miss these opportunities. PD: Another fun thing that I've discovered is zooming in on whatever the AI has, you know, created. So like crowd scene, if you start zooming in, like the faces just start to become horrific. What I've figured out is—I'm probably not the first person to figure this out, is it's really an expressionistic and impressionistic tool. MR: Right. PD: So just like, you know, when we do sketches, if you're doing a crowd scene, you don't draw every single detail. It's just the suggestion of a face or leg or arm or shoulder or whatever. And then the aggregate, our brains as the viewer, we look at that and say, "Oh, that's a, you know, group at a café, or whatever it is. And that's what it's doing with writing as well is like it feels like a professional whatever. But then you start like zooming in. Like, this is a weird phrase, you know, that people don't use. They used to use it in maybe 1900s, or whatever. A final little side note on the expressionistic part is I did a lecture for a group of retired business people. And I was just giving a overview of like, you know, here's some of the tools that are out there and some things I'm playing around with. And I showed this crowd scene of people in Houston. It was like, "Eh, that looks great." But then you start zooming in and went, eh, you know, all the jaws, all crooked and eyeballs are up there. MR: Yeah. Yeah. PD: I showed paintings from Francis Bacon. You know, Francis Bacon, the eagle? MR: Mm-hmm. PD: You know, and he did that on purpose. He'd painted like the Pope and it'd be all distorted and everything. And I was like, this is what artists do is, is we take snippets, we make suggestions, we use just enough information so that the brain fills in the rest. And that's what, you know, the computers and algorithm are learning from what we've done in the past. MR: Yep, exactly. Well, I would love to hear a little bit more, I'd love to have my origin stories in these and so wanna make sure we have an opportunity to do that. You're born in Kenya. So take us from that point till now. What directed you to the place where you are? 'Cause obviously you probably bumped into a variety of things. You talked about your dad wanting to be an attorney and finding out like, "Oh, this maybe not for me, and went in a different direction because of it." What are the things that happened to you along the way that brought you to where you are now? PD: Yeah. Well, just to finish up on my dad, fortunately he remained an attorney, but you know, he just took this turn over to Africa for a little bit was a teacher and then returned to the United States. I grew up in East Tennessee, in Knoxville, Tennessee in a leafy suburb watching those movies that are in the background on those posters down here. I'm a child of the late '70s, '80s, and drawing and doodling and cartooning and doing all that stuff, you know, watching a movie and then recreating it on paper and all that kind of stuff. And then, as I mentioned got a lot of support to go off to art school. Never got any pushback at all. And was really fortunate the school I landed in was a university. So we had to take courses outside of just, you know, the fine arts and illustration and graphic design. So I was studying history and biology. This was in the late '80s, early '90s, as the Soviet Union was falling apart and massive transition in Eastern Europe and the first Gulf War. I was the art director for a political magazine on campus. Which meant I did all the illustrations. So I had to practice, even though my name was next to everything, I would experiment. And it looked like 18 different people illustrated this monthly magazine. That was 'cause I was messing around, you know? I had different heroes that I was emulating, or I wanted it to look more like a wood cut, or this one more as like a super hybrid detailed drawing. And that was great practice because in illustration, you have an assignment, so you have an audience, you have a theme. You have a topic you gotta execute. If you're a good, you know, illustrator, you have your style. So you kinda have these five ingredients say you're working with, and you got a deadline. So that was great practice, you know, and sure enough, Mike, I don't know about you, you're probably a lot more well-prepared. Every single time that magazine had to go to print, all-nighter. It was just like all-nighter, every single time doing all illustrations. But great practice because I was working with writers, editors, the head of the magazine who was also a student, and learning to respond to other people's opinion. Then having to meet that deadline. So when I've graduated from school, I was super lucky. I applied for a scholarship, and you had to write an essay and submit work, it was a travel scholarship. So I wanted to go to Eastern Europe where all these changes were happening, and I landed in Poland. MR: Oh. PD: Yeah, I was in Poland and the summer that I arrived was the summer the Russian army was pulling out of Poland finally. MR: Wow. PD: So now we're like full circle, you know, with the Russians saying, "Hey, we made a mistake, we're coming back." That was a time where it was transitioning, and I was just trying to figure out what the hell's going on here. I'm not Polish, I didn't speak Polish. I was working in a school teaching English, but it was a school for local democracy. They were training young people to go into the local government, basically like state and regional government. And they were just, you know, learning the basic skills, computer skills, writing, all the economics. And then I was teaching English. Through that I was really trying to understand and document what was going on. So it was sketchbooks that became my main, just primary activity was just writing, taking notes, journaling, sketching, diagramming stuff out. The organization that I worked for, they saw these, and they said, "Hey, can we use that drawing to explain that these people who are coming in to talk about sanitation or, you know, tourism, what's going on? 'Cause it'll help us explain it." That was another pivot point. I was like, "Oh, these little notes I'm taking are useful for other people." That was like the first time my sketch notes were used by my client to just get people up to speed and, you know, codify a bunch of stuff. MR: Sweet. PD: So I'm gonna jump cut. That was like time outside the United States. When I moved back, I moved to Chicago and was temping making PowerPoints, not having a great time, professionally. Complaining a lot to my temp agent who is my age. And she got a assignment that she didn't understand. She's like, "I have no idea what this is, but it mentioned drawing. You seem to draw a lot. Young man. You show me your sketchbooks all the time, so go check this out." And it was an innovation center in Chicago. They were using, I think I just mentioned this a few minutes ago, they were doing SAP implementations. My mentor, you know, he parachuted in, but you're in software, so it's one thing in a design software, it's another thing to sell software and it's another thing to buy it and then make it work for your business. So that's what this large multinational company was doing, was helping people integrate this software into making their businesses more efficient. And so, it was kind of a line from that moment where this organization in Poland looked at my sketch notes and said, "Hey, can we use that to explain what's going on to these new people, to just being in the process." So listening to people present, talk, creating big drawings or small drawings. And then they were part of the churn. So it was just iterations forward, iterations forward. Well, after couple years of doing that and helping develop or open innovation centers in different parts of the world Including Europe and Australia, I just got burned out. For me, it was the same conversations over and over again. I did want to do more illustration, more storytelling and to kind of be out of that technical environment of implementing software. And so along with my—she then became my wife, with Diane. We started Alphachimp. Then we're in the crazy phase of building company, being freelancers, starting a family and building that up. So I've gone through a whole bunch of different phases inside organizations, starting a company, being in a independent, moving around the country a few times. And now, I'm really enjoying not having employees, not having a boss, but having a lot of friends that I have all over the world that I collaborate with. MR: That's cool. Yeah. That's kind of nice 'cause then, you know, if it's something you can do solo, you can just do it. And then if it's something that requires additional help, then you can call on your network and team up. That's kind of fun. PD: And I think because of the pandemic, it's just so much more fluid, you know? It's just with everybody being able to collaborate online. MR: Yeah. Yeah, especially with tools like you mentioned Miro makes some of that possible, and many other tools that make that possible too. PD: Yeah. MR: Wow. That's pretty interesting. And so, now you're still solo. You work with collaborators when necessary. I'm kind of curious, what are the kind of customers that you work with mostly? Maybe there isn't a group, maybe it's pretty varied. I don't know. PD: Yeah. Fortunately, it is varied, but I did spend about 15 years in healthcare. So for three years I was helping to run one of these innovation centers at Vanderbilt University. You and I ran into each other in Nashville, a time or two ago. MR: Yes. PD: I lived in Nashville for about 10 years, and through that developed deep relationship with healthcare. So that's one sector. And I also really appreciate how the medical mind works because when we were doing software in other parts of my life, people would say, "Well, it's not neurosciences, you know, and no one's gonna die if we get this wrong." Well, in healthcare, yes— MR: They do. PD: Yeah, neuroscience is involved and human longevity and suffering are at stake. I really like working with healthcare professionals of all different levels. Whether they're on the medical side or the technical side or system side, because they know that there's a lot of stake. It's very complex. And then right now I'm in Houston, Texas. I've moved here in 2001, in October 2001. This is the energy capital of North America definitely and the great energy transition is going on. So more and more I'm working with either companies that have a ESG or climate focused initiative. Last week I was working for a company that has 9,000 hotels, resorts, and properties. And this was with their engineers. I have to say it was 110% dudes. It was like big large men who have to keep the boilers going and the air condition going, and the water flowing. But they were implementing their net-zero promises, which are very difficult to do. MR: Yeah, it is. It's tough. PD: So that's the new world that I'm spending a lot of time in. MR: I spent a little time, like three years with Johnson Controls in that space. So worked with facility managers and kind of an unsung hero in a lot of ways. PD: Absolutely. MR: You do a lot to make you safe and secure and keep the building going, and you're sort of outta sight, outta mind down in the basement. So really important people for sure. PD: Yeah. MR: I don't know if any are listening to this podcast, but if they are, thank you for your service. PD: Absolutely. You don't think about 'em until something goes wrong. Then you'll be really glad when they show up. MR: That's right. Yep. PD: Yep. MR: Well, that sounds like a pretty varied selection of customers, and you've got challenges that you're facing for sure with, you know, climate shifting. I imagine with energy, you're talking about maybe a move from fossil fuels to solar and battery and electric power kind of things. And that's gotta be a huge shift to think about. You know, how long ago we developed the gasoline car network that we now enjoy, at least from a convenience perspective, to kind of ramp up, you know, EV charging at the same degree. It's gonna take a while. It's not gonna happen overnight, you know, and we realize it's been a hundred years or something of building that network to where it is now. It's not gonna happen in, you know, even in 5 years or 10 years, maybe not to that degree. PD: Yeah, and it's all the things. That's what I'm learning. It's not like, let's move to one thing, it's a total reinvention. MR: Yeah. PD: It kind of maps back to my first experience going off the Poland where there is a whole reinvention of everything, the economy, energy, power, the political system. And that's the unifying theme I think, at least in my life, is just trying to understand systems and visualize them so that people can make a decision about what to do next. And whether it's software or healthcare or energy, there's a lot of stuff, a lot of moving parts. MR: Interesting. PD: And there's a lot of them, just like you said, the engineers are invisible. A lot of these systems are invisible too. MR: Yes. PD: So that's what we can do as visualizers is help make that invisible system visible, or it is just so large we can't wrap our heads around. MR: Yeah. That's a really valuable place for us to be, is to sort of identify the unidentifiable or the hidden things and make them visible. That's pretty powerful in an in and of itself, I think. Well, I would love to shift now and talk a little bit about the tools that you like to use. We'll start with analog and then go digital. You sound like you're using Miro, so you're probably digital guy too. What would be some of the pens and paper, and you mentioned sketchbooks, are there favorite tools that you like to use that maybe somebody could get inspired to try? PD: Well, Mike, I've learned that if I buy something really expensive, I will lose it. So I went down the whole route of, you know, Lamy pens and all these different pens. So it's kind of like whatever pen I can get my hands on and find 'cause I keep losing them in my bags. And now here's the whole cupholder right here, just like randomness. MR: Oh, wow. Yeah. PD: Yeah. But yeah, Moleskines are still like the consistent primary tool. It's just got that perfect balance of weight of paper and thickness. It's like an heirloom object. You know, I would be shocked if anybody listening to this, it's like, "I'm gonna get rid of all my old Moleskines." Like, no way. I invested a lot of filling that up. So that's that is definitely a primary tool. I still work just in, you know, black and white, so just black pen and Moleskine especially for me. I went through this phase last three months of taking in a lot of information, so I was going to a lot of sessions, webinars. MR: I saw that. Yeah. PD: Yeah. And that's what I—you know, you're work is inspirational to me. I just was like, "I need to show this." You know, this is just these are my scratchy notes. They aren't even sketch notes. They're scratchy notes, you know? And it's not meant as a product to be displayed. It's me trying to remember stuff. So Moleskine, number one. Any sort of black pen that doesn't fade over time. So that was analog. And then Neuland markers. So when I'm working, you know, doing my professional thing, like that's the go-to. That's a family-owned business. And I think Guido is either second or third generation, Guido Neuland. They have the craftsmanship. They pay real close attention to their users who are us, and they're always like throwing out, you know, new products and super responsive. And they're sturdy. I have those pens. I've had 'em for a decade. I still fill them up. So just in terms of a footprint on the earth, you know, you buy it once, you refill it forever. MR: Yeah. Those are great, great pens. As far as black pens, if you did go to like a Walgreens or something, or an Office Depot, like is there a pen that you would sort of gravitate to? I tend to be the guy who's in, you know, Office Depot looking at the gel pens. And I like those because I feel like, I guess pretty much in any city that I'm in, if my pen craps out, I can go to a Walgreens or an Office Max and like find a replacement or something approximating it. Is there a favorite one there that if you had a choice, knowing that you would lose it anyway? PD: Well, my daughter is 16, and she is very put together. She's got all the—you know, everything's dialed in, color coded, sleek, and so she turned me on to the Sharpie gel pins. MR: Oh, really? Yeah. I think I've liked those. I've tried those before. They're quite good. PD: They're pretty good. It does depend on the paper. I have this weird notebook that's made of stone. Paper's made of stone. I don't know if you've played with that. And this stuff just, you know, it just bleeds, so. MR: Oh, really. PD: When I teach as well, Mike, both online and in person, I emphasize go with what's easy and available. You don't have to plop down a thousand bucks on the high-end stuff. So I'm still dropping by CVS, Walgreens, picking up Sharpie from the school supplies, you know? And then I have the kit, like the professional kit. MR: Right. It's got your Neulands and such in there. PD: Yeah. MR: Interesting. What about digital? I'm guessing you maybe use an iPad and a Pencil and some applications, or? PD: Yeah, and probably not gonna sound unusual if people listen to this podcast a lot, but yeah, iPad with Apple Pencil and Procreate or Virtual Scribing and Note-Taking. Those are the go-to. I keep things fairly simple. So I developed—I either stole, bought, or made my own brushes in Procreate. And I keep it really simple. So it's like four brushes just because the more choices, that's the more cycling time you have to, you know, make a decision and go back and forth. MR: Yeah, that's what I recommend when people shift from one tool to another is kinda limit the template size, limit your brushes, limit your colors so that you focus on very few and you don't have many choices. It forces you to really adapt to the tool. Then once you nail that, then maybe you can do some tweaking and stuff. And that seems to be a good— PD: Yeah, exactly. MR: - recommendation. PD: We're kind of sliding into recommendations, but that's one of the recommendations that I have is, you're doing this virtually for a client, just know what the pallet is and then in Procreate, you can make your own infinite amount of pallets. So I have a pallet per client or per event, and it's usually just based off their corporate colors or their logo or the event colors sampled from that. MR: We'll shift into tips then right away. That could be your first tip is, you know, create new palettes of colors for your events or your clients, if they're clients so you can keep them separate and go back to them. I do the same kind of thing. PD: Yeah. Let's see. I was supposed to have three tips, so that counts as one. MR: Yep. PD: The other tip is around ego and negative self-talk. So this is not about drawing, it's about that insecurity. We all have it. I have it every time. Especially if I'm standing up and they're proud people behind me. Like, how do you spell any word? I forgot English. I don't know how to write. You know, the first board is usually janky and kinda awkward because I'm nervous. MR: Getting into the groove. PD: I'm thinking about me, I'm thinking about the audience's perception. So that negative self-talk, it's always gonna be there. And just, you know, getting rid of it. Whatever rituals you can do to help with that. A lot of times just getting prepared, like tidying up or, you know, if I'm working on Moleskine, just writing the title, you know, date, all these simple things, it gets me outta my head and into my hand. MR: Into the mood. PD: And then the ears just like, you know, focused on the content. MR: I know a trick that works for me in that case is I tell the client and I tell myself, this is gonna be fun. I mean, I believe it. It's not like I don't believe it. But I think when I look at it as play and an opportunity to play around and have some fun, changes a little bit of my mindset. That often helps me. PD: Yeah. There's only been one time I almost fainted in front of a crowd. That was 'cause I stopped breathing. The audience, this was doctors, they had just come from a really serious, I think, budget conversation. They were all on suits. I was Captain Goofy at the front of the room, and I just turned and looked at them. And in that case, I was like facilitating and drawing. So graphic facilitation, and I couldn't get anybody to smile. I couldn't get like—and I knew people in the room, but they were thinking, they were like in their head and the whatever. And I started to get tunnel vision and I got really lightheaded. And there was a guy at the back who was videotaping, and after, you know, we wrapped in, I went back there and sat down. He is like, "Dude, what happened up there?" Is like, "Oh, I don't know, man." MR: I was freaking a little bit. PD: I almost fainted. But that's a fear response, right. That's me worrying about me. So we'll put that all in the bucket of tip number two. Whatever habits or ritual you can do to just get in the zone. Athletes do it too. You know, if you've gotta listen to music or pace around. And then tip number three would be, yeah, you're sharing your work as a gift. And it kind of ties into that self-consciousness from tip number two is some people are like, "Eh, I'm not really an artist." Or, "I didn't do that good." Or, "I didn't—" You know, it's like, look, this is a service, and if we're gonna help people move forward in their ideas or their progress or their process, this is a gift, you know, you're just offering. It's like, "Hey, you know, here you go." That's it. You know, you don't have to explain yourself or trash yourself. And the more you do that, the easier it is. You know, you separate your ego from your output. And that was that benefit of doing a call back to being in college where I had to like, pretend to be 18 different illustrators for that, know, political magazine. MR: Different styles. Yeah. PD: Yeah. I just wore that person. It's like, "Oh, I'm gonna be Alan E. Cober. That was one of my stars. You know, and do it in his style. So, you know, I'm saying you, I have to recognize I'm in a role and that role is service. I'm doing my small little part, and I'm giving back. And so just, you know, share your work. Austin Kleon, you know, he's got a whole book on— MR: Show Your Work. PD: Show Your Work. Yeah. MR: Yeah. He's great. Well, that's really fascinating to hear the tips that you have. And they're a little bit different than our typical ones. I really appreciate them. They're great. PD: I thought I was gonna be boring. Say what everybody else says. MR: No, this has been a lot of fun. Well, I just wanted to take a moment as we wrap up before we send people to places to find you, is just thank you for all the work you've been doing in the community. I know you've been a huge cheerleader for me and inspiration to me. When I see your work, I'm just always inspired to see the cool stuff you're doing lot. PD: Oh, man, that means a lot. MR: Yeah. So it's really cool to have people in the community that you can cheer for and you can see the work they're doing and just live through how they're helping other people. So thank you for doing that great work. PD: It's fun having friends, isn't it? MR: Yeah. It is very important. I think we need more friends. PD: Can I turn that into a tip? MR: Sure. PD: It's more like advice. Let's be positive out there, people. You know, it's hard for everybody. And so, that's one of the great thing, you've been a supporter of me. The people I respect they acknowledge that, "Hey, doing anything is hard, and here, somebody puts something out there, let's, you know, give 'em a thumbs up or a little added bonus." You know, all those whole comments like, "Hey, I really like the way you capture that metaphor, whatever." 'Cause We're all friends. We're all just still kids. We're just like, doodling. Like, "Hey, check this out." And you want somebody to go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool. Look at this." MR: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I think I go back to that we kind of have this idea that it's a zero sum game. That for you to win, that means I lose. Or if I win, you lose. I don't think it's that. I think there's so much opportunity, there's untapped opportunity for us in this space to help people visualize stuff to the point that we're not competing with each other really. We're really doing it together 'cause there's so much work to do. PD: We're competing against the robots now, Mike. MR: Yeah, exactly. PD: We all gotta stick together. MR: Yeah, that's true. Well, if someone wants to find you, what's the best place to find you, Peter? LinkedIn websites, social media, what's your thing? PD: Yeah, I think LinkedIn has really turned some sort of corner where it's actually been fun to hang out there. So I'm on LinkedIn. I'm just Peter Durand @linkedin/in/peterdurand. And then my website is Alphchimp. All one word, alphachimp.com. I am on Instagram, but I neglect it 'cause I'm just like, 'Beh." But that's @_alphachimp__. MR: Somebody got it before you did, apparently. PD: Yeah. I'm sure some like gamer kid, you know. This is how I use I Instagram, I follow artist-artists. So that may be tip number five is I look for inspiration outside. You know, from my friends, of course, but I look at street art. I look at old posters from 1900s. I look at Renaissance painting and illustrated books from the 1700s. You know, that's where I really get inspired is picking up visual language from artists and eras that aren't just like closely adjacent, you know, to the world I work in. MR: I think that's helpful. Well, five tips. Well, who would've thought, Peter— PD: Oh, bonus. MR: - when we started, you'd have to drop five tips in here. PD: Gotta pay extra for this podcast, baby. MR: That's right. That's right. Well, Peter, thanks so much for being on the show. It's been really great to have you on and to share your wisdom and some thoughts with us. For everyone who's listened, it's another episode of the podcast, or if you're watching another episode of the podcast, until the next episode, we'll talk to you soon. PD: Thanks so much, Mike. MR: You're welcome. | |||
