The Economist had me out to their Ideas Economy “Human Potential” conference in New York last week. I gave a talk on Newspaper Blackout and Steal Like An Artist, but I also did some drawings on my iPad during the other talks, and posted them to Twitter as I drew. (Still getting used to drawing live on the iPad — not sure I love it, but I thought I’d experiment.) I’ve cleaned them up a little and collected them here.
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Visual Note-Taking 101 from SXSW 2010
View more webinars from Austin Kleon.
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Back in March, my friends Mike Rohde, Sunni Brown, Dave Gray and I presented a panel to a packed house at the SXSW Interactive conference here in Austin, Texas. Last week, they posted a podcast of the session without visuals – so I spent some time syncing our slides to the audio.
Watch it above, or see the whole thing here: Visual Note-Taking 101 from SXSW 2010.
Watch a short YouTube video of my faces exercise:
And learn more about visual note-taking:
The coolest artifacts from the panel are the amazing Scout Books that Pinball Publishing had printed for us: read all about them.
I squirreled away a couple of them before we ran out — leave a comment below telling me why you want one okay those were making me feel too guilty that I only have four: how about a link to the coolest thing you’ve seen this week and I’ll pick four winners. Contest ends Monday, May 17th. (Be sure to include your e-mail — it won’t be published.)
Our Visual Note-Taking 101 panel made the cut for the first batch of 2010 SXSW programming!
Here’s the description:
Ever since Leonardo put pen to paper, visual note-taking has been a route to improve the quality of your thinking, make information more memorable, and make your ideas easier to share with others. Learn practical techniques and “tricks of the trade” from modern visual note-taking masters: how to write, sketch, and diagram ideas live, in real time, as you hear them.
The lineup isn’t finalized yet, but I’m hoping that Sunni Brown, Dave Gray, and Mike Rohde will all be able to sit on it. Read about our previous work together on the topic.
Thanks so much to everyone who voted!
Other panels I’m interested in seeing: Dan Roam‘s “Blah Blah Blah: Why Words Won’t Work” and Casey Caplowe from GOOD Magazine on “Interactive Infographics.”
Please do me a huge favor and head over to the SXSW Panel Picker site to vote for a SXSW panel on visual note-taking that will include me, Sunni Brown, Dave Gray, and Mike Rohde. Here’s the description:
Ever since Leonardo put pen to paper, visual note-taking has been a route to improve the quality of your thinking, make information more memorable, and make your ideas easier to share with others. Learn practical techniques and “tricks of the trade” from modern visual note-taking masters: how to write, sketch, and diagram ideas live, in real time, as you hear them.
Even if you’re not planning on going to SXSW this year, if you’ve enjoyed my mind maps, my SXSW visual notes, or drawing tutorials, please head over to the SXSW site, put in a vote, and leave a comment!
Thanks so much!
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:
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
(see it bigger)
Map of Sunni Brown’s, “The Art of Listening” presentation
see it bigger
Here are two thrilling shots of me in action:
And here’s my webinar setup:
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!
Here are a couple more sneak-preview slides for my part of the VizthinkU Visual Note-Taking 101 seminar. I took my map of Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections and broke it down into pictures, modifiers (speech balloons, captions, etc.) and words.
Here’s a little sneak-preview of the slideshow introduction I’m working on for my portion our Visual Note-Taking 101 webinar that’s a week from today! (Register here.)
I got the idea from some sumi-e doodles and quotes I collected a couple years ago, thinking about my formal (and informal) education:
…lately I find myself frequently torn between whether I’m really an artist or a writer. I was trained and educated as the former, encouraged into the world of paint-stained pants and a white-walled studio where wild, messy experiments precipitate the incubation of other visual ideas— though I’m just as happy to sit at a desk in clean trousers with a sharp pencil and work on a single story for four or five days in a quiet and deliberate manner. In short, I’m coming to believe that a cartoonist, unlike the general cliché, is almost—bear with me now—a sort of new species of creator, one who can lean just as easily toward a poetic, painterly, or writerly inclination, but one who thinks and expresses him- or herself primarily in pictures.—Chris Ware, Introduction to The Best American Comics 2007
“When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw it seems a shame to choose one. I think it’s better to do both.”
—Marjane Satrapi
A comics-art curriculum is interdisciplinary. As comics-art students learn to become literate and visually literate, they need to develop a vast array of skills. They need classes in drawing, writing, computer art, literature, storyboard, and character design. They need research skills, so they can make their stories convincing and make their characters behave and look real enough to come alive on the page or screen.—James Sturm, “Comics In The Classroom”
On May 12th, I’ll be doing a Vizthink webinar with my friends Sunni Brown, Mike Rohde, and Dave Gray (as moderator) on visual note-taking. Price is $99, but you get access to the live session AND the recording AND it all goes to the good cause of keeping the Vizthink staff and community afloat financially.
Visual note-taking 101: Techniques for making your notes more visual and memorable
with Mike Rohde, Sunni Brown and Austin KleonTuesday, May 12, 2009 | 11:00am EDT (15:00 GMT) | 3 Hours
Ever since Leonardo put pen to paper, visual note-taking has been a route to improve the quality of your thinking, make information more memorable, and make your ideas easier to share with others. Learn practical techniques and “tricks of the trade” from modern visual note-taking masters Mike Rohde, Sunni Brown and Austin Kleon. In this three-hour course you will learn how to use visual note-taking to improve your listening skills and take better, more memorable notes. The focus of this class will be on how to write, sketch, and diagram ideas live, in real time, as you hear them. Many of the techniques you will learn will also help to improve your skills in drawing your ideas at the flip chart or whiteboard.
Get more information and register here. (Also: dig the new VizthinkU portion of the Vizthink website!)
Sunni does graphic facilitation for a living, so she’s used to talking about her and her work, but this will be the first time that Mike or I have dug in and tried to explain what it is that we do.
The seminar will be in three parts. Sunni will talk about the art of listening and Mike will talk about being an editor vs. a stenographer. My part is called, “But I can’t draw!” I’ll be addressing folks’ fears of the pen, and talking about how there’s a a drawing alphabet just as there is a writing alphabet, and if you just learn the alphabet, you can draw anything. I’ll be using some cartoon theory, Lynda Barry’s “Two Questions”, Ed Emberley’s “Make A World”, and ripping off Dave Gray’s stuff on how to draw.
(TIP: I’ll be collecting a lot of my materials for the talk under the tumblr tag “But I Can’t Draw!” if you want a sneak-preview.)
This should be a lot of fun. I’m thrilled to be associated with these folks, and a little overwhelmed at the prospect of teaching with them: after all, it’s been only three years since I learned that this stuff even had a name…
Please let me know in the comments if you have any specific questions you’d like to have answered or topics you’d like addressed!
UPDATE: Here’s a sneak-preview of the introduction/bio slideshow I’m making for my portion:
UPDATE: A recap of the event.
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