Austin Kleon

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NOTES ON THE VIZTHINK VISUAL-NOTETAKING 101 WEBINAR

Over 100 people signed up for Tuesday’s Vizthink “Visual Note-taking 101” webinar put on by me, Sunni Brown, Mike Rohde, and moderated by Dave Gray (with great support from Ryan Coleman and Chris Pascucci…thanks, guys!)

It was a rad way to spend 3 hours: I taught the first section called “But I Can’t Draw!” that tried to get people thinking about drawing as building or collage using a simple alphabet (line, point, circle, square, triangle). We learned to draw stick figures and faces…oh, it was good fun. AND I found out that I really, really love teaching: what could be better than sharing your passion with eager students?

Here are a couple of screengrabs from my session:

how to draw a stick figure

how to draw faces

UPDATE: Here’s a short version of my “How To Draw Faces” activity:

I drew live in Sketchbook Pro during Mike and Sunni’s presentation, and here are the results:

Mike Rohde’s Sketchnoting presentation
Sketchnotes of Mike Rohde's Sketchnoting presentation
(see it bigger)

Map of Sunni Brown’s, “The Art of Listening” presentation
Sketchnotes of Mike Rohde's Sketchnoting presentation
see it bigger

Here are two thrilling shots of me in action:

webinar

And here’s my webinar setup:

Sketchnotes of Mike Rohde's Sketchnoting presentation

Mike has a good recap that pretty much covers everything that went down, including notes from my section and notes from the awesome participants, and Sunni has posted her tips on listening for graphic recording and visual note-taking.

I also highly recommend checking out the notes tagged viznotes on Flickr and all the great Twitter chatter about the event.

(And for fun, go see Rob Court‘s cartoon of my dog Milo, who started whimpering about 2/3 of the way through.)

You can see two little slideshow excerpts from my presentation: “The Battle Between Pictures and Words” and “Anatomy of a Mind Map”

And be sure to check out VizThink!

Comments

  2. Jonny – Glad that idea has been working for you: when I think of EVERYTHING as collage it’s a huge help to me when approaching my work….

    DIg this quote:

    “ Sometimes I think everything I draw is just a combination of all of the millions and millions of drawings I’ve seen.
    — Dash Shaw

  3. Sarah Mitchell has a wonderful post up about her experience in the webinar:

    “I swear could feel my brain unfolding and opening up creatively….It was an immensely valuable experience for me, and now I take sketchnotes whenever I’m taking notes during a meeting or presentation. It has DRASTICALLY changed the quality of my notes, and possibly even the quality of my engagement with the content.”

    And I don’t think I ever posted this from Colleen Wheeler:

    …it’s never too late for you to find your own inner cartoonist. I discovered this the other day during an excellent three-hour webinar on Visual Note-taking put on by the folks at VizThinkU. During the first segment of the seminar, Austin-based artist and author, Austin (from Austin) Kleon explained, “If you can write your own name, you can cartoon.”

    And a comment by @lynneux:

    Austin Kleon & co. are totally amazing and it’s well worth the cash outlay. I think it was one of the best investments I’ve made as far as professional development goes and moreover I just really enjoyed it. Turns out I actually CAN sketch. So, so helpful.

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