| 11 Oct 2022 | Tanvi Agarwal pivots her way to visualization - S12/E02 | 00:47:35 | |
In this episode, I talk with Tanvi Agarwal about her winding career journey: from engineering to graphic design and then into visual thinking and illustration. Now she draws for a living, helping firms with visualizations. She shares her insights on following her interests to success and how her engineering and graphic design knowledge gives her an edge in her visual thinking. Presented by The Sketchnote Handbook’s 10th BirthdaySave 50% when you buy any two of the The Sketchnote Handbook, The Sketchnote Workbook, or The Sketchnote Handbook Video together with discount code HAPPY10. For details on the offer, visit: Offer ends December 31, 2022. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 23 Apr 2024 | Alan Chen is fueled by a passion for storytelling and art - S15/E08 | 00:46:45 | |
In this episode, Alan Chen, co-founder of Sh8peshifters, shares how his passion for drawing, comics, and film helps him blend sketches, human-centered design, and storytelling principles into clear, impactful visual solutions for his clients. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts' vector-based drawing feature gives you the power to adjust your drawings saving hours and hours of rework. Vectors provide clean, crisp, high-resolution output for your sketchnotes at any size you need s ideal for sketchnoting. SEARCH in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army Podcast You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the Podcast To support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike, and I'm here with Alan Chen. Alan, thanks for coming on the show. It's so good to have you. Alan Chen: Thanks for having me, Mike. I've been really wanting to meet you. MR: You as well. We were talking a little bit about meeting on LinkedIn and how that platform seems like it's become very visual. I've asked a few people wondering, "Is it just me? Am I following visual-thinking people? And so the algorithm is feeding me visual stuff," but I think I got the sense that there's some kind of a change happening on LinkedIn where visual people are actually having an influence on that platform. Do you sense the same thing? Or what's your impression? AC: Yeah, I definitely agree, Mike. I probably am much less active on spaces like Instagram where, you know, ordinarily you think illustrators might be sharing their stuff. But you know, I use Instagram, maybe just kind of like a place for references, whereas LinkedIn, I actually have a lot of interaction with people. I share things and I see amazing work from other practitioners. So, LinkedIn is definitely the spot. MR: Interesting. Okay, it's not just me then. Okay. Well, let's get this thing rolling. With every one of these interviews, I'm really fascinated about you. I want to understand who you are. So let us know who you are, what you do, and then jump right into your origin story. How did you get here? What were the things that shaped you? What were the events that happened that sort of directed you along the path to what you're doing now? AC: Awesome. I love the questions. I guess at my core, I would describe myself as the dreamer. Somebody who has endless passion and ideas for all things, you know, related to stories and art. You can probably tell I'm a bit of a geek. I love collecting comics, books, and toys, and, you know, that stuff's all around me, as you can see. And that's kind of rubbed off on my daughter Aria, who is probably one of my biggest sources of inspiration. She, mind you also takes visual notes and she's seven. I'll show them to you some time. MR: Okay. AC: Now, whether it's drawing, painting, writing, or making movies or sculpting, I find myself deeply interested in telling stories. And that kind of relates to the work that I do. 'Cause I'm also the co-founder of Sh8peshifters, which is a small visual communication agency based in Sydney, Australia. I get to use a combination of illustration, human-centered design, and storytelling principles to help companies improve the ways they communicate the way they solve problems. And, you know, generally to help them better understand their strategy. Now, in terms of the origin story, everybody loves a superhero origin story, right? Not a superhero, but I love superheroes. Now, I think I've loved drawing for as long as I can remember. I was a big fan of the '70s and '80s films like, you know, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and lots of horror films as well. And I also loved Superman, Batman, and, you know, all the kind of comic stuff. And the thing is, I used to sketch from you know, being inspired by all of these things constantly. One time, you know, if I think back to when I was little, I was left alone at home, and I ended up drawing an entire story across my living room wall in permanent marker. MR: Oh, wow. AC: My folks amazingly, they didn't absolutely lose it. They were in fact, kind of supportive, and they left the drawings up on the wall as a bit of a permanent fixture for a number of years until they renovated. So, it was really cool. Yeah, they're very, very supportive. But on the flip side, at school you know, this was the, you know early mid-'80s, well, my teacher in kindergarten at the time, she was the opposite. She was very much against drawing in her classroom. She said, you know, "Drawing has no place in my classroom." And every time she caught me doing it, she would cane me. MR: Oh, wow. AC: She would literally smack me across the hand. MR: Ouch. AC: Yeah. It was pretty extreme. But you know, that was her way of kind of communicating to me like, "Nope, don't do this". I was pretty lucky because in Year 1, my teacher was super supportive. She was a bit of a cool hippie kinda lady. She was like, "No, no, Alan, you express yourself. You keep drawing. Do not stop under any circumstance." So I'm very lucky that I had some people around me who kind of were really supportive. But I think, you know, when it comes down to it, I reckon all of this began because I recognize that I learn a little bit differently than other people. So when I hear things, when people share ideas, and when they speak, I have imagery instantaneously appearing in my mind. So I can see words as images instantly. But on the flip side, when it comes to me communicating those things in written format or in in more detail, it used to take me a long time to formulate these things. And I think at the time, my teachers would often describe me as being slow, or, you know, having head in the clouds, or they thought that I was not listening. But the opposite was true. I was listening and I was just trying to formulate my ideas. So I think, you know, these days we might call somebody like that being neurodivergent. It was almost like, you know, some form of dyslexia. I'm not exactly sure. I've never been diagnosed about it. What I used to do was, I would draw what I would hear, and I would sketch and take notes at the same time. Which we now call Sketchnoting. MR: Yeah. AC: You know, it wasn't so appreciated back then. And maybe because I was drawing it in my textbooks as well as my workbook, any surface that I could draw. And I was like, okay, this works— MR: Fair game. AC: - this is fine. Huh? Yeah, it's fair game. That's exactly right. So yeah, that's kind of where the visuals and the note-taking stuff actually began. But then, you know, fast forward a decade or two later, I studied fine arts at Sydney University for a year. But then I quickly left that when I found out about this place called Enmore Center for Design, which is a really cool design school here in Sydney. And I ended up studying there for three years. And I loved learning about type and layout. You know, and I learned how to use imagery with all of that. But to be honest, I found graphic design work kind of dull. It just didn't do it for me. What I really loved was probably the things that were linked to my childhood, which was, you know, making movies. I always wanted to make movies. And I applied to study at the Australian Film School, and I was really lucky to get in. And then I can say I found my passion, which was storytelling. The moment I was in there, I knew that this was the right kind of thing. And I guess you can tell, because it led to, you know, over a decade of me working in the film industry. I started off as a storyboard artist and a concept artist. So I did a lot of you know, rapid prototyping and illustration for directors and producers you know, who just like spouting ideas really, really quickly. And I just had to do things in a way that was fast and clear and concise. And, you know, then I moved into concept art for Hollywood films. You know, this is like designing cool things. I mean, I got to work on, you know, superhero films. Like, you know, the first two Wolverine films with Hugh Jackman, I was designing costumes and superpowers. That was kind of a bit of a dream job for me. MR: I bet. Wow. AC: Yeah, it was a lot of fun because, you know, you get to draw things that don't exist, right? And you're like, this is awesome. I think what that did for me was it helped me understand the fact that no idea, no thought was too complex. Nothing was off limits. I could draw anything you know, as long as I put my mind to it. So that was a lot of fun. But I think one of the things about you know, working in these creative industries is I constantly was seeking something new. So it was like, if I wasn't storyboarding or doing concept art, I'd be then doing production design or costume design. I even ended up, you know, becoming a director, producer, and writer myself. And I've done, you know, loads and loads of films. So I've probably worked in the way of hundreds of films— MR: Wow. Wow. AC: - over the last decade or so. And, you know, I even got my wife Anita working with me. So it was kind of fun. 'Cause, you know, the crew felt like a big family. And all the kind of different work, it kept me very motivated and excited. But the common thread was that no matter what I was doing, I always managed to incorporate illustration in all of my work. I think my drawing skills helped me explain complicated ideas. And it helped put everybody on the same page. It also helped me win pitches and get funding because I could express those ideas really clearly. MR: Yeah. Yeah. AC: So that was a big kind of an unexpected boost to my kind of abilities. But, you know, simultaneously alongside the filmmaking career that I had, I began lecturing at different colleges and institutions. You know, initially, because teaching was a really good way to fill in the gaps between filmmaking. 'Cause filmmaking projects are super unpredictable, you know? One minute you are working for 14 hours a day for three or four months. And then suddenly there's nothing for two months. So it's kind of crazy like that. I started teaching because it helped me fill in those gaps. But then I found that I really liked nurturing and mentoring students. I've ended up mentoring many students in different fields. And I taught illustration filmmaking, and design. All the things that I was actually doing, I was teaching. So, you know, I was trying to be very practical about it, and I was trying to, you know, bring in a sense of, okay, this is what the industry is doing. This is what I'm doing in the industry. This is maybe something that's useful to students. And everywhere I went, I was always rewriting courses. Like, oh no, this is too academic. We need to make this more, you know, hands-on, more practical. MR: Need some practical, yeah, exactly. AC: Yeah. Yeah. So it was a bit of a thread. And then I think it was like 2015 I was given the opportunity to lead the visual communication department at Raffles College, which is this big international chain of colleges. And it was kind of hard leaving the film industry 'cause I was in the film industry for a long time already. But being able to have an opportunity to create something completely new was also exciting. And I love change. So I was like, "Yeah, I'm there. I'm definitely there." And I also, you know, funny enough, I met my friend and Sh8peshifters co-founder Diana there as well. So it was really cool. It's like a, you know, serendipitous thing. Now, I guess the education thing was cool. It was fun, and it was really intense and chaotic for two years. But after two years, I actually stepped away and found myself in the world of management consulting and strategic design. So I worked with a cool strategic design agency called Tobias. And it was unlike anything I'd ever done before. And I got to combine all of my drawing and teaching skills along with—you know, kind of a deep understanding of how visuals work in a space where I could actually see it making a change in companies and, you know, in their customers. So it was like, wow, this can actually affect people in ways that I didn't expect. Prior to that, I was like, entertainment and, you know, just like crazy fun stuff. And I was like, wow, this is kind of grown up and, you know, didn't expect to be able to do this kind of thing and help people and, you know, be in these kinda serious environments. So my job description I remember was like a blank sheet of paper, and they were like, "Okay, we don't know how to use a person like you, so why don't you work out what you want to do here and, you know, we'll take it from there." Which was like music to my ears, right? I was like, "Yes." MR: Yes, totally you, yeah. AC: You know, totally me. Totally me. And I think I started using graphic facilitation in meetings kind of not instinctively, I've never been taught it. But that's just the way I teach at the college. So, you know, I'm always drawing things on whiteboards. You know, drawing diagrams and annotating, and I take notes really quickly on the fly, and then I draw another diagram to help explain what I'm saying. So it's just the way that I that I taught. So I did that a lot during client meetings, and then I started graphic recording. I was really literally thrown into the deep end because it was just like, "Why don't you try this at events? And, you know, have you seen this sort of thing before?" I was like, "What? What's this?" And yeah. And I think that was a lot of fun. I even went to the States and I visited Dave Sibbet, Grove Consultants in San Francisco. MR: Oh, yeah, of course. AC: Yeah. Yeah. I found out about them, you know, when I was trying to research what this field was all about. I actually got spent a whole day with Laurie Durnell. And we just got to chat about the finer points of how to make visual thinking and scribing a viable business, because I was just like, "So you can make a living outta this kind of thing." I didn't know that. And then I think when the pandemic came that's when I actually branched out and started Sh8peshifters with Diana. And the rest is history. MR: That's really fascinating to listen to your whole story. Like starting from, you know, writing a story on the wall of your living room or somewhere in your house to, you know, how it expressed. It seems to me that you're very much a generalist in a lot of ways, right? You like a wide variety of things. You like the new things, you like blank spaces, and you're able to kind of meld all these experiences as a fine artist, as a graphic designer, as a filmmaker, and then having teaching ability to kind of put all these things together to make sense for students. And then further, like, all those things sort of combine together to then do what you're doing now, helping businesses and people express. So it's really fascinating how you've sort of melded all this, your whole experience into like, it's all part of you. Which is not always true for everybody, right? They tend to go, I do this, I'm a stockbroker, and then I'm a baker, and then I'm a this thing, right? Like, very separate, you know career paths. And this one feels almost additive. It's like the ball just kept getting bigger and bigger until you had quite a wide variety of skills that you could spin and call on, you know, whenever you needed them. That's really fascinating to me, I think. AC: Yeah. Cool. Thanks for reflecting on that. Yeah, I think I've always enjoyed being able to just kind of create my own path. I don't think there was ever any clear pathway for what I wanted to do. And I think that's just what I like. I was like, "No path suits me, just fine." MR: Yeah. AC: In fact, you know, the first scribing gig I ever got was at the film school where I was lecturing at the film school, The Australian Film School, and one of my colleagues, an amazing writer called Mike Jones. He just said, "Hey, Alan, can you come along and do the thing that you do in classrooms with those students, but do it at a client space with me at this—you know, it was at a museum, Australian Maritime Museum. And I said, "Yeah, sure, but what do you want me to do?" He was just like, "Take their notes and chat to people the way you do." So that was it. I went into a room with, you know, museum curators and researchers, and we were talking, and I was just illustrating what they were saying, and suddenly the entire room was just filled, you know, from edge to edge with sketches. Because of that, there's a permanent exhibit now, you know, sitting on like, probably one of the most iconic parts of Sydney's Darling Harbour. There's this huge, kind of like a spaceship there, and there's an exhibition with all of my drawings— MR: Wow. AC: - kind of wrapped around it. So I was just like, "What? I did not know this could be a thing. This is amazing." That was my first gig, you know, as a visual thinker. So, it was kind of cool. MR: You mentioned too that you sort of didn't know about this space. Was that sort of the 10 years ago experience when you stumbled into this? What did your brain do when you like, "Oh, this is a thing?" That must have been really fascinating. AC: Yeah. I had no idea. Whereas Mike, he was saying, "Hey, I've seen these little clips on YouTube. You should check these things out." I was just seeing people drawing on whiteboards, and I was like, "Hey, that's the thing that's the kind of stuff that I do, except I never film it. You know, I'm just in a classroom doing it." And he was like, "You should do this, you know?" And so, I found out about visual thinking then. But I never really looked too far into it until I began consulting. And then the other guys that were with me at the company, they were saying there are people who actually do this in front of crowds. And I was like, "Wow, this is cool. I'd love to give that a go. I've never tried drawing in front of a big crowd before, but I'll give it a go." Trying something new was lots of fun, but I honestly had no idea that this could actually be a viable business. This was just so much fun. MR: Wow. Well, you know, there's always need for people to have their stories told. And I think, you know, having it visualized is really powerful, right? And especially in your case, you know, specifically, you were so quick and built all these skills for storyboarding and such that you could almost immediately take those ideas that are coming outta somebody's mouth and then turn it into an image of some kind. I wonder too, I haven't really talked about this before, but like, as someone's idea is visualized—you know, if, let's say, you know, you and I, we are skilled in visualizing our ideas. So we can explain and draw and we sort of bounce back. It sort of reflects what we're thinking and it changes what we think. I wonder, like, if people see that live in real time, it must change the way they think, right? Because they see this thing come to life and either they say, "Oh, no, I meant this thing." Or then they would build on it, right? So there's like, once you see it, you can now turn it around like three dimensionally and think about what's on the back and how does this impact this? And like, that reality helps you, I dunno, take it further. Is that a interesting or a realistic way to think about that? AC: Definitely. I think one of the things I always lead with when I facilitate you know, kind of ideation sessions is I always say, "I'm not here to be right. I'm just here to create things for you. It's your job to be right. You guys are the experts in your field. What I'm an expert at is eliciting ideas from people and kind of reflecting them back to you. So please don't feel like my drawings are the be-all and end-all. By all means iterate and continue doing that. And you'll get the best result when you actually do that." So I wholeheartedly agree that that is something that happens because of visual thinking, because of visual facilitation. And, you know, if more people do it, they probably understand how much of an impact it can have on, you know, improving your own ideas. MR: Yeah. I think that's a lot of why I like teaching people even the basics. Because even a rudimentary skill to be able to express yourself even badly, is better than no skill at all or to not try. So, you know, using simple shapes to communicate—it's kind of amazing when I teach this, like within an hour, even using simple shapes, people really feel more confident. It's weird. It's like, how is this possible that you could teach someone basic skills in an hour and they can already see an application? That's super powerful. And, you know, not everybody pursues it and really practices, but, you know, some do. And you know, if you're faced with a whiteboard in a meeting, you would feel maybe a little confidence like, "Well, you know, I'm just using these five shapes to build stuff." Right? It sort of reduces the pressure and it just becomes a way of thinking. So hopefully, we're making that impact on people as well when they see it. I think always there's the challenge, like, "If you're too good at it, then people think, oh, you're an expert. I could never be as good as you." I hear that all the time. And so I try to turn it around as quickly as possible. What was your experience being both an educator and then also someone who formed curriculum for students? How did you deal with that specific challenge? You know, "I'm not good enough, or I can't do what you do," kind of stuff. How do you deal with that? AC: Well, I think one of the things that I do is I show people how I started off. And I definitely did not start off as being really, really good. I don't think anybody starts off as being really good. You know, we are all in a way still kind of building up our own abilities. And I firmly believe that even as you said, even the most basic skill set can actually help you build this ability within you. Oftentimes, the way I kind of got around the "I can't draw" thing is there's a couple of icebreakers that I do with people. And those icebreakers, I give people very little information. It's usually like, "Hey, give me three things that you're interested in and just draw an icon that represents these three things." And then I say to them, "You've got a minute to draw this," and that's it, you know? And in one minute, usually people have three, sometimes five things. MR: Wow. AC: And you know, I'm always astounded. I'm like, "Guys, you got the brief. You get it. We're a visual tribe. This is what we do. And everybody can do it. I think you just need to be able to recognize it in yourself." So there are a couple of exercises I think that are really good to help people get around that fear of, "I can't do this. You are the expert." And they really work. I've tried them out for years and years, and they really do you know, warm people up really quickly. MR: The other sense that I have is like, the more powerful you are inside an organization, the riskier it is to draw. And the way I would explain that is like, say you're a CEO, let's say your drawing skills are not great. Like, there's a little bit of fear, like public speaking, that if I draw like a seventh grader, 'cause that's the last time, you know, when I was, you know, 13 years old, I'm gonna draw like a 13-year-old and that's embarrassing. So I don't want to do it. Or my ideas might be bad. Like, because you're not skilled in that skill, you're worried that I might, you know, say the wrong word or do something dumb and I'll look dumb. And I think some of it is just simply getting over the fear of like doing something and it being wrong, and that that's okay. Have you experienced that as well? AC: So much. The fear of failure mindset it's damaging. It's really damaging. I think failure is—you learn so much more from failure than you do from, you know, being in power or winning. It's something that I kind of try to teach my daughter a lot is not to worry if she makes a mistake. Not to worry if she draws outside of the line or, you know, just, just to keep going. So yeah, I experienced it a lot. Actually, Diana and I recently—not recently actually it would've been about a year ago, we ran a workshop for CFOs. And, you know, these are people who understand finance really well, who understand tables and columns really well. But we showed them how to use columns in a way that they'd never thought about. And it was a lot of fun because, you know, I think they started off thinking, "Hey, what are you guys gonna show us about columns that we don't already know?" We just think about these things slightly differently. So there were a lot of fun simple drawing exercises for, you know, people who are you know, sitting in the c-suite and who've never really had to do this. And then suddenly, they're able to communicate to their team so much more effectively. The results that kind of came out of it were really amazing. And I think we're very grateful that we had that opportunity. MR: And I think that's where our calling is, right? I always think of like, all the opportunity for everybody in this community is that there's so many people that feel like they can't do it. Like there's an opportunity to even move them one step forward to like, I can do basic stuff maybe for some people in their life that's good enough, right? That's all they really need. Like a CFO being able to do simple drawings that communicate, you know, 50 percent better is like a huge forward jump, right? So that's kind of where the opportunity lies, is moving people from zero to one, and then some people will take off with it, right? Maybe there's a CFO who secretly loves art and is just visual and never felt like the permission to express themselves. And this might be the little spark that sort of kicks that off for all we know, right? So it's really interesting opportunity that we have before us for sure. AC: So much. That's right. MR: Well, we've kind of gone off on this philosophical discussion, but I've loved it. I'm trying to do more of these as we get to the end of the origin story. 'Cause I think it ties in there and it sort of relates to application, but what I'd really like to hear is what are some of the tools that you like? And we'll start with analog and go to digital after that, because it seems like I always discover some funky tool that I'd never heard of. And by tools, I mean like pens, pencils, brushes, notebooks, paper, any kind of stuff that helps you communicate. And that, in the analog space. And then of course, if you use some digital stuff, it'd be interesting to hear the tools you like there. AC: Cool. I think it's a general rule. I never leave home without a sketchbook and a pen. Never. My default sketchbook is I think a four and a half by seven-inch Moleskine. So that's like roughly A5, you know, according to Aussie stuff. And I always carried with me a Steadler 0.3 fine liner as well as, I don't know if you've heard of these but a Zig Art and graphic twin brush pen. They're these Japanese pens that are just amazing. I love the ink. The other one that I love to use is the Zig Kuretake number 22. And I'll share these with you later if you like. MR: Okay. AC: But these things, I find like there's a combination of, you know, tight stuff where I can write really crisp things and I can kind of draw almost diagrammatic stuff. But I love the brush pens, because I love to draw. I love to paint. So the Zig pens are really loose and they're very easy to use for me. The other thing I carry around with me usually when I go traveling though, is a small postcard-sized watercolor pad. As well as a pentel aqua brush. These ones are amazing because you can fill them up with water or ink. And then if you use dry watercolor pigments, you can do some crazy paintings with very little mess and, you know, very little fuss. And that's kind of why I like it. So I can sit by a poolside, I can sit on a train, and I could do a watercolor painting really quickly, and, you know, not take up much space. Yeah. So, I also really think paper is king, especially if you are building skills because these skills can actually carry across to digital. But the other is the other way is not true. So digital skills can't carry across to analog, but analog does for both. So it's awesome. In terms of digital tools, nothing really exciting, to be honest. I have iPad pro, Apple pencil, Procreate that does 90 percent of the lifting for me. The other thing, obviously if I have really large artworks like murals and, you know, things that are kind of wall sized, which I occasionally do I go straight to, you know, Photoshop and like my huge, it's called a Humion Kamvas. It's like a 22-inch massive screen that I can draw across. And it's really nice. I guess the iPad is probably the easy pick in terms of the digital tool, probably for most of us 'cause it's fast, right? Like, you just open it up and within seven seconds you can actually start drawing, which is almost as fast as when you start drawing in a notebook. Almost as fast. MR: Yeah. It's close. AC: Yeah. So that's close, you know. But the digital stuff I think is pretty predictable, right? I can see why you're more interested in the analog tools. MR: Yeah. I don't know that I've heard of Zig markers. Now I'm curious. I think I have to go to someplace and find them. And I've seen the dual tip, so I'm guessing is one side a brush and the other side a point or something like that? AC: Yes. MR: Or are they two? Okay. AC: That's right. Yeah. MR: You said the colors you like are? Did you say gray and black? Are those the two or do you typically carry gray in a color? What are the two colors? AC: I've got gray but I also carry pink. I think pink is probably one of my favorite colors to use just because it's difficult, actually. It's difficult to use because I like using it in its most rich form. So fuchsia and bright pinks. And adding that into graphic recordings or sketch notes can add like this crazy spark. So when you see, you know, pink or orange or, you know, these vibrant colors, they suddenly pop and they kind of really catch your eye. So I'll share with you the exact pink shade I use. MR: Yeah, we'll definitely put it in the show notes so you can go check those out. In the same way, I love, Aqua. Bright Aqua and Orange are my two—I love those together, and I like them individually. AC: Oh, that's awesome. MR: Yeah. So those are sort of my signature colors. I guess if I were to say signature. We're sponsored by the app Concepts on the iPad, but I think it's actually a really interesting tool because as an Adobe person, you might be kind of curious to play with it. It's vector based, so it's got all the brushes and all those things, but you have an infinite canvas. So like you talked about your large Photoshop thing, it might be interesting to explore that, which you can just open it up and just start drawing. Like on your living room wall, right, just keep drawing and keep going in all directions, which I've been exploring that app, in addition to them being a sponsor, it's actually a really fascinating app. And might be something worth exploring that might have some unique capabilities worth checking out. AC: Yeah. I'm always keen to try out something new. I think the reason I've stuck with Photoshop is, you know, in one sense is just because it allows you to do kind of crazy things like oil painting kind of style stuff. You know, so I love that sort of thing too, so but I'd be keen to try out something like Concepts. MR: Yeah, that'd be cool. You know, the other thing I would say too is I am a believer in using the tool you know, best. So, as an example, when I wrote my book, at the time, I was really heavily into Photoshop for UI and UX design, and I had the opportunity to use a Adobe's page layout program. I can't think of what the name of it is. And I had to, for the front and the back matter, but for the guts of the book, I actually laid out and did everything in Photoshop because I was so fluent in it. I knew that I could be fast. There was a speed advantage by using this familiar tool. I didn't have to think about stuff. I just did it. It just happened and I could work with it. I was working with it all day during the day. So at night, I use that tool to kind of accelerate that process. So I think there is something valuable in an a known tool where you don't have to think about it. And that's where that would come back to pen and paper. There's very little that you have to know about it, right? Once you have your tools, they kind of work the way they work, and then you can sort of forget about the tool and now focus on the content and thinking and visualizing and stuff. So that I've noticed as well. AC: I think that's the key, Mike, is forgetting about the tool. Like the tool's almost unimportant, right? It's being able to come up with the idea and just finding a way to be able to execute that. So yeah, whatever, whatever tool kind of gets you there the quickest and with the least mental fuss is the one that you should probably go with. MR: Yeah. Definitely. Well, let's shift into tips now. I asked our guests, imagine someone's listening, they're a visual thinker, and maybe they're in a rut, maybe they just need a little inspiration, maybe something practical or something to kind of spark them, what would be three things you would tell that person? AC: Sure. I think one of the things I often say is whether you're starting out or whether you are, you know, somebody who just wants to improve you, let's say you're already you've already got a significant amount of skill and you wanna improve, I always say to people aim for your creative minimum. And what I mean is most of the time, you know, when we set out to learn new skills, we place this high expectation on setting aside time, you know, in the hope that our skills build as quickly as possible. It's the same, you know, if you go to the gym and you beat yourself up, if you're not going every day or something like that, and you skip a session, you'll feel like everything's derailed. But the truth is, I feel like any skill visual thinking takes, you know, a good deal of time to actually hone. So don't aim for Spartan levels of training instantly. I feel like instead, you should start out by drawing for at least two minutes a day. It's actually so much harder than it looks, but if you keep it up, the results will definitely speak for themselves. Another tip I would say is practice on paper more than on digital, if you can. Paper doesn't allow for undoing. So this is actually so much more valuable than people realize, because when you make an error, you actually get to see them, and then you could collect them, and then your mind gets a chance to register them as an error. And then you can make actually a conscious decision about how you wanna adjust that error. But when you undo something, you actually don't have the benefit of seeing the error and you're so much more likely to make the same mistake over and over and over again. So yeah, definitely analog over digital is one thing. And, you know, I think, as I said before, analog skills, they carry over to digital because analog skills are hand-eye coordination skills, but digital skills don't carry across the analog. And, you know, I've even found myself sometimes when I'm sketching stuff, you know, on paper, like double tapping the paper to try to undo something, and I'm like, "What am I doing? This is insane," you know? So, you know, it builds bad habits if you're doing that. Fortunately I don't do that too often, but like, I have found myself doing that once or twice, and I just have a laugh at myself. The other tip that I would recommend is to try to link your habits. What I mean is okay, let's take for example, sitting down. Most people sit down a lot, whether it's for, you know, a meeting or a coffee or a meal. I think sitting down takes up probably half of our waking time. So if you can link sitting with sketching, I think you've already solved half of your dilemma. Now the trick is, if you can have a sketchbook that you can bring with you on your body without it being a hassle, you'll reduce the level of difficulty by a lot. So small sketchbooks, I think, are the way to go. And then I always say keep like a felt tip marker or a ballpoint pen, or anything you can write with on you so that it makes that habit easier to actually achieve. MR: Those are great tips. It's interesting you mentioned the last one. I just recently, I sort of got out of the habit of carrying a sketchbook and I just started doing it again. I had a little leather case made for a field note size, just roughly three by five inches. I don't know what that is in the A6 or something like that, but it's a little pocket-sized. And, you know, most of the time I don't draw in it, but there's something comforting when I touch my leg and I feel that notebook. And I always have a pen with me. The feel of the notebook and the pen, and know that at any time I can bring out a notebook and I can capture an idea wherever I am, which is really great. And the other tip that I'll tell people is if you have young kids like I do when you're in a restaurant waiting for your appetizers, you're waiting for your meal, I play the game with my sketchbook where I'll do a scribble and I'll say, I'll make the kids make something out of it. So, and then they get to scribble and I've gotta make something out of it. And it's a nice way to pass the time. You're not on screens, you're having fun together, and it's a bit of a game. And then suddenly, hey, you know, the time has passed and the appetizer's here. So it can have some side effects as well for your kids in a positive way. So, an extra tip from Mike. AC: I fully agree with that. My daughter and I call that game squiggle master, so we— MR: Oh, there we go. AC: - we do that a lot too. MR: Yeah. Cool. AC: We play that. Yeah. Yeah. So definitely, keeping it on you is useful for more than one thing, right? MR: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Well, Alan, this has been so much fun. Tell us what's the best place, obviously, it seems like LinkedIn is one place to find you, and we'll have a link to that. Are there any other social media places to go? What's your company or personal website that we can check out and reach out to you if we want to? AC: Okay. Well, as crazy as it sounds, I'm not super active online. The best place, as you said is LinkedIn. So I periodically share the stuff that I'm working on. So I get the opportunity to do some really cool and unusual projects, I think, as I'm sure you do, you know, doing this kind of interesting job that we have. So LinkedIn's probably the best place to connect with me. But the rest of the links you know, I think for my website, it's sh8peshifters.com. And for whatever reason, I think Diana and I, we went with instead of Sh8peshifter with an A, we went with an eight. So it's Sh8peshifters with an eight.com instead of an A. So, I don't know, it's kind of crazy. I also do stuff on Instagram, but it's kind of personal art stuff. So I mean, people could find me on that. Again, I'll share it with you. The other link that people might find interesting is the link to Sketch Lab, which is where we share all of our teaching stuff. So it's called Sketch Lab Online. Diana and I have created one course on there, which is visual thinking kind of like a beginner's course. It's kinda loaded with all of our kind of personalized tips. Yeah. So it might be a good place to start. We're just terrible at actually marketing the thing, but there's a full course there. I think I've written three whole visual communication courses for at universities. So we do have a lot of experience doing it, but we're just awful when it comes to marketing, like, "Oh yeah, we've made this course. It's gonna do its thing on its own now." MR: You guys are too busy doing projects to think about that stuff. I suppose, so. AC: I think that's our excuse. MR: Is that the old adage, "The cobbler's children have no shoes" kind of thing, right? AC: I think that's it. Definitely. MR: So busy making shoes for other people that your own kids don't have shoes or something. I dunno. Something like that. Well, Alan, it's been so much fun to get to know you and have you on the show. Thank you for the work you're doing in Australia and in the world with all kinds of people, all the influence I'm sure you've had with students, all the influence you've had on the media that we love, like movies and stuff, and for sharing your experience. It's so good to have you as part of the community. Welcome to the community, and thank you for all that you do. I'm really happy to have you as part of this community. AC: Thank you so much, Mike. I'm really glad I finally got to meet you and finally got to actually put a face and a voice to the person whose book I've been recommending for the past eight years. So, yeah. Thank you. Thank you for having me. MR: You're so welcome. And for anyone listening to the podcast or watching it on YouTube, this is another episode. Until the next episode, talk to you soon. | |||
| 01 Nov 2021 | Ben Norris sketchnotes for meditatation - SE10/EP09 | 01:00:11 | |
In this episode I talk with Ben Norris, a software developer, sketchnoter, mental health advocate, blacksmith, a loving husband and father of 7. Ben shares his passion for mental health, and how sketchnoting is a meditative practice he’s used to support his own journey with ideas for you too. Journey along with us on this thoughtful discussion. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Draw and take notes with liquid pens, markers and brushes in your favorite Copic designer colors. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. Drag and drop images onto the canvas, and use layers and grids to organize your creative space. When you’re ready to share, export straight to your friends or team. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 15 Feb 2021 | John Muir Laws on Nature Journaling - SE09 / EP03 | 01:24:21 | |
In this episode hear the passion of John Muir Laws, a scientist, teacher and author who helps people forge deeper, more personal connections with nature through keeping illustrated nature journals. John and I talk about how he entered into nature journaling, the importance of parents encouraging kids to explore their interests, ways sketchnoters and visual thinking can enter into nature journaling, and more. This is a fantastic interview I know you’re going to love! SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by The Sketchnote Ideabook, the sketchbook designed for sketchnoters. Equipped with a no-bleed, now show through paper, The Sketchnote Ideabook can take almost any marker or pen you can throw at it. Save 15% on your entire order of Sketchnote Ideabooks and Autoquill Pen sets at the Airship Store when you use code IDEABOOK15 through April 30th, 2021. To claim your 15% off visit airship.store today! RUNNING ORDER
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 20 Sep 2021 | Dario Paniagua talks metaphors - SE10/EP03 | 01:06:56 | |
In this episode I talk with Dario Paniagua, visual thinker, coach, and ex-advertising agency veteran. Dario’s mission? Helping amateur scribes become professional visual thinkers with his courses and his coaching. You’ll hear about his journey out of the agency world into visual thinking. You’ll also learn about his courses that help you create metaphors without using cliches — and how his coaching is tailored to his students. This is going to be a fun one, so don’t miss it! Sponsored by the Sketchnote IdeabookThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by The Sketchnote Ideabook, the sketchbook designed for sketchnoters. Equipped with a no-bleed, now show through paper, The Sketchnote Ideabook can take almost any marker or pen you can throw at it. Save 15% on your entire order of Sketchnote Ideabooks and Autoquill Pen sets at the Airship Store when you use code IDEABOOK15 through December 31, 2021. To claim your 15% off visit airship.store today! Running Order
10% OFF METAPHOR MEMBERSHIP FROM DARIO!Dario has kindly re-opened enrollment to his Metaphors Membership and you can get 10% off for the first year. Use code: SKETCHNOTEARMY on the checkout page of the Membership Plan you choose. https://www.dariopaniagua.com/metaphors-euro-membership Move quickly! This offer lasts until Thursday, September 30, 2021! LinksAmazon affiliate links below support the Sketchnote Army Podcast.
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 21 Mar 2023 | Katrin Wietek - who you work with is more important than what you work on - S13/E01 | 00:56:32 | |
In this episode, Katrin shares how working on personal branding and marketing as a university project launched her sketchnoting career and increased her visibility on LinkedIn. Sponsored By ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts, a perfect tool for sketchnoting, available on iOS, Windows, and Android. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you to sketchnote in a defined area while still enjoying infinite space around it — to write a quick note, scribble an idea or to keep pre-drawn visual elements handy for when you need them most. The infinite canvas lets you stretch out and work without worrying if you’ll run out of space. When combined with powerful vector drawing that offers high-resolution output and complete brush and stroke control — you have a tool that’s perfect for sketchnoting. SEARCH “Concepts” in your favorite app store to give it a try. Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey everyone, it's Mike and I'm here with Katrin Wietek. How are you doing, Katrin? ** Katrin Wietek:** I'm really good and I'm really honored to be on your podcast today, Mike. MR: And it's so great to have you. I'm excited to hear your story and all the things you have to share with us. But first, I understand that you have a nickname, Kat, and I would love to hear what's the origin story of the nickname. KW: Actually, in 2014 and 2015, I went for a work and travel year in New Zealand. I'm originally from Germany. And I decided I wanted to go to the place that's the furthest away from Germany, and that was New Zealand, and it was also beautiful on top of that. I worked at a little cafe restaurant thingy and there was another employee from Germany and her name was Karina, so Karina in English and our boss, he switched up our names all the time. And then one day he said, "You know, from this day on, I'll call you Karina and your Kat." From that day on, with all my English-speaking friends, I stuck with Kat, basically. So yeah, that's how Kat came to be. MR: Oh, that's great. You probably know how to make a really good flat white then, I suspect if you worked in a cafe in New Zealand, eh? KW: My barista skills came a little bit later. They didn't trust me with the coffee machine. I was basically waiting tables and getting orders in and working on the till and everything. But a little bit later I was finally taught how to do coffee MR: Oh, good, good. I'm glad to hear that. That's very important. If you go to New Zealand, you have to have a flat white, I think, or Australia. KW: Or Mocha. MR: Mocha, yeah. KW: Don't forget the Mocha. MR: That's my wife's favorite drink, so she would be happy to hear that. KW: Nice. MR: So, hey, let's get started. I am really curious to hear your story. You've hinted as we've gotten ready to begin that you have an interesting one. Tell us the story of how you ended up—well, actually, let me back up. I think I'm jumping my own schedule. Let's first understand who you are. Tell us who you are and what you do, and then you can jump right into your origin story after that. KW: Okay. As a profession, I would say I am a content marketer by day. I work in B2B content marketing, part-time. And then I'm also self-employed. I do freelancing work. And that's not only sketchnoting and illustrating, but a whole range of copywriting and social media work. I have a really diverse career, I would say. MR: Oh, that's great. Obviously, the place that I've found you and I've seen you do most of your work is LinkedIn, which is fascinating because as social media goes, I've actually been more attracted to LinkedIn in a lot of ways because the quality just seems like it's a little bit better and there's, I guess a little bit fewer ads. I don't know, they all seem overloaded with ads to me, but I know that Instagram has a strong community around sketchnoting, but I'm starting to see, and the thing I don't know, is on LinkedIn, is it because I'm following so many visual thinkers that my feed just seems loaded with visual thinking? Or is it actually a trend in LinkedIn? It's probably more likely the former, in that I've sort of made a little bubble for myself. But I would love to hear, a little bit of your thought on LinkedIn and the work you do there specifically. KW: I think LinkedIn is a platform where visuals work really, really well. I think part of that is that the platform is not like as visual as Instagram or Pinterest, for example. Because on Instagram you had this buildup, every visual had to be better than the other one. And people are just used to beautiful pictures and really good infographics and everything. And a lot of the content on LinkedIn is still text-based. So, I think once you add a really cool picture that's not a selfie, that actually drives value, I think that's why they work really well. And also, because LinkedIn is a bit more similar to Facebook and the way that if somebody comments, this comment pops up in your timeline if you follow the person. It's a lot easier to be discovered by other people on LinkedIn. Especially, when I was posting on LinkedIn, I did a lot of career content, and that's perfect for the platform. You know, it's a whole like strategic networking and the career world, if you do content in that area. I think that's just pre predestined for LinkedIn. And I would say yes, you live in kind of a bubble, but I think the amount of visuals and infographics and sketchnotes is definitely increased over time. I think when I started doing it, I didn't see a lot of work like that, but who was already on the platform at that time was Tanmay Vora. I think you know him. MR: Oh yeah, yeah. KW: I saw his schedules a lot. And now it's gotten a lot more, which is cool. Oh, and you also see a lot of the explained ideas visually on LinkedIn, really small graphics where it's just a simple idea. There are a few people who do that and they are all over LinkedIn. MR: Got it. My screen up has one of your more recent sketchnotes, my takeaways from the LinkedIn algorithm report. So maybe I need to look at that sketch note and sort of understand what's going on and then I adjust accordingly, right? Yeah. KW: Yeah. It will be a lot quicker than reading the whole 50 or 60-page report. MR: Which is the beauty of Sketchnoting, right? KW: It is. MR: That's really great to hear. All right. So, we know what you do. Go into your origin story. It sounded like you had a really interesting history before, to kind of bring you to where you are. I'd love to hear that story. KW: The story's actually a little bit longer, so sit back. MR: Go for it. We have time. We have plenty of time. KW: I started thinking about what you said, like, was there a moment in my childhood or in my school life? And I wouldn't say not really, but I always had really neat school notes. Because when I had a messy note from school, I wouldn't learn from it. I always needed to make sure like my handwriting was nice and it didn't look messy. And I also remember color coding different topics. For example, we did the democratic system in Germany or whatever, and then it had like yellows, oranges, and reds throughout the whole topic. And then for another topic I chose, I don't know, blues, purples and dunno. So that helped me. At that time, I had no understanding of graphic design or how color theory works, but I did that just intuitively. I would say I was never really good at drawing in school. Arts and drawing always can really hard. And it wasn't until I discovered the internet and that I could like retrace work of other people, that helped me understand and get better at my art skills I also remember one funny story. It was actually during my A Levels. In the German language class, we were very required to read all those classic, like all these classic books from good and so on. From the 1700 and 1800s. And I hadn't read a single one of them for my A Levels. During the years, like the grade 11 and 12, it was I think, I never read anything and then I kind of panicked. What I did was I looked up the Wikipedia summaries, and I couldn't memorize any of it, so I drew little comics. So, I had like gorgeous work and like a little scrappy comic. And then all these other people's works, I basically just looked at the comics the whole time when I was on the bus and when I was at home. I never had read these books because I had so much other stuff to learn. I think that's maybe when it started and when I found the power of visuals and with my really neat school notes that I had drawn. I think that's how I came to be. I'm not sure if it was you who I found first, but I think actually it was Eva-Lotta Lamm— MR: Makes sense. Yeah. KW: Who I found first because it was in 2015, I would say when I finished school, she did like a travel diary consisting out of sketch modes from her around the world trip. And I thought that was so cool, so incredibly cool. I was really inspired because I'd also like traveled and I thought, "I wish I had known it before then." And I think that's when I googled the term sketchnotes and then your book popped up. "The Sketchnote Handbook." I think at that time it wasn't available in German or maybe it was, but I ordered the English version on Amazon. Then I read through it and I did some of the exercises and then I forgot all about it. I got busy because I started a degree. After school I started my degree in digital media and I was actually working in software development at the same time and I was doing user research user experience design, I think what you are doing right now as well, Mike. I forgot about the sketchnotes, but what I always had to do at work was like facilitate workshops. I worked a lot on flip charts everything and I always was really invested in making those flip charts look really, really nice and really cool and really clean. During the whole degree I forgot about the whole sketchnote thing. When I finished my degree, I was little bit lost a because I knew what I was doing before. I wasn't sure if I wanted to pursue that as a career and I wanted to know maybe there's other stuff out there as well. I decided I wanna take a break between my bachelor's and my master's and I got a part-time job and I decided in 2019 I was gonna do 12 creative projects. Each month was one creative project. That's when I remembered that I had your book at home and I was like, well, in January, let's start with the sketchnotes because I really wanna get better at them. And I've never got into them and never had finished any work. January was sketchnotes. I basically listened to podcasts about topics I was really interested in at that time. So that was personal finance. I was teaching myself a lot about finance and what to do and taxes and what not to do and also health topics. From a research perspective, how do I live a healthy life? Like what do I need to do? What should I eat? How much should I sleep? How do I reduce stress and everything? Mental health was really big at that time. I listened to all those podcasts and I basically turned them into sketchnotes to just memorize all the information that I heard on all the podcasts. I started posting them on Instagram. Basically, you set up a whole new account, said, "Hey, here's my 12th creative project." If you scroll down, you can still see the announcement. Then basically just posted all of the sketchnotes. It was really funny because one of the—oh, and what I wanted to say, one of my core values in life is lifelong learning. And I think the sketchnotes tie in really well with that because they help you so much with learning because you're visualizing the information and it helps you memorize it, it helps you retrieve it. That's why I picked it as a first project. Actually, I did one sketchnote about mental health and nutrition, what are important nutrients for the brain. It was a podcast with a nutritional psychiatrist called Drew Ramsey. He was from New York. I did a sketchnote. I tagged him, didn't expect anything of it, but he saw a sketchnote and he loved it. He was like, "Oh, this is so cool." At that time, I had maybe done, I would say 10 sketchnotes in total. MR: Oh wow. That's pretty good. KW: Yeah, I know. He was like, "I have this research about— In his research he identified 23 nutrients that are important for the brain. And he was like, "Do you wanna do a sketchnote on each of them?" I was like, "Okay. I'm not a freelancer, you know, I've just only started this, this is a hobby actually I have a February project coming up." I was a bit confused, but I said yes because I like to do things that terrify me. At that time, my process was still really, really basic. I was basically what you describe in your book, I don't know the two-way technique. I basically had a piece of paper, I drew everything on pencil, erased a whole lot and then rearranged it and I had the whole pencil thingy, then I retraced it with a pen, then I erased my pencil lines, then I scanned it, then I put it in Photoshop and made it look really neat. That's what I uploaded. That's also what I did for Drew Ramsey, so it was really tedious. It took a lot of time to do the 23 nutrients. MR: I bet. KW: Yeah. And I can tell you I never got around to doing the another 11 project of that year because Drew was really happy and then he came to me and he said, "You know what? I'm writing a new book. Do you wanna illustrate it?" I was like, "Oh my God." MR: That's great. Scary but great, right? KW: It was really scary. I think there was a lot of serendipity involved in that whole story because I basically had just started, it was just to figure out what I wanted to do with my creative life and with my career. And it was just one project of many projects. I had so much cool stuff coming up. I wanted to do product design and videos and editing, but I got stuck with the sketchnotes. And the book was really cool. The topic was "Eat to Beat Depression and Anxiety." So basically, the nutrients that are important for the brain and if you suffer from certain mental health conditions. Drew was super cool. He was writing the script at the same time and he always sent me the script and he basically said, "You have full creative freedom. You can decide what to make a sketchnote out of. Here's the script. You can decide how many sketchnotes you wanna make." I can remember I got—because he published a book with Harper Collins and they sent me this whole illustrative agreement. I was like, "Oh my God, I have no idea what I'm signing here and what they want from me and file types." I had no idea what they wanted. MR: Production stuff. KW: Yeah. I was so terrified. But I did it. For that project actually I knew that my whole pen and paper and pencil and scanning and Photoshopping wouldn't work, so I got the iPad for that. Basically, took all the money that I made from the 23 nutrient sketchnotes and put it in an iPad so I could do the book project. That was super fulfilling. And they never had any revision wishes or something like that. They basically like, "Oh, you want to do a sketchnote on the benefits of dark chocolate, do it. Just do it. And it was so cool. I would say, that took around half a year. Basically, my break had come to an end and I was really doing a lot of sketchnoting. Well, in retrospective, it wasn't so much sketchnoting work, but I also had a part-time job. For me, it filled a lot of my time and I didn't have time or the creative energy to do anything else at the time by the way. Fun fact, these old sketchnotes that I created with the pen and paper and Photoshopping and scanning and everything, they also landed in the book. Nobody told me. They totally didn't fulfill the technical requirements and stuff, but Drew was just like, "I want this in the book." MR: He's passionate about it. KW: Yeah. He was passionate and he didn't care that they had a totally different style and like the quality was really different to the iPad because of how the way I worked back then. It was so funny that he like just put them in the book as well. That was really funny. After the book project I started my master's degree, I was figuring out I wanted to go into marketing, and my degree was in corporate communications. It was really funny, we had a social media module. Basically, do a social media strategy. My professor, he had these companies that we could collaborate with or we could also bring our own project. For example, like one of my classmates, he brought I think his dad's tax office firm or something like that. Then during my degree, I got really interested in LinkedIn because first time in my life I actually knew or got to know what B2B and B2B marketing was. Then I found out, okay, there's this platform LinkedIn and everybody's on LinkedIn and I should maybe make an account too. At that time, I think personal branding, the whole term and the concept of it was really popular on LinkedIn. Right now, it's everywhere, but at that time it grew in popularity, I would say. Then I thought, maybe I can do my own personal branding strategy. Then I asked my professor and he was like, "Yeah, sure, do whatever you want. And I was like, cool— MR: That's so smart. KW: Cool, let's do it. And then, I think I got a book about digital personal branding. It was a German book. The author, she basically said, "Because you have to figure out your content strategy and what you're gonna write about and what mediums you're gonna use and what the purpose is and who your audience is." And she basically started like, "Lay out your superpower portfolio." So basically, write down all your skills, your knowledge, your unique experiences. Then I did the whole exercise and I put sketchnoting in there for my skills. Then she said, "Well, which ones do resonate the most? Circle them and then make your content strategy out of it." Then I knew, okay, sketchnotes were gonna play a big role in my personal branding thingy, kind of. And at that time, because I was in LinkedIn, I was really interested in how could I advance my career. I had basically just done a pivot from lUX design to marketing. Then there were so many content creators talking about how to negotiate your salary, what to put on your cv, how to strategically network on LinkedIn. I thought it was so cool. I never heard any of that before. Everything I learned from LinkedIn Lives and podcasts and other people's posts, I just put into sketchnotes because I wanted to memorize it. And that was really cool 'cause like I said, the whole career content really resonates with the whole LinkedIn audience because everybody's trying to advance in their careers and in their jobs. So yeah, that was really cool. I think basically, I had a few favorite creators and they had a huge following. So what I did, I watched a talk and then I created a sketchnote then I tagged them. Like I said earlier, LinkedIn works a bit like Facebook. So then they saw it, they commented and then their whole network came to my sketchnotes. That's how I created this, in my eyes, huge following. 10,000 followers is not huge, but for me it's like, oh my God i’ts crazy. MR: That's pretty good. It's pretty huge. KW: Yeah. I think so. That's how I grew on the sketchnotes. They really blew up. I would say like after the social media module we had to do a presentation with our analytics and I think I had half a million views on my content. Which to me was just mind blowing, you know. I had no idea how to explain. It was just like, you know, I did this. I posted this, this was my strategy and it just worked so well. It was incredible. Like I said, visuals work really well on LinkedIn. That definitely contributed to it even though I had a super small reach. But since all the big creators saw it and brought their audience, that didn't matter so much. Funny story, then it was summer and I was a bit exhausted from the module and I thought, woo, that was intense because all these people text you and write you, and like how do you do it and you wanna hop on a call? And I was really overwhelmed with all the attention that I then I went abroad. Funny story. And then I went abroad to study in Scotland for a semester and I had another digital marketing module and our professor was basically, "You just have to create a website and market it and you can create a website about whatever you want." And I'm like, "Well, I'm gonna pick my own website and market it." That's how my website came to be out of that university project. And with the marketing, I basically continue what I was doing anyway on LinkedIn. Then I posted a bit more on Instagram and I tried out on Pinterest as well, but I basically just continued for the module, what I was doing in the old module as well. I'm really grateful that my university professors both in Germany and in Scotland, they just let me do my own thing and work on my personal brand because it paid off crazy. I still can't believe the few sketchnotes that I posted, I got so much attention and my audience grew. I'm really thankful they just let me do my own thing and get university credits for it. That's cool. MR: You really got good value from your education in that sense because it was so directed and practical. KW: Yeah. MR: As I listen to your story, the two things I reflect on is you actually started this all with, you mentioned reading about Goethe and all these masters, and you made these little comic books that you then studied. You realized really early that there was something about the visualization, at least for your brain. At that point you probably didn't think about anybody else, right. You just wanted to pass your A levels, right? So, you were using this technique to visualize this information and you found that it worked for you and that you came back to it. And that turned out to be of the seed for everything that you're doing, which is cool. And then the second part is what you just said that your professors were open to you directing your own path of the things that you wanted to market. I would imagine from a professor's perspective, and when I was in school, I relate to this that there was a crew of a couple of people who were really interested in doing more than the more than the curriculum said. There were a lot of people that just did exactly what the curriculum said and they met it to the T. They did exactly what the teacher wanted, but it was kind of boring, right? Like it was the same as the sample. Like it didn't really extend further. So, I can imagine these professors more have the problem of students, like if they gave them any choice that they would not choose anything. They would just go to the ones that everybody else does. And so, they might have actually been excited to see that you took it in a direction that most students don't, which is, well I know me the best, let's market myself and take that as the case study. So that's cool that the opportunity was there and that you kept on leaning on it. And then I guess the third thing would be your sense with these sketchnotes that you did initially that turned into 23 sketchnotes and then a book that it reveals to me that if you're in the right place at the right time doing this work and you hit the right person, those opportunities can open up. Obviously, they did and then you were aware enough that you stepped into those even though they were probably pretty scary, right? Doing 23 sketchnotes manually and doing all this work. And then jumping right into doing a book illustration project was, I'm sure a real challenge and maybe freaked you out a little bit at the time, but now you're glad that you did it right. Think of how much that's impacted your career and your person as well. That's just a great story. It's really fun to listen to you to share it with us. KW: I would definitely say because what you—and there's a whole lot of serendipity involved. Like you said, I was at the right time in the right place. What I also didn't expect, you know, basically my goal with the whole like personal branding thing on LinkedIn, which people know me for now, they don't know me for the book illustration project or what I did back then, the little bit of work. But it's impacted my career in so many ways that don't directly translate to sketchnotes even. For example, I had recruiters reach out to me. I was a marketer on LinkedIn, but I must have thought that my sketchnoting skills translate to, "Well, she must be a good marketer. She gets all this engagement, she has to know what she's doing on social media." That was really astounding that basically they just saw the sketchnoting skill, but they assumed I was a good marketer because of what I was doing. Then also I remember I attended an online Google career event for women and I basically, they had lots of inspiring speakers and I basically just put my favorite quotes on a really nice-looking sketchnote. Then you could apply for this Google career upskilling program as a university person. I networked with all the people that I put on the sketchnote, like the quotes. I put the quotes in the sketchnote and then I also submitted this with my application and I got into the program. I think it was a really smart way of saying, "Hey, "I'm going the extra mile and I really want this." But that was really cool. And then also, one of my former employers, they had seen me on LinkedIn and I was doing paid media work for them, but they were like, "Do you wanna kickstart our LinkedIn strategy? "Do you wanna come up with that? I was still a student at that time, so that was kind of big, you know, like coming up with the strategy and presenting it to the founders and to CEO of the company. That was really cool. I think also, in the hiring processes as a marketer, it always gave me a big bonus because I'm a content marketer, and I wanna make sure I have a really diverse skillset set. Be it writing or basic video editing skills or basic graphic design skills. And then I also have sketchnoting skills in case they needed it at some point. And then I have, of course, the freelance work as a sketchnoter, but also like freelance work as a copywriter for LinkedIn. Because they see, hey, I know how the platform works and then people approach me if I can help them with the LinkedIn profiles and with their content. Because I'm a polymath, I'm a multi-passionate person. I have many interests in life. I really appreciate it. That not only sketchnoting work came from this, but so many other opportunities. That's so cool. For me, that's the best part about the whole story. MR: That's really great. And I think, you know, not to be missed if you're listening is Katrin was very aware of these opportunities. I remember there was a study years ago, they talked about happy people or something, or lucky people, I don't know if you've heard this story that they had a newspaper and the lucky people would notice that there was an ad in the second page that said, "If you see this ad, stop reading and go collect your money you've won or something.” But people that were unlucky who thought themselves unlucky would miss that and they were looking through this newspaper. So, apparently, that was the whole test. The study more deeply talked about, being lucky is much more of a mindset because these things happen to many people, but many people are not prepared or not aware or not willing to do what you did. You were aware, you were prepared, you know, to do something, but then you also took a risk, right? Doing those 23 things was probably scary. Some people might have turned that down and that whole line of books and everything that happened would go open a puff of smoke, right? KW: Yeah. MR: This idea that you're open to trying new things and you know, the possibility of failure is there, right? That could have gone badly, but you wouldn't know that until you went down that path. I think, if you're listening to this and thinking, "Oh she's so lucky." It's like, well she kind of made her own luck. She saw these opportunities and she took a risk that could have gone the other way and it just worked out that she did the hard work to deliver. I think that this is such a great origin story that's so inspiring. Maybe we don't need tips. Maybe you just need to listen to the origin story again instead of the tips. I don't know. KW: I have one fun mantra that ties in really well with this. I always say to myself, "I can be terrified and brave at the same time." Same with the podcast. I was super scared to come on and talk about this and it's my first podcast. But this doesn't keep me from doing stuff. Same with the book project. I don't understand the illustrative agreement and everything, but I'm gonna figure it out. You know, I'm terrified, but that doesn't mean it keeps me from doing the thing. And yeah, that's one of my life things that's really important to me. MR: I love that. That's a great one. Okay. We've got your origin story. Tell us about what's a project that you're working on now that you're really excited about? Either something that maybe just came out or maybe something that's in the works that will come out when this episode releases in March, sometime. KW: What I was really excited about was part two of the LinkedIn algorithm report thing by Richard van de Blom. It's actually quite funny. I've landed so many dream projects in my life basically by giving away a little bit of my work for free. Then the person seeing it and then them hiring me to do more of that. And that same thing happened with Richard. So basically, did the LinkedIn algorithm report in 2021 just for free. I found it and I thought, I thought, "Oh, this is a great piece of content, maybe a bit too long for LinkedIn, let's put it in a sketchnote. I think this could be really beneficial." And Richard basically said, how it blew up. And he was like, "Wow, that's crazy. Can you do more of that for me?" And I love working with him. Because I always say it's more important who you work with than what you than what you work on 'cause he basically gives me full creative freedom. He's not somebody to do many revisions. He's basically, "Just do whatever you want. I trust you, you're the expert." Apart from that, actually, that answer might surprise you, but I've taken a step back from freelancing in particular 'cause I was doing so much freelance work and not much work just close to my heart, you know, just for myself as a hobby. Freelancing burned me out a little bit, particularly being stuck in revision hell, revisions going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. I'm taking a step back and really asking myself the question, is this something I wanna make a lot of money with or is it more a hobby? And if a dream project comes along my way, then I'm gonna do it, but otherwise, I'm gonna say no. I don't have an answer to that question yet. I think like some days I lean more towards that and other days I lean more towards the hobby side of it. I always listen to the other guests on your podcast 'cause they have made a career out of it and they are illustrators and everything. But me, as a multi-passionate person, I don't want to be like a full-time illustrator or a full-time sketchnote artist. What I do as a content marketer, I can do so many different disciplines, and sketchnoting is one of them. So yeah, freelancing has taken the joy away from it a little bit. So, I'm taking a break right now to find my passion again and the things I'm really passionate about and then maybe get into freelancing again. If one of my favorite podcasts said, "Hey, can you be like our sketchnoter for every episode? Like Andrew Huberman, I love his podcast, neuroscience. He talks about neuroscience. Then I will be, "Of course, I would draw each of your episodes." But with other projects, I have to be really excited either about the person that I work with or about the work they do. Otherwise, it's a clear no. It needs to be a hell yes for the work that I do. MR: Which is Derek Sivers, of course. "Hell Yeah or No," Is his famous book. It seems like what you're talking about is opportunity cost, right? If I'm doing freelance work, what if this amazing podcast comes in and I'm loaded? I can't do it. The opportunity might be lost there. So you have to be careful. I think in some ways, probably the advantage you have in working part-time is that you have to make a choice. If you're doing something like this full-time, then you would have more margin to do more and maybe you wouldn't feel it. But being part-time helps you get clarity around what you want to do. Then probably the other thing I would say is you probably would identify that as a multi-talented content marketer that sometimes sketchnotes aren't the right medium for something. Sometimes video is a better medium or writing is a better medium, right? It's like an expert mechanic. They don't use the wrench for everything because it's not designed for that. You use the tool that's designed for that task. In the same way, Sketchnoting can be overused, I think, and if you see too much of it, then it becomes like back background noise or something. So, deploying it in the right opportunities probably is important there. So— KW: I actually. MR: Go ahead. KW: I actually wanted to ask you, Mike, how you decide which freelance projects to take on and how you prevent creative burnout. 'Cause I definitely struggled with it, so I wanted to hear your opinion on this. MR: Well, I've struggled with it as well. I do a full-time job as a user experience designer. I love doing it. I work in software. For some people they would look at what I do and think, "That's like the most boring thing ever." But I love it. Like helping work on corporate software and solving—making somebody's life. I don't know who these somebodies are. Somebody's life is going to get better because I've spent the time to think about what's the right way to work through this workflow so that it's smoother, that it's cleaner, that if I do it in one area, it applies to another area. All these things that I think about. That's my full-time work. What that means is that all the sketchnoting stuff that I do, if I travel and I teach at a school, or if I go to the international sketchnote camp or whatever I do, like I've got a limited time to choose from. So, I have to be very choosy and picky. I think I followed a similar pattern to you. It's either really yes or no. I tend to be someone who loves to help people. So, I'll tend to say yes, a little bit too much. I've been getting better at saying no. One of my solutions has been to build a network of people who do work that I admire so that when I get the project that comes in, it's like, "Eh, I could do that, but I'm not in love with it." I could think, "John is really good at that. I'm gonna make a connection to John or Mary." Just as an example. For me, I need this outlet of somebody else who I can trust that will handle it, that is a good fit. Like they would fit together and then I just redirect that inquiry to that person. Then try to focus on the things I'm excited about it or I think it will have an impact. That's hard. I don't think I've solved the problem completely because I certainly, occasionally will get projects that aren't exactly what I want to do. But for the most part, I think your comment about finding the right customers is really important. The people you work with are much more important than the projects in a lot of ways. Because if you're given creative freedom like you've said—I think the other thing, the other thing I would say is finding clients that are collaborative. It sounds like many of the clients you've mentioned were very collaborative and working, working with you. They were open to your expertise and would listen to you. Being able to modify what they were thinking if they come to you with an idea and then you come back with them with an alternate idea. You just twisted a little bit and say, "Did you ever think about maybe doing this or that?" And then they're open to it. That's a really important aspect for a customer that I look for. You can tell pretty quickly when you start working on something with someone, whether that's there or that's not there. And then you would have a tendency—I have a few people that I work with. If they call and say they need something, I'm an immediate yes. I don't even have to think about it because I like that person so much. It sounds like you have similar people. Those are the few things that I do. The last thing I'll say is having kids for me is helpful because I can't work all the time. I need to spend time with my kids. I like cooking with my kids. I like spending time with my wife. I have a whole other life beyond all this stuff that keeps me grounded. And just reminding myself that I can't do it all and it's okay. There's many other people and it's a huge opportunity. Everybody's got plenty of work to do and if I give it away to somebody else, it's not like the work will stop coming. It just keeps coming. I don't know if that's helpful. KW: Absolutely. I'm totally on your side and I share your view here. I was wondering, Mike, was there ever a time when you considered sketchnoting your full-time career? Because you're kind of like the inventor of sketchnote. I'm surprised actually to hear that you have this whole full-time job apart from that. MR: I've considered it in the past. It just felt like with a family and all the responsibilities that the variability would be a challenge. I think maybe sometime in the future that would make sense. But I think honestly, having it as a side gig has been good. I've hinted to in the feedback I've given, which is because it can only be a side gig because I'm such a helper and wanting to help people, it forces me to choose. Like if I had it full-time, I might like really overload myself. Having this finite constraint is actually a good thing for me. I found that with sketchnotes too. I stumbled on the sketch notes 'cause I constrained myself to a little book and a pen. That helped me to move into the space where visualization made sense 'cause I couldn't write everything down, I couldn't draw everything. I had to do it in the moment. That whole history was tied to constraints. I found any time where I put some limitations on myself is when I'm most creative. I think that's maybe true for other creative people too. Having that limitation on what's available forces me to make a decision. Like, am I really gonna spend the next three months working on this thing or is it better spent on something else? Sometimes I choose and it's like, "Oh, I wish I hadn't done this." Or it's taking longer than I wanted. I'm still happy with the output. Again, the opportunity cost means, 'cause I'm working on that, I can't take something else that comes in so I have to be more careful. I think, in some ways it's better to have it as a side thing because I can really be selective. KW: I absolutely love it as a side thing. Like I said, especially as being a multi-passionate person, it helps me so much. And then also realizing my time is really valuable. 'Cause otherwise I would've maybe the whole week and I would have a few hours every week. Then communicating this to clients and also saying, "Hey, don't expect revisions in the next five days 'cause I'm really busy with other things. It helps me prioritize and also keeps my life super interesting 'cause I have this other thing next to my regular job, like my employment. I love it. I wouldn't have it any other way. So, I can totally get what you're saying. MR: Like I said, maybe in the future the opportunity comes where it becomes a full-time thing. The other thing that I didn't mention is when I started all this stuff, there really wasn't a sketchnoting anything. There are people doing it. Eva-Lotta was doing it around the same time. We started to build this community. A Lot of the work has been building a community of people that do it so that I have students to teach now. Now I'm doing more teaching and that's working well because there's actually people that are interested enough that they would spend money to get real deep teaching. Then also companies being aware. I think you're starting to see this. Companies are becoming aware that visuals in the right context can be incredibly powerful. There's actually enough of a supportive market that you could be full-time. Actually, many of the people on the podcast like Ben Felis and a bunch of other people are full-time because of both of those things. There's a community that's willing to hire them to learn and then there's professionals that are willing to pay for them to do the work. I think a little bit of it is timing and waiting for the market to be there. That sounds like something maybe in the future would make sense to move in that direction. But I haven't decided that yet. KW: It's so fun what you said about teaching 'cause I'm not at all into teaching sketchnoting to other people. So many people have asked me like, "Wow do you do it and what you use and how did you get started?" I always just point them to your book. I'm like, "Sketchnote Handbook" by Mike is the only thing you ever need to read and practice to learn sketchnoting." Then I'm always so happy when I see you have another live workshop coming up and I'm like, "Yeah, go to Mike. He'll teach you. 'Cause I learned from him and he does such a great job. Every time I hear somebody who wants to learn sketchnoting, I point them in your direction. MR: Well, now if you're a German speaker and you're listening, there's another opportunity with Eva-Lotta's got a course that she's offering on Udemy, which think it's around 20 euros, something like that. $20. Anything that Eva-Lotta does is excellent. I'm one of her biggest fans. She's really great and she's very skilled. That's in German language. If there's Germans listening could be a really good fit if that's more natural for you to check that out. Look that up. She also does more intensive teaching on sketching. She's a great teacher as well. KW: I can only second that. I love her work. MR: She's really great. We've talked about your whole origin story, what you're working on. Now let's shift into tools. I'm really curious, you sort of hinted at this. You originally were doing this pencil sketches and inking and erasing and Photoshop, and that's the way I did it too 'cause that's all there was. You had to do that. Now we have really great mobile phone cameras. There's even tools on mobile phones to do modifications. We have platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram where we can share these things. Tell us about what are your tools that you use now? Let's start if you still use any analog tools. What are those tools and then digital after that? KW: With the analog tools, I thought about it a long time. Actually, over the years I became a minimalist and decluttered my whole home and everything. I have to say sketchnoting and illustration doesn't go well with that because you have to buy a pen in every new color that's out there. It just never stops with stationary and pens and notebooks and everything. They didn't make the cut after I switched to the iPad, but if I do some work, I always use the Staedtler Pigment Liners. I think they're a favorite in the community. MR: Excellent. Yeah. KW: And then basically, what I had at home, I used the Stabilo pens back then. I had Copic markers, but you need a certain kind of paper for them 'cause they're alcohol based, otherwise, they bleed through everything. Copic Markers. I had a few Tombow brush pens that I used, but it was really basic. I basically had like maybe 20 pens and pencils that I used the whole time. And then I made the switch to completely digital work 'cause I was always like, "Where do I store all of my work? It's not only stationary and pens and pens, where do I keep it?" Then there's the elements, there's heat and light and everything that works against your work. You know you have of preserve it. And I was getting really stressed out about that. Now, I'm more chill that I know it's all in a digital space. Now my digital space is really cluttered, but I'm working on that as well. But yeah, since then I've basically switched to the iPad and Procreate, the standard stuff and it's really cool. What I want to get, I haven't tried it 'cause I don't actually know anybody who's doing like iPad kind of work. But I never got one of the Paperlike skills 'cause I never wanted to put them on my iPad permanently. But now I know there's a company they do a magnetic thing MR: I've seen this, yeah as well on Instagram. I think I've seen this. KW: You can basically just put it on and then—'cause I watch a lot of TV series and stuff on my iPad then I don't want the paper-like thing on it. Then I can just put it off and then when I draw, I can put it back on. And what was really game-changing for me 'cause I hated doing sketch notes in the summer 'cause my hand always stuck to the iPad. Then I discovered the drawing gloves, they just go around your fingers down here. They've been a game changer. They are so cool. It's an analog tool that I use for digital work. MR: Interesting. Interesting. We have a few friends, Rob Dimeo, who was a huge fan. Michael Clayton, another friend used those gloves. I think I have one in my bag somewhere. I haven't used it for years. I think those were, at least for the iPad, more because I think the old iPad software was not great about determining if your finger was touching or if it was a pencil early on so you would end up getting stray marks in some apps. And so, this is a way to stop that. But it's got the second benefit is keeping your hand from sticking to the screen. Have you been using this magnetic screen cover and how does it work for you? KW: No, I don't have it yet. It's on my list. I thought it was really cool 'cause like I said, I never wanted to put a permanent screen protector on it. I'm getting it this month, hopefully. MR: Okay. I would say Paperlike was a past sponsor of the show, but regardless of that, I like them because I think the way they structure it is the little bumps that they're creating to create that paper-like surface, they're scientifically placing them. I've been actually pretty surprised when I use my iPad that it doesn't seem to impact when the screen is playing, like for tv. You might be surprised how clear it actually is. It'd be really interesting for you to try both then magnetic and the Paperlike and compare them and see. My concern about the magnetic one would be if it's kind of floppy and there's air between there, how does that react? Maybe that's not an issue, but that would be what I would wonder about. Maybe you could share that in a sketch note for us or a video or something. KW: Yeah. I'll do that once I've tried it out, but it's also really cool. I've never had the chance to talk about Paperlike to anyone. It's really cool that you didn't have the impression it ruined the other things you do in the iPad. I was always afraid of that and that's why I didn't wanna buy it. But I might give it a go. MR: All right. Maybe I'll reach out to my friends at Paperlike, and say, "Here's a person who needs a sample." KW: Oh yeah, I would appreciate that. MR: They like doing that stuff. They're really great people at Paperlike. It's a German-based company as well, so. KW: Ah, I didn't know that MR: They're in Hamburg, so, you know, they could just run a little truck down and drop it off at your place. KW: Really cool. Cool. I'll write the review then. MR: Okay. There you go. Well, we'll work on that offline. Okay. Well, simple tools. I like simple tools. I like buying my tool at the corner drug store. Keeps things real. Analog. So, it makes it easy to replace things when you're in another country as well. You can probably find a gel pen someplace. So, let's shift now. This part is where we talk about tips. And we'd like to frame it as someone's listening, as a visual thinker, whatever that means to them. Maybe they feel like they've sort of reached a plateau where they're a little bit burned out or they need a little inspiration from you. What would be three things you would tell that person to kind of inspire them and get them moving forward again? KW: I would say the first thing is pick a project you're really excited about. I always also say for me, I do a lot of visualization of podcasts, live talks, reports, anything like that, and I need to be excited about the source material 'cause I find especially with freelancing where you don't always can influence what the topic is about or whatever, that really helps. I don't do any work anymore where I'm like, "Oh, this is really uninteresting and I don't wanna be drawing this." And then also, if you're not working of source material, maybe like do the travel sketchnotes. Like Eva-Lotta Lamm did. Pick something, pick a personal project. I would say this was a huge learning curve for me, that I only enjoy sketchnoting when the topic is right. And what I draw about really aligns with my interests and with my passions. And then the next one, it sounds so cliche, Mike, but I think it's so important don't compare yourself to others. Full stop. I know there's like a comparison is to thief of joy or something. But I think it's really true. I have a really basic and minimalist style and when I look at your work or at Nadine Rossa's work, I think she was on your podcast. I always get, I'm like, oh my God, I have such a long way to go and it's my work even good enough. But the validation I got from the outside well tells me it is good enough. There are people who appreciate your minimalist style that's not super visually complex and doesn't have all the really sophisticated doodles and everything. I've come to accept that, I think. And also, I try to stay in my line. I don't look at the work of others so much. if I do that, I set a certain timeframe where I look at your work and then I get some inspiration, but then I leave it at that. I know it's harsh, but maybe that even means unfollowing a few people on social media and only looking at the profiles like, I don't know, once a month or something. I think all you learn basically to not compare yourself to others, but I think it takes some time to learn that. And then also, also sounds a bit cliche, but don't overcomplicate things. Don't overcomplicate sketchnoting. I think that's also in your book. A sketch note doesn't have to be visually complex. And for me, for example, that means if I don't wanna drop people, I don't draw people 'cause I don't. Maybe I don't like the style of it or maybe I haven't put enough practice into it. Well, then I don't draw people. I don't have to do everything that the sketchnote community says that I need to do and how a sketchnote is supposed to look like, you know? "Cause I have quite a minimalist style and I like it that way and maybe at some point it gets more sophisticated or maybe it doesn't, I don't know. I would say those are my three things. Oh, and can I do a fourth one? MR: Yes, you can. KW: Don't overvalue talent. People on LinkedIn, they always tell me you're so talented. And it gets me really angry 'cause sketchnoting is basically you put in the work and the practice and then you get better. It's like running or playing an instrument. It has nothing to do with talent. If you look at my early drawings and when I started practicing with your book, it didn't look great. Don't overvalue talent. There's no talent. Everybody can learn sketchnoting. I would print this on a t-shirt. There you go. MR: I love it. Four is great. And we love it when people give us extra ones, so that's pretty cool. KW: Four is my lucky number. MR: There we go. I think in Asia, isn't four a lucky number? I'm not sure. KW: I don't know. I was born on the fourth, so yeah, that's why— MR: I think actually in Japan, four is unlucky if I remember right. I know this because I was an old PalmPilot guy back in the day. Palm did not release a Palm IV because it was popular in Japan and four, I think it's related to death or something like that. So that's why they jumped from the III to the V. KW: Oh, no. No, with us It's a lucky number. MR: It's a lucky number. I think so. We make our own luck, right? KW: Yeah. MR: So Katrin, what is the best way for us to reach out to you? Obviously, LinkedIn would be good. KW: LinkedIn is great. It's basically Katrin Wietek on LinkedIn. I have this website that I created in university, but I don't maintain it so much. But that's Katrin-kristin.com, I think. Also, that's the same Instagram handle, @katrin.kristin, I think. I don't post so often, but maybe that might change in the future. That's basically the three channels where you can find me online. MR: Primarily, it sounds like LinkedIn is the best place. Obviously, you're pretty active there. So that's, if you wanna see your work and connect there, that would be the place to go. So that's really great. KW: Exactly. MR: Well, this has been really wonderful. Time has flown by. It's been such a fun discussion with you and thank you so much for the work you do and your attitude and how you share your work, and really an ambassador for Sketchnoting in the LinkedIn world probably more than anyone that I can think of. I really appreciate that. And it's so good to see someone representing and having such a positive attitude for the community. I think you're just a great ambassador for us. KW: Well, thank you for inventing sketchnotes, Mike, and thank you for writing that book, because otherwise I wouldn't be here and I definitely wouldn't be at that point in my career. I'm pretty sure about that. And it was an honor to be on your podcast. Thank you so much for the invitation. I'm super proud of where I got along the way. And I'm gonna share the podcast with all the people I know and also posted on LinkedIn, so maybe a few people can see it. MR: Well, for your first podcast in English, you did an excellent job. You're a really great conversationalist. KW: Thank you. MR: Be very proud of that. You did a great job. And maybe I'll send this to people as a guide, if they're on the show, to listen to you. KW: This means a lot. Thank you so much. MR: Well, for everyone who's listening or watching, this is another episode of the "Sketchnote Army Podcast." Until next episode, we will talk to you soon. | |||
| 08 Nov 2021 | Mister Maikel digitizes his graphic visualizations - SE10/EP10 | 00:49:53 | |
In this episode, Michael Geiß-Hein, better known as “Mister Maikel” from Germany, shares his journey from analog-only to adding digital graphic recording and sketchnoting to his company’s options. Mister Maikel also talks about his experience creating his new book on sketchnoting, “Sketchnotes, Dein Workshop” or “Sketchnotes, Your Workshop” where he teaches you to improve your sketchnotes in 6 weeks. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Draw and take notes with liquid pens, markers and brushes in your favorite Copic designer colors. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. Drag and drop images onto the canvas, and use layers and grids to organize your creative space. When you’re ready to share, export straight to your friends or team. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 09 Nov 2020 | Georg Petschnigg - SE08 / EP08 | 00:55:00 | |
In this episode, I talk with Georg Petschnig, founder of Paper for iPad, and General Manager at WeTransfer. Georg talks about his entry into visual thinking, Paper’s origin story, and the team’s philosophy behind Paper. If you haven’t considered Paper before, this discussion will give you insights into why Paper works the way it does. SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Paperlike, a screen protector for the iPad that makes drawing with the Apple Pencil feel like paper. Paperlike’s Nanodot technology offers the paper-like friction you want with the clearer screen visibility you need. This new surface even improves drawing precision — and reduces arm fatigue. It’s the closest you’ll get to paper on a digital screen. Buy yours today! https://paperlike.com/sketchnotearmy RUNNING ORDER
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 27 Dec 2024 | Justin Hamacher’s hand-drawn road trip leads to a visualization of Jungian insights – S16/E09 | 01:11:46 | |
In this conversation, Justin Hamacher delves into how drawing became a powerful tool for learning and recounts his remarkable journey through teaching, punk music, and Jungian analysis. Sponsored by ConceptsThe Concepts Sketchnote Workshop video — a unique, FREE, hands-on workshop video where I show you how I use the Concepts app to create sketchnotes on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. In this one-hour, eighteen-minute video, I cover:
The workshop video includes answers to common questions about Concepts. Watch the workshop video for FREE at: Be sure to download the Concepts app at concepts.app and follow along with me during the workshop! Buy me a coffee!If you enjoy this episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, you can buy me a coffee at https://sketchnotearmy.com/buymeacoffee Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production, and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! Episode TranscriptMike Rohde: Hey, everyone, it's Mike Rohde, and I'm here today with Justin Hamacher. Justin, good to have you here. Justin Hamacher: Hello. Very happy to be here. MR: So you're an interesting guy. We've been connected for years and years, and you popped back up in my life recently. You've come from the design background a lot like me, but you've done a shift, which I found was really interesting. And it seemed like it could be really fascinating to bring you on the show, not only as a designer and what you're doing now, but you're also a visual thinker, and you've done something interesting in this new direction you've gone by integrating visual thinking into the training that you've taken. So rather than me try to explain it, 'cause I don't know the details, tell us who you are and what you do, and then if you'd like, go right into your origin story, like from a little boy, how did you end up to this moment now? JH: Oh man. How many hours do we have? Oh, I'll do my best. I'm so happy to be here. This is a wonderful base for the community to learn about individuals and how they use visual thinking. MR: Yeah. JH: It's striking to me how relegated it is by the educational system and by our employers and other places, really into a background or kind of novelty identity. For some of us, it's the way our brain works, you know? And it's so hard to have to put things into writing or words or other things without being able to be visual. So I'm really happy this is taking place. Let's see. So, I'll just kind of pop back to when I was little, and then we can work our way forward. Is that okay? MR: Yeah. Sounds great. Yeah. JH: Okay. So, one of my very first memories, I swear I'm not gonna talk for hours, I was just joking, is I remember being in preschool and drawing a bird and sitting there and not knowing any other kids. Actually, it was kindergarten because I knew the kids in preschool and, you know, feeling some anxiety, and the room seemed really big and there was a lot of other people around me, I didn't know. I wasn't afraid, but I was a very extroverted kid, you know, but cautious and a little shy. And I was drawing this bird, and I knew how to draw feathers on a bird. If I look back at the bird now, it's rather comedic, but at the time, for other little kids, they thought that was really cool. And I remember this one little boy coming over and he didn't know me, but he saw me drawing and he said, "Whoa, you can draw feathers on a bird. Oh my gosh." And he knew the other kids 'cause they'd gone to preschool or something. He ran over and grabbed like four kids and brought 'em to the table where I was sitting alone. And they were all like, "Would you show me how to draw feathers on birds? I wanna draw feathers on birds. Oh my gosh." It felt so good to be expressing myself in a way that was personal. I wasn't holding up the bird feather drawing or something, but to have it resonate with people and to have people wanna learn and share. And then I was able to look at what they were drawing and stuff. It was just a really wonderful start to kindergarten. So, you know, I knew from being really young, my main identity was an artist. I drew a lot for myself. Scribbled on the interior walls of my closet in my bedroom as a little kid. My mom didn't know about that until we moved when I was around 10, and she was like, "Oh my God, what did you do in here?" There's just, you know, a whole cosmology on the interior. Yeah, it was just scribbles and stuff though. Yeah, so going through school, it was not easy. I went to parochial schools, so little Catholic grade schools, and they hated drawings. I'm not, you know, universally gonna say they all did, but most my teachers specifically would tell me to stop drawing and to take better notes and to write down what was being said exactly as it was being said. Not to elaborate or have an imagining come off what I was recording. And that was really stifling because you as a creative guy myself, as a creative guy, other creative people, you have lots of ideas and you wanna kind of suss out the tendrils and see where they go and what they might become. You don't have to follow all of 'em, but that's how you keep your mind alive, you know? So that was really challenging going through all parochial school and pretty much continually being told, "Don't imagine, don't do those things." I do remember in third grade, there was a big contest for the grade school. The grade school is called Our Lady of Fatima in Seattle, Washington, Magnolia. If anybody out there happens to be from that grade school, what's up. We had a contest for the city of the future. And it was all the students in each grade, eighth grade, seventh grade, sixth grade, fifth grade, you know, down to first grade. Each student was gonna do a drawing. And then the class would elect one big representative drawing, and then we would make a big drawing and put it on the exterior of our classroom door. Then the teachers would walk around and vote on which class they thought did the coolest one. I was in third grade, and my thing was a city of the future that had, you know, sky cars and floating houses and gardens where people could eat and solar stuff. It was good surprisingly 'cause most kids like to draw battleships and Star Wars kind of stuff, but for some reason, I laid off that and I drew this. Well, it won for the class, and then it won for the whole school. I remember that feeling so good to see seventh and eighth graders walking by our little third grade classroom and looking at the drawing and being like, "Wow. All right, who did that? Oh, Justin, you did that? What's up kid? Like, dah, dah." I was like, "Oh, man, this is—" MR: Good job, man. Yeah. JH: Yeah. This feels good. Some of the other ones were battleships and, you know, big space wars and stuff. I think the teachers wanted to go with a more holistic kind of view of the future. Maybe we could share it with our politicians or something. Anyway, so yeah, grade school, high school, coming more comfortable with an artist's identity, but, you know, at the same time really kind of becoming not—well, there were moments of misanthropy, but like, just, you know, angry at the society and becoming a punk rock musician out of that. Then my identity in Seattle after college was a punk rock musician for like 10 or 15 years. But in college, I majored in woodblock printmaking. My parents wanted to kill me, but I was inflexible on that point. They made me promise to minor in something they saw some utility in. MR: Something practical. JH: Yeah. So, English and psychology were the minors. Then fast-forward to life, just young musician, art teacher teaching kindergarten art, which was fricking awesome and my favorite job of my entire life. It was just wonderful how broad their imaginations were. And also, the little boys and little girls, they hadn't quite been pushed into emotional regulations associated to gender. So there were some really caring little boys that would give each other hugs when they came to class. It was just great. It was just like such a free wild little group of people. Did that for a few years. And then, let's see I was having trouble paying my bills. As you can imagine, traditional woodblock, printmaking in the year 1999, not really— MR: Hiring per demand. Yeah. JH: No. Also, it was really hard to get access to presses, like to do litho. There were a couple good places in Seattle, but those presses are huge, and they're expensive, and I didn't have the money to join those memberships to participate in them. So I went back to school, became a designer. Went to Cornish. I didn't actually wanna become a designer. I wanted to go back and study sculpture and video, but the head of the art department was sick the day I went in to do interviews. The design chair was there, and she said, "You can take sculpture and video as electives. I'll give you a scholarship if you join design." I was broke. And I thought, "Well, okay, let's do it." So did that for two years, got out. All my classmates were in—this is a while ago. There was no Amazon in Seattle, I mean, at all. MR: Yeah. Microsoft back then up in Redmond, right? JH: Yeah. That was about it. The big design companies people were interested in, if you're a designer, were Starbucks and REI. Those were the two places young designers wanted to work. I wanted to have nothing to do with that. I still was, you know, pretty central in my punk rock ethos. MR: I was gonna say punk rock would be resisting all that stuff, right? JH: Oh my God. Yeah. I'll drink a Starbucks now, but back then you'd have to pin me down and pour it in my mouth. I'm not kidding. So, started my own small design studio and worked with small businesses and I loved it. So coffee shops, bakeries, massage parlors, therapists, artists, websites, boutiques. It was great. That was really what got me interested in user research too. So having those conversations with business owners and really hearing about their needs, and like having to unwire my brain. In design school at the time, we didn't even talk about UX. That wasn't a thing. We were trained as—I know you love comic books, like, what was gonna be our superpower and how were we gonna be the authority that came and solved in a heroic way, you know, whatever it was we were trying to solve. I really had to unwire that from my brain. I was doing small business stuff for a few years, then I took a UX certificate course. Well, then the market crashed, right, in 2008. I had a small business. It was doing pretty well. The market crashed. I lost all my clients. I had a lot of real estate development clients in Seattle, like Paul Allen, some of his projects and stuff. I tried to return the deposits to the people, and they wouldn't even return my calls. I don't know if the, you know— MR: Just, puff, disappeared, huh? JH: Yeah, were just gone. So I had to go downtown to take a job, which I really did not want to do, but I had to. I'd borrowed some money from my sister to buy a motorcycle, and she was about to have a baby. I was like, "I gotta take care of this." I went down and worked for a consultancy called Slalom, which was a small at the time. Now it's pretty big. Then they had a educational program where they'd pay you to take some classes. So I took some at UDub, got into UX certificate program. Really liked it, really liked the people, the instructors. That program used to be called Technical Communication, so it had more of a scholarly HCI orientation. Understanding how more humans' interactions. MR: Academic. Yeah. JH: Yeah. And I really appreciated that. So anyway, got a master's in that. Then I started switching companies, worked in gaming—went from consulting to gaming, and then from gaming I joined a small Indian company, and that was a crazy ride. That started getting, acquired, like 1500 people, 8,500 people, 16,000 people, 33,000 people. MR: Wow. JH: Yeah. And finally, Samsung bought it, and I was along for that ride. And I was the UX director, then. I was a creative director, then. I was a global creative director. And I was going to India and managing a team there, flying there and stuff. But I was not happy. So if you have a line for career trajectory going like that, and you have another line for like, my spirit and my creative soul just like that. MR: Yeah, was going way. JH: - Yeah. That led to crisis. You know, not like a explosion or an implosion, but a lot of nightmares at night. Kind of archetypal nightmares about not expressing the self and feeling lost. Anyway, luckily couldn't stick with that. I went to Spain on vacation, and while I was there on the Island of Menorca in a cave, actually, which sounds crazy, I realized I had to just quit that job. I came back, and my boss wouldn't let me quit the job. He kept canceling all our meetings. MR: Wow. JH: I wanted to quit, and he kept canceling. I wanted to do it nicely, you know? And he kept canceling all these meetings for three weeks. And finally, I was just like, "Dude, you gotta meet with me." In my head, I'm like, "I'm not gonna be here Monday unless you do this." That led to me going to the University of Washington and becoming a full-time professor there teaching human computer interaction and design. And while I was there working with graduate students, I really tried to form a bridge between design and the computational realm and the fine arts. That was kind of my personal mandate. They weren't super excited about that. I think the art department was, they were like, "Oh my God, a designer's actually coming over here and talking to us. We love to talk to you guys, but you never do." But for some reason, design was pretty insular and kind of at the time, trapped in a typography spiritual realm or something where they thought it was like the end all be all for all forms of visual expression, right? MR: Mm-hmm. JH: But I loved that. I was there for two years, and then I was in an experimental program, so it was funded by departments, and then we free-floated in the middle. They re-orged that, and the director left and I left. Then I went and started training as a Jungian analyst. So that was the big pivot point for me. It was like, all right— MR: Yes. Yes, that's what I wanted to get to. Yeah, for sure. Make sure we covered. JH: Yeah. So doing the self-inventory, it was like, what lights you up? What are you most excited about? It was like, I like helping people, working with people, having a chance to hear their personal stories and using creative means to help people self-actualize or, you know get to other levels of their consciousness or other spaces in their consciousness. So that kind of brings us to today. I think I just talked for 20 minutes. I've been training for seven years as an analyst. First in Boston for two years, then for five years in Zurich. Now I'm what's called a diploma candidate. So I have a small practice here in Portland where I do analysis with folks. I'm also a licensed psilocybin facilitator. I do both those things here in Portland, Oregon. How the visual stuff ties into all this is, you know, as I became a creative director and stuff, luckily you get to set the tone for a lot of your projects. And the clients do—the more high-end and imaginal clients want wild ideas and they want sketches. They like that. If you're a B-rate consultancy, you're gonna give 'em wire frames. If you're an A-rate consultancy, you'll give 'em those wire frames, but you're also getting 'em storyboards, and you're gonna give them some imaginal stuff and really push the boundaries. The people that really love that the most are the CEOs. My experience has been a lot of CEOs are pretty imaginative and do think big. Some aren't, but you know, some get a bad rap for not being visionary enough. But if you can get 'em in the right context and break them away from all the VPs and everybody else, and do some workshopping with them, they're in incredible. Some of 'em are very imaginative people. I was able to do more and more drawings, but as I got into my training—would you like me to just kind of start into that, or do you wanna break off and completely—? MR: No, I like the flow. JH: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I'll share some visual artifacts with folks too, if you want. MR: Yeah, that'd be great. That'd be great. JH: I left the UDub and University of Washington, and I had—my dad had an RV for his business, and I knew I needed to be in Boston to interview at the Union Institute there. I think it was in late June. My dad was a kind of hard ass character, not always very friendly. He called out the blue, and he said, I was expecting to fly there, probably though I woken up like three months earlier in the middle of the night, and I'd done this drawing with a map of the United States and all these different towns and places, and I drew my cat on it. It kind of became a joke for my students that I was gonna leave the University of Washington to go on this big RV trip with my cat. They knew I was gonna interview to be an analyst, and some of 'em were excited about that, or to train to be an analyst, but I didn't have a way to make that happen. So suddenly my dad calls, and he is like, "Hey, do you want the RV for a month?" MR: Oh, wow. JH: At the exact timing I needed, I hadn't mentioned the trip, I hadn't mentioned anything about it. I was like, "Are you kidding? Like, that's insane." And he didn't make offers like that very much. So it was the first bit of synchronicity around that training. I drove across the country, and as I drove, I really wanted to have an open-hearted and imaginative experience going. I decided the best way to do that was with people and meeting people. So each place I went that I met an interesting person, I drew them as a card. MR: Oh, wow. The same thing. JH: Yeah. I kept these with me, and then each next town I would go to, at night, I would go to a café or a pub, and I would journal all the people I met. This was so awesome to have done this because I met more and more people, right. MR: Yeah. JH: I started with five drawings, and then I'm at a pub drawing, and suddenly more people are coming and being like, "What are you drawing? What's your story?" So I'm meeting all these really cool people by doing these drawings. I did this big deck of all these people. It was really fun. That one's super funny. You can see the guy's crack there with a kid keep going cream at some coffee shops. So I made this big deck. MR: Wow. JH: One of the funniest things about it was I got back to—this young woman, was so cool. She was in Rockport, and she had just started a jewelry business and was really making a go at it and out on the end of this pier. So I bought a ring from her and some other things. It's just a great way to remember trips and journeys. Then when I got home, I think the most fun thing about it probably was sitting with my friends, and they were like, "How was your trip?" And I'd lay these out on a table, like a big tarot deck or something, and go, "These are all the people I met, who would you like to hear about?" And they were like, What?" Then they'd put their finger on one, and I'd be like, "Oh, yeah, that's Josh in Woodstock. He was super nice. When I parked my car, and he gave me some help, and dah, dah." You know, it was just kind of really fun. I started with that, and that was a great tone setting for the start of my Jungian studies. I was accepted to that institute, and then I came back to Seattle and I got a job at a startup. And I made the startup agree that I could have the first Thursday and Friday of each month off because I had to fly to Boston Friday, Saturday, Sunday of each month. The first part, we had classes there. MR: I see. JH: So I was doing that training. So they were into that. This is kind of what I'm super excited about, is to share a few of these. MR: Yeah. Another big stack. JH: Oh my God. The very first day I'm in Boston, I fly out there, and I've got my Fabriano Bristol board style drawing pad, you know, it was crisper, cycled nice paper. I was gonna go to Cambridge and draw some of the churches and the buildings at Harvard and other stuff. And I had that, and I had my laptop, and I'm super into this training. I'm like, "Oh, dude, this is gonna be life changing and this is the path forward for me. I'm all in, dah, dah. I'm committed to this. I can't believe I got in." So excited. The first lecture stands up to start to teach. And I have my laptop open, and I'm like, "I gotta capture everything they say. Oh my gosh, there's gonna be so much here, and we had to read these things beforehand, and I don't wanna miss anything." And I happened to have my sketch pad there with you know, a few architectural drawings, and it was really like this kind of two roads diverged in the wood's moment. It was like this Robert Frost kind of moment. He started talking, and I took—I hadn't thought about it. I wasn't like, "I'm gonna draw the lectures." It was such a natural decision. I just closed the laptop and I picked up my sketch pad and I just started drawing. And I hadn't ever really sketch noted. I'd always had this distinction. I'd write my notes and then on some other pages, I might draw some wild drawings like, Ooh, here's whatever, and now, I'm not gonna mention— MR: Separate from each other. Yeah. JH: Yeah, yeah. Almost cognitively. Like, here's the purely imaginal realm. Here's a pollen air, you know, thinking function realm where all that's being captured. So I sat down and I just did it, and I didn't stop. So for seven years I've drawn all these lectures in real time. And they you know, they're— MR: Pretty detailed. JH: - they're done with—yeah, they're really detailed and they're done with crisp—you know, I use a Staedtler architectural pen, and then I use a Copic marker. And I've got just a ton of them. MR: Wow. JH: Yeah, and they're each really specific to that lecturer on that date and that topic we were talking about. So we're trying to make a book of these. I have about 180 pages, and it would be—this one's kind of cool, shows you how to analyze dreams. MR: Oh, wow. JH: Got like a body scan methodology we learned about and some other things. Yeah. So this will be a book and also my thesis when I finish my training. The book is about how people—well, it has all those artifacts. So it's kind of like autoethnography art space research, looking at myself, but then there's a companion portion, which is how do people creatively process psychically rich material, or heavy material? What are the means we do that by? I'll interview a bunch of Jungian analysts to talk to them about how they, in their training, learned all the stuff that was required. Like, how does a choreographer or a dancer get through this material? You know, how does an architect, how does a painter, how does a designer, how does an artist, a musician, accountant, you know, how do people handle this material? You know, it's a matter of how do you embody it? How do you retain it? How do you comprehend it? How do you spark other areas of your imagination with it? And then how do you socialize it? How do you come back to the community and enrich your learning and their learning by talking and sharing it? Yeah. MR: Wow. Wow. There's so many questions I have after you kind of revealed this. Maybe I'll just sort of go in with the first one on the top of my head. It seems to me that your decision to choose between the laptop and drawing was really critical for you, now looking back. Also, it seems to me like the preparation before, like doing those little single squares over your trip out east almost primed you for that moment. And it's an interesting choice because right now personal knowledge management is this huge space really valuable, right? Using these text editors, like Roam Research or Obsidian, there's all kinds of tools out here, but it's very text-based. I think sometimes even through the exclusion of attachments, although that these systems do handle visuals in some basic way, and that you could have gone in that direction and had this searchable database, but you chose to go in this other direction and that you were primed there. Would you say that all of this travel and that—I think the other thing that's fascinating, is that you limited yourself to this square, which to me says that you kept yourself from being overwhelmed by having this small space to work in. So you knew you could handle it, right? I could do this, like I could take a lunch and I can draw a square. I can handle that. You had reasonable minimums. But then you had the option to, later on you talked about going to a pub or something, or in your hotel or whatever, and then reflecting on that experience after having drawn it and then writing in more detail. Which then led you to when your friend said, "Tell me about John and Fargo or whatever." That you could look at that image, that it would bring back all the memories, and then it would kind of tap back into the writing that you had probably done, whether it's long or short, that sort of sparked all these memories that you could then tell a whole story out of these seemingly limited artifacts. Even if you were to read the writings and look at the picture, there's way more in you that's tied to that, that only comes out when you're asked, right. So it's almost like you have to turn on that memory bank and then that stuff comes flooding out, and you probably remember things as you're talking, and it gets broader if you could probably keep going, right. It's really fascinating. And it's sort of, I guess for me, in this big long ramble, reinforces this idea that visual thinking in this way, sketch noting, if you wanna call it that, using visuals as a way to remember is really powerful, right? I think you're sort of living proof in a lot of ways that this is actually doable and it's not—and I think the thing I love about it is there's not a huge expectation or extra work that you had to do to enter into it. JH: No. MR: Is that fair way to kinda? JH: Oh, yeah, totally. You know, if we think about a divergent energy and a convergent energy and things that are defined and things that are undefined, you know, if we think about things in that way, these kind of panel drawings and sketch noting are so wonderful because they are really are launching points for more divergence. If we have an AI capturing all the text, or we have a volume from the philosopher or person we're interested in reading, that's concrete, you know? MR: Mm-hmm. JH: Thoughts and ideas can come off of that. Often, we're so devoted to the physical artifact and what it contains, that we don't allow our minds to go beyond that container. And that's why I love these kind of things 'cause every time I tell the story, it's different. If I had written down three paragraphs, "Josh and Fargo worked at such and such place. He wore these clothes and he helped me park my car. He seemed—" If I were to do it, you know, then I come back. My friends also don't really want to hear that, like, as a story. That's not a story. That's like there's something else, you know? MR: Yeah. JH: So they're great for story building. And then if we're trying to have a living knowledge rather than a fixed knowledge, we need to feed the process somehow. Images are great for that 'cause images often lead to more images. If you have a dream or you meditate, or you do psychedelics or something, and you have an image, it's like a river going by. Very naturally. Next comes another image, next comes another image. Some you might wanna grab others, you just let float by. But they seem like a very divergent and rich starting point for narratives. MR: It's really fascinating when I compare, like that work that you did, the travel, the panels, the writing, and then sketchnoting, basically your whole education, and I compare that back to you started out by saying, I went to this parochial school, and all the teachers at least in that location, were sort of trying to beat that out of you. And it focused toward a known, structured, rigid, listened to what we tell you and remember the things, you know, very rote, stuff would almost be like, in some ways the opposite pole of like what you ended up doing with this work, right. Because the stuff that you captured, I almost think of it as like, these things you did are the essence of the concept, and they can be endlessly generated from, right. So those squares, I would think—the other thing I think that's interesting is context, right? So you draw a square of this person in this place, if one person asks you to tell the story, you would consider their context and maybe tell them a different story. And then this other person has a different context or interest, you would tell the story differently. It would probably reveal other details or things you were thinking that because that person asked you in their context that would come up, that might not have come up in the other story. So in a lot of ways, it's like this inexhaustible resource. I dunno, it's probably exhaustible, but I mean, it's generative, right? It's like we think of generative AI, and it can only work with the stuff that exists, and it's often not very good. But we as people are like the original generative, you know, thinkers. So this sort of provides these generative starting points that you can just keep on, you know, using them in an interesting way. JH: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We have our unconscious. You know, we have that working for us. So if we start with an image, you might not know why or how, but a few other images that are associating with it. And you might mention one of those to a friend as you're telling the story, or just even more empathetically, you might know they're a gardener, and you're like, "Oh, dude, I got a shoot. I met so-and-so at the Bread and Puppet theater in Vermont, Olivia, she was so cool. And she showed me her pictures of her sunflowers." There's no sunflowers here, but I know— MR: It's embedded. Yeah. JH: - my friend is a gardener, you know? MR: Interesting. JH: Yeah. MR: Probably for those who don't know, l would include me, what are the basic tenets of a Jungian approach to analysis of people? What are the components? And then I'm really fascinated, like, how do visuals kind of fit into that? It seems like they were open to you doing this. Did they have a reaction to you sketch noting every lecture and having this collection? What's the reaction from the Jungian space getting exposed to this visual thinking thing? JH: Yeah. I've just been doing it for myself, and I was kind of that dude sitting in the back of the room constantly drawing. Then a couple people were peering over my shoulder and they're like, "What are you doing over there, man? Like, that's wild." I was like, "Oh, thanks. This is just how I process and remember things. I have to do it this way. There's no other way." I would've quit if I wasn't allowed to do this 'cause I would've been bored out my skull. I think if you're an artist too, you have to generate. We don't wanna sit in a class and have a unidirectional podium delivery. We're not there to catch the confetti from what other people say. We wanna be a part of the process and co-generate and co-create. So that's the other beauty of these kinds of notes, is they're co-creative. So the person's giving you information, you're adding that part of yourself to it, and then you come out with this melded thing, which has so much more energy for me, and for probably for you, and for people like us than just sitting there and writing things down. MR: Right. JH: Man, you put me on the spot with, what are the foundations of the Jungian stuff? MR: It's probably huge, right? That might be a podcast of its own, right? JH: It is actually, or a series, but I'll do my best. MR: Okay. JH: Images are foundational. MR: Oh, really interesting. JH: Yeah. Because what Jungians are trying to do in analysis is take the unconscious elements of it, bring it into consciousness, observe it, understand it, see where the blockages are, which we would call complexes, and where the opportunities are and where people wanna be in their future selves, and then integrate it. So bring it all together. Well, we know the unconscious is just full of images. It's a cauldron being stirred and bubbles come up, and you know, dream, or you know, you're on a long drive and your mind wanders, and you're dissociating. You're like, "Where on earth did that memory come from? Or that image come from?" So it's all image based and it's pre-language. If we go back through biological anthropology, before we had the spoken word and language, we had image. So the basis of this psychology is image based. We do that through a lot of dream analysis, working with fantasies, creative practices, sand play is part of the Jungian realm where you take figures, little kind of action figures even almost and in a sand tray, you will recreate a scenario or describe it there, and then the analyst will work with you to understand what it's about. It's really super image based, but there an issue in the Jungian realm. Particularly, there's such a strong intellectual component, and the educational environments have trouble letting go of the thinking function and really wanting to create taxonomies and categorize and microscopically dissect and understand things with so much intentionality that they can lose that divergent free-flowing engagement with personal narratives and the unconscious. So that's a thing. I think if somebody doesn't get this book that I'm working on, you know, they're kind of like, it's a parlor trick, or it's like a gimmick or something like, "Ah, that person just sits and listens to things." Then people that get it though, it's like, "No, that's how they embody it." We all have our own ways of doing that. MR: Right. JH: You know, a child in class, they need a break. You know, if they're learning to spell words or something, they might prefer to go out on the playground and do jumping jacks while they spell words. You know, orange, O-R-A-N-G-E. That works for them 'cause there's a somatic pathway into retention and embodiment and learning. The biggest challenge for all of us, I think in the world, is calling a time out from the conventional realm and from the pressures and the voices and the demands, and beginning to understand individually how we learn and how we grow and how we can master this life experience, you know, in a healthy way. That timeout is probably the hardest thing 'cause we know there's so many demands from society, family, and finances and things like that. MR: Wow. That's really fascinating. If someone was wanting to go a little deeper, is there like a primer that they could look at or something to watch that might give them a little bit more depth? Because I would imagine it's a huge ocean of resources that you could get easily swept away in and lost in without some—and maybe that's something you give me a show note link. Like you'd have to think about and give me some links if someone wanted to look further into the Jungian space and understand what it means. JH: Yeah. I can give you some links to some books and some other things. Yeah, because it is really heady. I think what happens is people might pull the book off the top shelf and go, "Oh, dang. This isn't for me because I can't intellectually grasp it." But there's an entire other way to get into this knowledge, and that's what I'm trying to do here. MR: Yeah. You're sort of coming at it from a different perspective. JH: Yeah. MR: Let's come back to the Jungian space and those practitioners and the other ones like you that maybe aren't as visual, or maybe they just haven't released the visual capabilities because they haven't really thought about it that way. They just came to it from, you know, schooling, right? You learn how to type stuff or, you know, you write things. What has been their reaction to the sketch notes? You talked about people, you know, being surprised. How has that continued as you've—because obviously you have been dedicated, I see that stack of sheets, and that's a significant investment. Obviously, you needed to do it 'cause that's the way you work. But like, there had to have been a reaction by not only students, but professors. How do they react to that? Do they want copies of it? Do they wanna know how to do it? I'm curious about that side. JH: Yeah, absolutely. I have had professors request the sketches of their lectures because they were gonna deliver additional lectures on that topic and they thought that would be useful and good to share. I think a lot of the analysts that are running the institute in Zurich are pretty forward thinking and imaginative. They really do want to shift more into a feeling and artistic and visual space. So that's great there. There's a real health around that. I think there's a lot of people—I love what you just said about "maybe they haven't discovered that capacity yet" because, you know, if you've ever taught little kids art and then watched them go through school and seen them as adults or our friends or ourselves, people have tremendous capabilities which get shut off by society. So it's important to have those small classes. I know you do a bunch of these and they're fantastic. To just help people get back in touch with that, to oil the machinery, and with, you know, no sense of shame, no sense of deliverables or a timeline just in a very open way, go into it slowly and try to build that capacity. And folks are interested in that. You know, when I began my training, I told a friend that was a poet and another friend at the university that I was starting this, you know, switch into this part of my life. They didn't like it. They were very dismissive. MR: Really? JH: Yeah. They were like, "Carl Jung, that that's crazy stuff, or that's a cult, or that's weird, or dah, dah." And I was like, "Man, oh, that's so strange my good friend just said that. Conversely, one of my bosses in the tech space who was a VP business guy, MBA, one of the most boring people you can imagine on the surface, but had a lot underneath going on, told him out at a coffee, he just lit up. MR: Wow. JH: And he was like, "What? That is so incredible. Oh my gosh. That's so cool." And then you, you learn, he majored in art history in college. He had this whole other side, an undeveloped part of himself. There's an opportunity for all of us to look at those underdeveloped parts of ourselves and through this kind of activity or another activity or something else, begin to open those up. Yeah. MR: Well, and I would suspect so, the book that you're trying to produce here and that you're producing, I would guess the consumers of that are probably two, at least that I can think of off the top of my head. One, are Jungian practitioners of some level, right. Because it would be a reference. "Let's go look in the index. I wanna learn about dream interpretation and the body thing you talked about." You could find the page and look at it. "Oh, that's right. Yeah. I remember learning that." That would just like your little squares, it would spark their memory from probably learning similar things in their education that's maybe easier to enter into than to read like a really dense book about the process where you could actually look at it, just be reminded and, "Oh, that's right. Okay, let's try this. Maybe we'll put a little spin on it and do this other thing and experiment a little bit." So that would be one space. JH: Yeah. MR: I think the other space would be maybe someone like me, I don't know anything about Jungian thinking, it might be really fascinating to think of this as a primer in a way. Of maybe it's a little deeper than that, but to be able to look through and understand like, oh, okay, this is kind of, you would form an opinion off of it, but it's more approachable and accessible than a very dense, you know, tome in in German or something. Where you'd have to learn German to read it and understand it in the original language or whatever, right. Because Jung I think he was Swiss. I think. He was a contemporary and a little bit of a—I always remember that he and Freud were sort of like frenemies, I guess. I dunno. Like they— JH: That's a good way to frame it. MR: Is that the right way to describe them. JH: He was a protege and then they were arch enemies after really falling out. MR: Really. JH: Yeah, unfortunately, or at least Freud exiled Jung from the realm because their theories diverged in places that were irreparable apparently. MR: Interesting. JH: But no, you're right. One thing is this book is not an explainer text. 'Cause we have to remember these are all live drawings. These were done in the classes. There's a lot of stuff that didn't make the drawing. MR: Oh yeah, sure. JH: You know, it's in the hour it's me going, "Oh, that's cool. Oh, that's cool." Like you said, they're just sparks. You could look at the page and be like, "Oh, that's a reference to such and such writer. Maybe I'll go read that person. Oh, here's this thing, maybe I'll go explore that." So there's that. You know, the other thing for me is it's a memento. It's a milestone of the training. It's like, "Dude, here's seven years of your life. You gotta turn this into a book." Because someday when I'm like 83 and I'm talking to my grandkids or whatever, I wanna be like, "See, I did a thing. You kids never listen. And I actually did a thing, whether you wanna believe it or not." Then for lay people, I think there's also kind of this mystique around if people even know what Jungians are. There's probably people listening to this podcast that are like, "I have no idea what this particular episode's about." But for people that do know the history of psychology and the different methodologies and ways you can work on your psyche, they may be very curious about what the training is. It's kind of this Hogwarts sort of thing with a big door, you know, and you, how do you walk through the subway portal in the brick wall? What goes on in there? This is a nice snapshot into, these are the courses that were taken, this is the material that was covered. The book also has reflections. So it has 180 pages of this, my personal reflections, dreams. So I found key dreams from my training, and I can put those in there. And then exercises. So it has exercises I developed over those seven years people can use. This one with the travel is one of those exercises I talk about. MR: Yeah, I that would make sense. Yeah. JH: Yeah. I want it to be more fun than just, "Here's these drawings." You know, I want it to be active. Yeah. MR: Yeah. Yep. You wanna have some practicality out of it as well with, you know, actions that you can draw from it. So that, you know, explaining that, it seems to me like maybe your primary audience are Jungian practitioners, and maybe they could be people in college who are considering picking a Jungian path and wanna know, like you said, there's a big dark door and lots of thick German writings that I don't have to like—you know, unless you're a German reader, which there's a fair amount of German people that listen to the podcast and watch it. So but like, you know, there's lots of opacity to getting an idea of it. If you were in a point where you're like considering maybe one approach versus another, this could be a good way. Maybe you check it out at the library, right. Maybe you see this at libraries, right. So that's your gift to the world. And then some kid in the future who's considering this path could get at least some kind of a sense of where this might be headed, right. That could be another thing, right. JH: Totally. Totally. And maybe if people are going into heavier thinking function-oriented trainings, they can understand, you know, via you and your work and your podcasts and your classes and this book and other things, can see like, oh, it's okay to process in other ways. I'm not bad. My second grade Nun which I had, is not hitting me with a ruler because I'm drawing in the margins of my spelling journal or whatever, You know? MR: Yeah, yeah. JH: Yeah. MR: Well, that's really interesting. We just got back from the International Sketchnote Camp in San Antonio, and there was a little bit of talk afterwards. I mean, one of the sessions was about how to make this a business. And I think that's a valid thing, right? Is how do you take these visual skills you have and then use them as a way to share with companies to hire you to do this work for them. I think I'm most fascinated by more like this stuff where people keep their day jobs, but they find ways to integrate visual thinking into the work they do. They don't have to leave the thing that they're good at. Like say you're an accountant, or something like that. That's really fascinating is how do you integrate this visual skill in your unique context. And I think that in some ways can be powerful 'cause I think it can reach a lot deeper inside of organizations and reach to individual people, maybe more than a professional coming and doing visual thinking on demand, which has got value, right Especially if it's interactive, but it feels like it can reinforce this idea that, oh, only the professionals can do that. You know, "I'm not a good artist. I could never do that." And it kind of reinforces. A lot of the work that I've done has been trying to break down those ideas and then just set the bar really low. Like, you don't really have to be a great artist to do this work. Now, if you're really good at it, you could elevate to that level. It's really interesting to hear this and think the work you're practically doing is could impact the Jungian space in a way that maybe hasn't been done since the beginning. I don't know. This seems pretty unique to me. JH: No one's ever drawn all their classes. It's the first. Either I'm a madman or I'm onto something. I don't know. Maybe both, but per your comment, think about how much rigid thinking there is in society. MR: Oh yeah. JH: How, just in terms of politics or arts theoretical spaces or other things where people are either here or they're here. Having just a civilization that has more plasticity in our thinking and a way to look at things from different directions, doesn't mean we have to agree with them, but we can at least examine 'em, open up, feel things through. I mean, that would be so wonderful to have scientists thinking that way, to have mayors and people leading towns, politicians, you know, teachers, everybody just kind of drawing as a way of thinking. 'Cause it is so divergent, you know? It's really like that. I mean, at some point it comes back in, but it's just a wonderful, rich external exploration, you know? MR: This has been really fun to see. We'll definitely have to have you take a couple shots of maybe a couple of pages and, you know, some samplings of these little squares so we include those in the show notes, maybe throw 'em on your site or something or social media or wherever so people can see, if they're listening, you can click on the link and see those images. JH: Oh yeah. MR: We'll do that as for you. So that brings me to—typically, this is where we talk about tools. I'm really curious about the tools that you chose here. It seems like you went really simple, right? You had a pad, you had you had a fine liner and then a Copic for shadows. And that was pretty much it. Tell me a little bit more about the tools you chose and why. JH: One trick you know well, and I know and others that have been drawing for a little while, is if you're gonna do a set, find your most comfortable tool and stick with it throughout the whole set. Probably don't switch. So I just happened to have my architectural drawing tools on that day in Boston. And it was a 0.5 Staedtler. MR: Yep. Fine liner. Super popular. JH: Yeah. And a Fabriano pad, which I'll get it, it's right here. MR: I think I've had Fabriano pads in the past more like a spiral bound notebook? JH: No, it's this recycled paper and bleached and it's so— MR: Oh, wow. JH: I love this. I you may have trouble ordering 'em 'cause I ordered so many 'cause I— MR: You cornered the market. JH: I wanted to make sure—yeah. But these are great. It's this really crisp white paper. It's sort of between paper and Bristol. MR: It's something like a sticker card stock almost. JH: Yeah. 94 pounds. MR: Okay, so somewhat heavy. Yeah. JH: Yeah. Those, and then for other illustrations, I do, I use the Neuland markers, which I — MR: Oh yeah. They're great. Yeah. JH: - learned from you and like that gives a thicker line like that. And then I use a Copic N2 grayscale. MR: Adds some tone. JH: Yeah, and that's it. Just keep 'em real simple. The book will not be digitized. So this is gonna be a print-only book which I do that for a number of reasons. I might have to self-publish it. I've had some good conversations with publishers, but the response has been basically, "We don't know how to handle 180 pages of—we don't do that." You know, "That's beyond where we're at." Some of the graphic novel publishers, it's not really in their— MR: Yeah. It sort of falls in this middle space in a way, right? JH: Totally. So if anybody's listening and they wanna gimme a holler about a book deal, if there's any agents out there or anybody, please don't hesitate. MR: Wow. JH: Yeah. MR: And then for the little squares, did you just take that same pad and pull them out of the book and then cut them in quarters? How did you produce your little squares? Or are they— JH: Those exact? MR: Okay. JH: No, totally same. So they're six two-page, they fit. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. And I draw them in here, and then I cut them out. MR: And then you cut them out. Got it. Okay. JH: Yeah. MR: You probably use your maybe a pencil to stroke the break points for the six panels, and then work your way through them and cut them out at the end. Probably good for managing, like, on that trip. Right. You would keep them in a central place so that they wouldn't get lost 'cause I would think with loose squares like that, like ordering them then becomes more complex than if they're bound into a book. At least maybe while you're doing the production. JH: Well, I actually cut 'em out every night because the payoff was like, if you spread like 55 squares on a table, it's pretty visually impactful. And I wanted to talk to people. I didn't know anybody as I drove across the country. So if I arrived in Minneapolis and was at some cool cafe, you know, oftentimes another artist would come up and be like, "Oh dude, what are you doing? Like, that's really cool." And I was like, "Hey, who are you? What do you do?" You know. MR: Make another square. JH: Exactly. Exactly. MR: Interesting. It's like the thing beget more things in a way. JH: Yeah. Kind of is. MR: That's funny. So we'll definitely have to—we'll get some links specifics for you guys out there listening if you wanna check out these pads. Let's shift into practical tips. So this is where I invite people to do tips for listeners. And the way I frame it is, imagine there's a visual thinker listening. Maybe they've reached a plateau or they're just feeling a little bit burnt out, or, you know, they just wanna see a change. What would be three practical or theoretical things, tips that you might offer them? JH: Yeah, totally. The first is gonna be draw where you aren't conventionally permitted to do so. Like, push the boundaries of drawing. So if everybody else on the bus is on their phones, they're staring out the window at the raindrops, draw. If you're at a lecture, if you're at the symphony, if you're at a very boring social function with your in-laws, you've gotta be careful there, but just draw. Start to push the edges and in the massage of that boundary, you will start to loosen up your own expressive capacity. So that would be one is, is draw where you're not really encouraged to draw. The other would be have the easiest materials possible that you know you will use. You know, sometimes people wanna get into photography and they think that means buying the, you know, four-foot-long telescopic lens and dah, dah, dah. That's not true. The best camera is the one you're going to use. So find tools that feel good in your hand. The pen should feel really good. You should have a relationship with your pen and then paper that feels really good. For some people that's gonna be more granular. Other people, it's gonna be smooth. For some people, it'll roll up nicely. Others will be really firm. I just love thick card. I don't know why. Maybe it's my printmaking background or something. MR: Yeah. It could be. JH: So that would be the second one. And the third would be the way I learned how to play guitar when I was a punk rock musician—I've had other younger guitars say, what advice can you gimme on learning guitar and stuff? What they expect is you to tell 'em some scale technique or something. That's not it. This sounds so weird, but to fall asleep with my guitar. So to actually at night play it—this is a long time ago, I learned to play guitar. You're watching like David Letterman on TV around midnight or whatever it was on, playing guitar. Always was in my hand. As in college, in my apartment, that guitar was in my hand. I'd fall asleep and that guitar was with me. I might wake up in the middle of the night and kind of remember a melody and I'd pluck it out. I'd kind of fall back asleep. It was always there. So, related to that, try to have your drawings and your materials with you as often as possible. Another reason these are the size is because one of my favorite coats has an interior breast pocket right here. I capture my dreams too. I'm a Jungian, I draw various dreams I've had. And then I will take those dreams. And this is an exercise in the book actually. I will put 'em in the breast pocket of that jacket in the winter with my big scarf on. I'll walk around the city and I'll sit at cafes and then I'll pull the deck back out. I'm not trying to meet people or socialize during this exercise, but I'll reflect on things, put it back in my pocket, walk some more throughout the city. Might take an hour or two to walk. I walk a lot. Go to the next place, pull 'em out, look at 'em, shuffle 'em around, have a relationship with them. So it's the third bit of advice is that like, try to have you and your tools as close to each other as possible to develop that relationship and to open up those channels of expression and communication with yourself 'cause that's really what's going on, right? You gotta talk with your deeper self to get in touch with these processes. MR: You want the tools to kind of step out of the way and be there when you need them and perform enough to do that. JH: Yeah. MR: I've been bullet journaling for years. I just recently bought a leather—I could show you this leather thing that I had made. JH: Nice. MR: So just a leather wrapper for my Neudstram. I had my little logo put here in the corner. JH: Oh, cool. MR: And then I decided to get a Lamy safari fountain pen. JH: Oh, nice. I love those. MR: It feels great in my hand. It's got weight to it. I actually just shifted the tip from a fine to a medium 'cause I wanted more juice out of my ink. I like juicy inks. They need to flow. I've noticed that it's changed my relationship with writing. I really enjoy the writing a little more. All I did was change the tip, which is really easy on a Lamy, you put scotch tape and you pull it off and you just stick the other one on. You can even do it with ink inside. It's crazy. So it's a really good trick. JH: Wow. MR: Yeah. JH: I didn't know that. I love Lamy. What kind of tip did you put on it? Like a more fine one, or? MR: Yeah, I bought it with a fine tip on it, and it felt scratchy to me and it kept bothering me especially when it would run out of ink. And I thought, you know what? I'm gonna do it. The ink is low. This is the time to do it. So I looked up a video and it showed do, you could do it when it was loaded with ink 'cause the tip sits on top of, whatever, the feed, and you just use some scotch tape and you put it on and you pull out and down and it just pops off. You take the other one and just snap it on there and start writing. It's a really ingenious design from Lamy with their tips. JH: Oh, I gotta look at that. I gotta look at that. Do you use Noodler's ink? Are you a Noodler's guy or what are you like? MR: I have not tried Noodler's yet. For this one, I bought the Lamy ink. I kind of wanted to go all stock with it. I've heard good things about Noodler's. I haven't tried it. I think it's water resistant or if not waterproof. So, yeah, I think I just have found going back to this tool, which, you know, I mean, I think the pen was like $40 for this heavy pen. But it changes my relationship with my writing. I've noticed that Neuland markers do the same thing, like the quality. Like there's something to be said by using cheap pens that are available at the grocery store, and the truth is, is that you get really excellent pens at a grocery store or a corner drug store, like, you know, Energels or G2s really amazing. Like the technology is improved so much that they can also be, you know, something that you like. But it seems like my relationship with writing and reflecting in the bullet journal context has changed by switching the tools that I use. And it makes me more expressive. It's little, it's a small friction, but it's definitely works. JH: I hear you. I think their stock tips, especially for the fine ones can be really scratchy like you're saying. MR: Yeah. Yeah. JH: Yeah, yeah. MR: So, you know, you gotta find—I think it goes back to you finding what are the tools that are right for you? And don't feel like, just 'cause everybody uses this tool that I have to, you can break from the pack. JH: No. MR: You know, be a punk rocker like Justin was. You know, find the thing that works for you. Well, this has been really fascinating and fun and enlightening and I'm looking forward to seeing your book published. I'd love to see it when it comes out and have a print copy. JH: Oh yeah. MR: Tell me a little bit more about where people can find you. This is especially helpful if someone has ideas—If you're in the publishing space and you have ideas for Justin about how he might go about it to reach out to him. Do you have a website? Are you on socials? How would you like people to reach out to you and see your work or chat with you? JH: Yeah, yeah, totally. I have a few things. For my Jungian work, it's cascadejungianservices.org. So if people wanna learn about Jungian stuff or psychedelics in Oregon and how we support that as well here with licensure in the state, they can go to that. For the book. I just got the Instagram handle, The Visual Jung, J-U-N-G. MR: Good. JH: So that's that. I'm gonna just start posting stuff there. Then for my work as an artist Justin_hamacher_artist on Instagram. Those are the three best places to get in touch about all those things. MR: We'll put those in the show notes along with all the other resources. So if you're curious, you can go in there and dig in there and follow your passion and find out more. Well, thanks so much, Justin. This has been a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed the discussion. I know a little bit more about Jungian concepts. Not enough to practice, but enough to play Jungian on TV, I guess. I don't know. Not really. Not really. But it's been really fascinating. It's makes me want to dig in a little bit more and understand Jung and like how we got to these ideas and maybe do some research on how could it apply to me? What are some practices that could help me? So it's interesting. JH: Oh yeah. Yeah, active imagination is a big one. That's the most visual. I'll send you some links and some books if folks are interested in. MR: Yeah, we'll put 'em in the show notes for sure. I think as visual thinkers, this audience might be well suited for this kind of work, these kind of practices potentially. JH: I think so. It really resonates. So much image basis in the unconscious in the Jungian space too. Yeah. MR: Interesting. Well, thanks so much, Justin. Thanks for being on the show and thanks for the work you're doing. Thanks for helping people in the way that you do. I think it's important that we each find that way and you found the way, which is great. Listening to your story and how you got to where you are, all that background's gonna help you, I think. So thank you for your contribution. JH: Thanks so much, Mike. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for hosting this podcast. It's really fun to see all the folks out there doing visual thinking. MR: I'll never run out of people to interview, which is really great. JH: Cool MR: Well, everyone, if you're watching or listening, this is another episode. Until the next one, talk to you soon. | |||
| 22 Mar 2021 | Ceren Yildirim talks agility in sketchnoting - SE09 / EP08 | 00:44:23 | |
In this episode, I talk with Ceren Yildirim, an agile coach and avid sketchnoter and visualizer living and working in Turkey. Listen in as she shares how she integrates sketching and sketchnoting into her agile coaching practice — and how our pandemic lives have made for challenges — but also great opportunities for both our sketchnoting community and for the world. Enjoy the episode! SPONSORED BYThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Neuland, the innovative maker of visual thinking tools. Every Neuland product is designed with passion to be durable and sustainable. Check out their newly redesigned Neuland FineOne® line of water-based, refillable markers:
Save 15% with code neuland@sketchnotearmy-2021 at Neuland.com until May 30th, 2021 RUNNING ORDER
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SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNESYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. SUPPORT THE PODCASTTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
| 29 Mar 2022 | Adrien Liard, the agile visualizer - SE11/EP07 | 00:46:33 | |
In this episode, agile visualizer Adrien Liard shares how his lifelong obsession with drawing led to a brief career in graffiti which became a foundation for Adrien’s agile development career and his live, graphic recording practice. Sponsored by ConceptsThis episode of the Sketchnote Army Podcast is brought to you by Concepts. An infinite canvas sketching app built for tablets with a stylus, like the iPad Pro, Microsoft Surface, and Samsung Galaxy Tab. Concepts’ infinite canvas lets you spread out and sketch in any direction. Everything you draw in Concepts is a flexible vector, so you can move your notes around the canvas, or change their color, tool or size with a simple gesture. SEARCH ”Concepts” in your favorite app store for infinite, flexible sketching. Learn more: Concepts App Running Order
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Subscribe to the Sketchnote Army PodcastYou can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or your favorite podcast listening source. Support the PodcastTo support the creation, production and hosting of the Sketchnote Army Podcast, buy one of Mike Rohde’s bestselling books. Use code ROHDE40 at Peachpit.com for 40% off! | |||
